I didn't go to that many concerts in 2012, but most of the concerts I went to bordered on the extraordinary. These were some of my favourites.
The March ATP Festival curated by Jeff Mangum was legendary. For starters, Jeff's two shows were incredibly emotional. I remember being next to a young couple whose romance - so they told me - had started when he entered the shop where she worked and timidly commented on how much he liked the music she was playing, Neutral Milk Hotel. She flushed, he did too, and they fell in love. Five years or so later, there they were, crying together while listening to 'Oh Comely'. That was the kind of mood the anti-charismatic singer with a nasal voice and a few acoustic guitars managed to build.
The dark side was equally powerful: I had never seen anything like Boredoms. A ritual of witchcraft and shamanic possession rather than a concert, I'd say. Way beyond anything musically describable. Yes, there were 14 guitarists, 5 drummers and 'Eye' the conductor/MC/medium/shaman in all their maximalism and synchronicity; there were the epic up and downs in intensity, huge one chord waves, raging beats... But the real spectacle was the effect on the audience: we were shuddering, shivering, goose bumps and all. I won't attempt to describe it further. Lucy Cage did it brilliantly here:
Other festival highlights included: dancing to the infinite and certainly extraterrestrial groove of the Sun Ra Arkestra, straight from Saturn; exploring the limits of slowness with Earth; discovering the desert blues of Group Doueh; and surrendering to Joanna Newsom's powers of seduction.
In Madrid, in May, I went to one of the best double bills I can remember: Ainara LeGardon and Lisabö. Ainara opened, on her own, with the only company of an electric guitar and a cranked-up 100w Marshall. Not that her songs need any further embellishments; she's got an ear for hypnotically circular compositions which seem to be - however implausible it may sound - somewhere in between Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Slint.
And then there was Lisabö... Once again, I experienced the brutal shake-up they subject you to, and with it the pleasure of giving oneself away, of letting go no matter what. Through their concerts, I've come to understand that creating something sharable and shared out of the 'the intimacy of pain', as they sing in their latest album, is perhaps their greatest achievement. Their current incarnation as a double trio grants them symmetry; their current pursuit of noise and abstraction displaces it.
A Lisabö show is a bodily experience only comparable in intensity to a very different form of brutality I also enjoyed in 2012, that of Sunn O))). Seventy minutes and 130db of sub-120hz frequencies - an exploration of the limits of tolerance and a radically new experience: listening through one's legs, belly, chest. Sunn O))) produce sounds which reach you from your own inside, as bodily vibrations rather that sound waves. I'd say it has to be done at least (and probably only) once.
Picture: i.m.g. 'Sunn O))) at London's KOKO, 12 June 2012'
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