Awake On Foreign Shores: Trans Musicales 2011

Trans Musicales curator Jean-Louis Brossard presents a varied and eccentric bill; forging an unlikely alliance between young electronic and indie rock acts with some of the more daring leftfield talents from the world stage, he shows little interest in the hip or commercially viable. Dubbed 'the anti Michael Eavis' by repeat visitors, his enduring ethos from the multi-venue festival’s foundation back in 1979 remains “to defend and promote a new vision of music that differs from what the public is being force-fed.”

Brossard scours the globe all year round to prepare this three-day smorgasbord, and like any festival worth its salt previous years have seen real coups – its organisers continue to proudly trade on early doors performances by Nirvana and Massive Attack. This is certainly not to say that Trans Musicales has its head stuck in the past; the installment we’re thundering through the Euro Tunnel (en route to Rennes, Brittany) for is very much of the time, too – from London’s maverick Mercury nominee Ghostpoet and heavily vaunted industrial disco miserablists Factory Floor, to Nantes’ accidental electro pop hit makers College (see their recent contribution to Cliff Martinez’s Drive soundtrack).

The Franco-Scottish connection is also historically strong here; triumphant tales have travelled home of our own Phantom Band and Anglo Scots Django Django being rightly trusted to helm headlining slots at the abandoned aircraft hangers on the periphery of Rennes in which most of Trans Musicales’ twilight hour action takes place. This particular edition finds Glasgow's psych revivalists Haight-Ashbury playing the slightly lower echelons of the ‘Bars En Trans’ fringe events that precede the witching hour mania (we'll be expected to stay up till 6am).   

Starting the weekend at one hub for this grassroots strand of the festival, Bar Hic feels like home – essentially a nae nonsense spit and sawdust box room the size of The Thirteenth Note basement. Here we chance upon 'coral pop' ensemble Crane Angels, essentially Bordeaux’s answer to Broken Social Scene (they count members of JC Satan and François & the Atlas Mountains in their swelling ranks), who merry their way through an energised set of rough-hewn and endearingly ramshackle folk rock. Clearly they have a ball on stage, and the crowd is right there with them. Ales are raised in good cheer; a barman resembling The Big Show feeds us free Jäger just ‘cos he’s hard. Everybody's happy.

Like that time Eddie Jordan played classic rock covers from the back of a lorry at T in the Park, there are a few bizarre spectacles ahead; from the slums of London’s Brick Lane to the 35,000 capacity Le Liberté literally overnight, Lewis Floyd Henry finds himself plucked from busking obscurity to main stage infamy – although, dressed as a leprechaun and covering Wu-Tang Clan classics with an acoustic guitar, it’s difficult to understand why. Equally as mental – though no less rapturously received by a few hundred misfits too inebriated to care – guitarist and laptop operator Capacocha leads us to believe he’s been raised in seclusion on a steady diet of 90s Eurohouse and LA Woman for the last 20 years before being unleashed from his log cabin to terrorise the youth of Rennes tonight. But both acts set the weekend’s agenda on opening night: there is fuck all pretension here.

As with most of the second day’s festivities – from revellers taking in the town centre’s carnival atmosphere with a beer and a sausage crepe (a €5 combo from most street vendors), to any given open venue with a PA – the compact Club UBU is buzzing as native trio Juveniles take the stage. Comprising former er… members of local heroes Russian Sex Toys and Wankin’ Noodles, this slick, synth-propelled incarnation owes as much to Morten Harket’s falsetto as Two Door Cinema Club’s chirpy 80s electro cup-a-soup shtick. It makes sense that Parisian fashion house turned indie label Kitsuné are all over it. Maybe they’re not quite ready to be beamed into present day Inverness, but you get the feeling that, in some guise or other, they’ll eventually go places without a flux capacitor. As their solitary EP release since forming eight months ago points out – they are young. 

When night falls on Rennes we find real gold back in Bar Hic (besides the local Pilsner): math rock by design, Lausanne quartet Honey For Petzi cut to the guts of recent album General Thoughts and Tastes; doling out discordant robot rock to the pace of time signatures that shouldn’t work, rotating each player through entirely new roles to keep their hour-long set fresh. Whether it’s through intention or the acoustics of the room, their duelling vocals are often muffled and indistinct, but the sheer energy eclipses any problem that could have been. Mainstay drummer Christian Pahud throws down with particular intensity, looking like he could do with a drip when he finally tumbles offstage, shaking his head to calls of ‘encore une fois!’ Time for a 20 minute bus ride to Parc Expo on the outskirts of town (not before being misdirected by a piss-taking conductor to a snack van dubbed ‘ze ticket bus’ to pay for the fare, such is the local patter).

A midnight set from Detroit saxophonist Colin Stetson proves to be the revelation of the weekend: expressive and emotive, but with his feet firmly clamped to the spot for a full hour – upwards of 1,500 kids find a way of dancing to these manic, droning brass grooves and rhinoceros grunts summoned from the depths of Stetson’s chest. Rocking back and forth like a man possessed, his track Judges’ bubbling ostinato eerily recalls Pink Floyd’s early use of synth on Dark Side of the Moon. Circular breathing comes in handy. “This is all me,” he says between blows. Nodding to the eight folk sober enough to remember there’s a ban on fags indoors, he offers: “thanks for not smoking.” By turns foreboding and glorious, last year’s New History Warfare Vol. 2 left jazz-heads flummoxed, but tonight Stetson’s other life as a hired gun for Tom Waits and Arcade Fire makes perfect sense.

By the time freak folkie and ATP poster boy Alexander Tucker climbs behind his effects desk to serve up supernatural psych opus Dorwytch, keeping the crowd engaged (those not partaking in the philosopher’s blend anyway) becomes a heavy task. Skewing the traditional folk template with samples, effects pedals and a lilting falsetto, his cosmic, slow-burning set simply takes too long to raise its wheels from the runway.

Dodging past a strangely civilised queue of drunks blowing chunks against the hanger wall outside, it falls on a witch doctor masked Aaron Jerome, AKA SBTRKT, to resurrect the crowd in the wee hours. Although he’s only been active under the moniker these past two years, remix work for the likes of Radiohead and Modeselektor have seen to it that the London DJ’s fusion of dubstep and Chicago house has been fast tracked to the masses. Joined by his live partner in crime Sampha, the neon glow of the duo’s tribal stage getup brings a Daft Punk-like theatrical element that the kids of Rennes can obviously relate to. Us? We’re away back to the hotel for a nightcap and a jammy croissant.

The next night, another masked figure graces the same arena: shadowy genre-crosser Zomby puffs blunts and necks champagne from the bottle from the very start of a bafflingly early 9pm slot. “I roll a spliff of high grade skunk and get wonky,” he told Fact Magazine of his writing process a few years back, and it seems the same is true of his live show. Smoke billows from under his V for Vendetta disguise while he gets hotboxed to a mix of tracks lifted from 2001’s sombre Dedication and a full-on homage to early techno, R'n'B and Southern rap, regularly infused with his own trademark rattlesnake rhythm. Classical samples are fused with 90s jungle before he effortlessly carries us back to the modern day. Still, as Zomby gets progressively more chonged, you can’t help wondering if this is ultimately all for his own amusement. Either way, he masterfully weaves an ambience that would better suit the end of the night.

Like some distant, sedate relative of Outkast’s future funk, Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces (significantly, Sub Pop’s first rap signing) pit Ishmael 'Butterfly' Butler’s laconic rasp against percussionist Tendai Maraire’s down tempo bongo and hi-hat combo. Slowly slapping hands and burling 360 degrees to intentionally shit synchronized dance moves, they raise the fleeting question of what Kriss Kross are up to. Besides the oddness that comes with their dimly-lit performance and weird, low key bravado, what marks Shabazz Palaces out from so much of the hip-hop world is their willingness to forego the medley format that has become an established standard and give the crowd credit by playing their own material in full. They play the lion's share of their sedate debut, Black Up, in jumbled order, without ever defaulting on another knee-jerk salute to past rap titans when the audience starts to look restless. It’s a brave new world.

Following suit, relative veterans Spank Rock continue to defy convention. Last year’s uncharacteristically self-aware Everything Is Boring and Everyone Is a Fucking Liar may have fallen on deaf ears with its shift from playful party rap to a 'work for something, fight for something' call to arms, but on this bill the Baltimore crew’s boundless energy is unmatched. They even have the stones to throw Gimme Shelter in a bass heavy electro freak-out blender with a recurring line of dialogue from The Karate Kid: ‘Put ‘em in a body bag!’

With those words buzzing in our skulls, we bus it out of the Parc Expo complex for the last time; a flask of Jameson confiscated from one of our squad by security comes in handy for the trip home. Knackered but satisfied, we're pretty certain that whichever path punters chose to take over the last three days, Mr Brossard fulfilled his remit for the 33rd year.