FutureEverything @ Islington Mill, 20-23 Mar

Live Review by Lauren Strain | 27 Mar 2013

At the festival launch, as we probe our amuse-bouches and survey the city from the eighth floor of NOMA53 – that beached blue alien just off Rochdale Road that doubles as The Co-operative's headquarters when not signalling back to the mothership – it's more than apparent that FutureEverything has come of age.

What began as Futuresonic in 1996 – with the likes of Jo Apps and worriedaboutsatan (now Ghosting Season) playing to 30 people in the basement of The Bay Horse (2007) – is now an internationally attended summit; and where its curators have previously struggled to decide exactly what ‘future’ might mean in the context of a music programme (erm, Gang Gang Dance, they sound sort of... weird... right, guys? Guys?!), this year's tech conference is flanked by a faultless sequence of line-ups at Islington Mill, showcasing the international (Brandt Brauer Frick) alongside the resident (Andy Stott), the in vogue (Lapalux) with the genuinely wayward (Hieroglyphic Being).

Jackknifing from his smogged-out, strapped down hip-hop samples on the one hand to his oily, slick oscillations on the other, Lapalux deals in textures as in so many swatches of fabric. Backlit by a blinding lightshow and wrestling with his hardware, he is a bold, even cocky physical presence. Album highlight Guuurl gets the room in gear, but it's nothing compared to the frenzy that Berlin trio Brandt Brauer Frick – with help from vocalist-cum-hype man Om'Mas Keith – induce with their extraordinary mania of wounding, techno-derived rhythms and shamanic, mesmeric sense of build and release. It's 11pm on a Wednesday night, and it's raining from the ceiling.

Thursday is all about wide, slow waves, from headliner Holy Other's sad, plasmic echoes to WIFE's diseased nocturnes. The night's surprise revelation, however, is Tourist: while his unashamedly hands-up climactics tend towards the naïve, they stay just the right side of brash, and I Have No Fear and Never Sleep – from his recent Tonight EP – prove perfect fuel for yet another infectiously up-for-it weeknight crowd.

It's testament to this year's programming and the gusto with which people throw themselves into it that every night this week feels like a finale; which is just as well, because after Friday's bruising combination of Lee Gamble's brutalism, Andy Stott's circuitous hauntings and a lot of junglist headfuckery courtesy of Hieroglyphic Being, this writer wasn't actually able to make it to the closing party. Now, how many days is it 'til 2014?

http://futureeverything.org