Hello all,
Here's some droppings from DOUR festival '07 - came back on Monday and feeling mangled. Crappesque-photos are in a separate thread later...
MUSIQUE
--------
NO MEANS NO -
As usual, they delivered full throttle. Kick started the festival for me and was the best thing I've seen all weekend. Highlights included "The River"...and a medley of "Two Lips/Two Lungs/One Tongue - Rags and Bones" sends me
dementious. A bottle hits me in the neck while I'm in mid-twist. My luck is in. It's plastic.
WU TANG CLAN
Slipstreaming in the jets of lanky Euro-folk through the madding crowd on Friday night to get a better view of a blistering Wu Tang performance. ("Where are we man....? Oh yeh dog.....Motherfuckin'.....Belgium...") Used lots of towels onstage. Sweat is IN this Summer,dogbitch.
STEREO TOTAL -
Big crowd for this and the folks here love them. Charming, relentlessly upbeat and goofy, brilliant pop songs too - perfect for this festival. Grand kudos to the security for allowing the audience to invade the stage unharmed at the
end of their set. Would this happen in the British Isles without getting a size 16 gorilla headlock-cum-boot in the behaviour glands ?
K-BRANDING -
Knew nothing about these before DOUR but a great discovery....mean, industrial, improv, punding electronica-noise pummeling steely meringue of a yoke. Had to stand 20 feet back from the entrance to the tent such was the
GZGZGSGRRRINNNNNNNGGTSSSSSHHH and only caught the end of their set but pleased to make yr acquaintance, yis very pressing Belgians.... www.k-branding.be
GRIOTS AND GODS (YOUNG GODS & DALEK)
So glad I caught this. Thought they'd vanished (?!?) but here they are - sounding mellower than ever but just as expansive and huge and less rokk-goddy now....Eastern timbres and krautrock-electro type pulses behind some ominous rapping from der Dalek....long groovy instrumental parts too. Was expecting to get my ears skewered but like, emerged like, boddhisattva-like and pigshit happy...
MICHAEL GIRA
Damn, I was fading fast on Saturday night before this man took the stage and it could have been the last thing that I needed. He introduces himself thus - "Hi, I'm Josef Stalin". He's not that far away. You can see people's
sun-kissed, beatifically fatigued expressions turn to masks of discomfort, unease, fear even...it's a long time since I saw a performer affect people so much...it's a bit intense to say the least. A good few people have had
enough and are attempting to leave as Gira's voice chases them back into the sunshine outside. A voice that's squalling, contorting, writhing like a metal reed in a hot blaze....over downbeat, dischordant strumming...it's
agonising, but totally, utterly compelling. I'm have the fear at the end of the set - have to run into the arms of Stella Artois who assures me that I hadn't just seen seen the ghost of Joe Stalin....
AUTECHRE
This place has gone WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH-spllllerrggh-mong-mental at 1.00 in the morning - torrents of crazily happy manic Dourists pouring towards both dance tents that culminates in a big bottleneck with people bopping outside 'tween tents- young guys and girls holding up hand-scrawled signs for XTCMDMALSDETC......somehow I manage to make it up to see Autechre and it's exactly wehat i hoped they'd be like....kind of like the musical equivalent of seeing "Inland Empire" in a way. Dark, twisted, labyrinthine, thrilling, exciting, funky, endlessly mutating mindfuckery.
With some sternum-shattering bass thrown in. You've earned at least 3 pot noodles each lads.
AIDSWANK
Legendary stinky punk combo return to perform alfresco dans la campsite. Understandably rusty after being away for so long but Rick Chimpton's still got it. Free Belgian shandies for weary dick-slackers and all !! Who said alturism was dead ?
Here's some basic yays and nays....
BADEN-BADEN !
-------------
-No shops nearby - or indeed, people selling essential stuff on the roads nearby. Dour pounters were forced to walk to supermarkets to buy cheaper, more nutritious nosh - markets which were frigging miles away and hellish to get to when the weather's on extreme sides (a gruelling 3 mile walk in the midday sun on cobblestone paths to queue up for food and water is not what you want to be doing when you're camped aeons away from the festival site as is - nearly fucked up the whole of Saturday for us.) Behave next time or it's high time for "a CENTRA FOR EUROPE" campaign.
-TOKENS at the venue- You couldn't buy drinks or food without these itty shity bits of arse-cardboard. 9 euro gets you 5 beer tokens, 9 gets you ten food tokens. On the plus side, they make the staff's job a bit safer I suppose but it's a rip-off considering that you have to USE THEM ALL AND QUEUE UP TO BUY THEM TOO !!! Try doing that late at night when you're 3 sheets to the wind.
-Walking back through the mid-afternoon heat for miles up to the venue to find that ERASE ERRATA have cancelled.
-Scabby food portions.
-"WRONGBURGER". Eating should be easy. But no. Not at "Wrongburger" - a stall set aside for the unwary, the drunk and the generally uninitiated DOUR punter. I'm in bad need of re-fuelling so I buy a hamburger and chips. On
munching through the first layer of chips, I encounter the scrofulous eponymous. This meat has never lived. Thus, you cannot kill it. And it's the colour of dog food. Ergo, I'm a disgusted pedigree chump.
-Usual festival things - warm drinking water, queues, stink, struggle and morning tent-saunas...
-Dealing with a drunk Belgian shithead who sat opposite me on the train back who nearly stopped me getting off at Charleroi.
-Too many fucking sports-metal clone-bands by far.
-Part Chimp
-Hot Chi(m)p.
GOODEN-GOODEN !
---------------
-Numerous cheap showers
-Car wash nearby for hosing down sweaties.
-Lovely beer that you don't get hungover from drinking.
-General atmosphere of extremely good natured madness.
-The overall line-up
-Dry weather.
-Cheap as chips.
Verdict - Go next time. But go the day before it starts and leave on Sunday.
Here's some droppings from DOUR festival '07 - came back on Monday and feeling mangled. Crappesque-photos are in a separate thread later...
MUSIQUE
--------
NO MEANS NO -
As usual, they delivered full throttle. Kick started the festival for me and was the best thing I've seen all weekend. Highlights included "The River"...and a medley of "Two Lips/Two Lungs/One Tongue - Rags and Bones" sends me
dementious. A bottle hits me in the neck while I'm in mid-twist. My luck is in. It's plastic.
WU TANG CLAN
Slipstreaming in the jets of lanky Euro-folk through the madding crowd on Friday night to get a better view of a blistering Wu Tang performance. ("Where are we man....? Oh yeh dog.....Motherfuckin'.....Belgium...") Used lots of towels onstage. Sweat is IN this Summer,dogbitch.
STEREO TOTAL -
Big crowd for this and the folks here love them. Charming, relentlessly upbeat and goofy, brilliant pop songs too - perfect for this festival. Grand kudos to the security for allowing the audience to invade the stage unharmed at the
end of their set. Would this happen in the British Isles without getting a size 16 gorilla headlock-cum-boot in the behaviour glands ?
K-BRANDING -
Knew nothing about these before DOUR but a great discovery....mean, industrial, improv, punding electronica-noise pummeling steely meringue of a yoke. Had to stand 20 feet back from the entrance to the tent such was the
GZGZGSGRRRINNNNNNNGGTSSSSSHHH and only caught the end of their set but pleased to make yr acquaintance, yis very pressing Belgians.... www.k-branding.be
GRIOTS AND GODS (YOUNG GODS & DALEK)
So glad I caught this. Thought they'd vanished (?!?) but here they are - sounding mellower than ever but just as expansive and huge and less rokk-goddy now....Eastern timbres and krautrock-electro type pulses behind some ominous rapping from der Dalek....long groovy instrumental parts too. Was expecting to get my ears skewered but like, emerged like, boddhisattva-like and pigshit happy...
MICHAEL GIRA
Damn, I was fading fast on Saturday night before this man took the stage and it could have been the last thing that I needed. He introduces himself thus - "Hi, I'm Josef Stalin". He's not that far away. You can see people's
sun-kissed, beatifically fatigued expressions turn to masks of discomfort, unease, fear even...it's a long time since I saw a performer affect people so much...it's a bit intense to say the least. A good few people have had
enough and are attempting to leave as Gira's voice chases them back into the sunshine outside. A voice that's squalling, contorting, writhing like a metal reed in a hot blaze....over downbeat, dischordant strumming...it's
agonising, but totally, utterly compelling. I'm have the fear at the end of the set - have to run into the arms of Stella Artois who assures me that I hadn't just seen seen the ghost of Joe Stalin....
AUTECHRE
This place has gone WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH-spllllerrggh-mong-mental at 1.00 in the morning - torrents of crazily happy manic Dourists pouring towards both dance tents that culminates in a big bottleneck with people bopping outside 'tween tents- young guys and girls holding up hand-scrawled signs for XTCMDMALSDETC......somehow I manage to make it up to see Autechre and it's exactly wehat i hoped they'd be like....kind of like the musical equivalent of seeing "Inland Empire" in a way. Dark, twisted, labyrinthine, thrilling, exciting, funky, endlessly mutating mindfuckery.
With some sternum-shattering bass thrown in. You've earned at least 3 pot noodles each lads.
AIDSWANK
Legendary stinky punk combo return to perform alfresco dans la campsite. Understandably rusty after being away for so long but Rick Chimpton's still got it. Free Belgian shandies for weary dick-slackers and all !! Who said alturism was dead ?
Here's some basic yays and nays....
BADEN-BADEN !
-------------
-No shops nearby - or indeed, people selling essential stuff on the roads nearby. Dour pounters were forced to walk to supermarkets to buy cheaper, more nutritious nosh - markets which were frigging miles away and hellish to get to when the weather's on extreme sides (a gruelling 3 mile walk in the midday sun on cobblestone paths to queue up for food and water is not what you want to be doing when you're camped aeons away from the festival site as is - nearly fucked up the whole of Saturday for us.) Behave next time or it's high time for "a CENTRA FOR EUROPE" campaign.
-TOKENS at the venue- You couldn't buy drinks or food without these itty shity bits of arse-cardboard. 9 euro gets you 5 beer tokens, 9 gets you ten food tokens. On the plus side, they make the staff's job a bit safer I suppose but it's a rip-off considering that you have to USE THEM ALL AND QUEUE UP TO BUY THEM TOO !!! Try doing that late at night when you're 3 sheets to the wind.
-Walking back through the mid-afternoon heat for miles up to the venue to find that ERASE ERRATA have cancelled.
-Scabby food portions.
-"WRONGBURGER". Eating should be easy. But no. Not at "Wrongburger" - a stall set aside for the unwary, the drunk and the generally uninitiated DOUR punter. I'm in bad need of re-fuelling so I buy a hamburger and chips. On
munching through the first layer of chips, I encounter the scrofulous eponymous. This meat has never lived. Thus, you cannot kill it. And it's the colour of dog food. Ergo, I'm a disgusted pedigree chump.
-Usual festival things - warm drinking water, queues, stink, struggle and morning tent-saunas...
-Dealing with a drunk Belgian shithead who sat opposite me on the train back who nearly stopped me getting off at Charleroi.
-Too many fucking sports-metal clone-bands by far.
-Part Chimp
-Hot Chi(m)p.
GOODEN-GOODEN !
---------------
-Numerous cheap showers
-Car wash nearby for hosing down sweaties.
-Lovely beer that you don't get hungover from drinking.
-General atmosphere of extremely good natured madness.
-The overall line-up
-Dry weather.
-Cheap as chips.
Verdict - Go next time. But go the day before it starts and leave on Sunday.
