My final day of ATP New York didn’t begin until the Caribou Vibration Ensemble performed in the early evening, due to a number of unforeseen factors, one of which involved a lack of gasoline in the car I was driving. The massive incarnation of Dan Snaith’s Caribou project, a 16-member group (among the musicians was Kieran Hebden of Four Tet and John Schmersal of Enon) included four drummers, oodles of guitars, electronics, keyboards, a gong and a five-piece horn section featuring the legendary Marshall Allen, who currently leads the Sun Ra Arkestra. They all unified to convey Caribou’s lushness almost entirely through live instrumentation, transforming Snaith’s manifestations into a huge organic sound more like an experimental jazz group than the electro-noise pop that he’s honed over the years.
The next act, the avant-pop quartet Deerhoof, took the stage backed by the projections of filmmaker Martha Colburn, whose work was at times completely abstract and at others looked like animated collage, and was often grimly humorous. Satomi Matsuzaki’s sweet, high-pitched voice against the wild imagery, angular guitars and pounding drums created an intense contrast, which fueled the energy of Deerhoof’s live performance, and the four once again delivered on all the promise of the band’s complex recordings.
After Deerhoof, I popped in on a number of live shows that failed to interest me, among them Black Moth Super Rainbow, whose psychedelic set included a gorilla-suit clad “singer,” and for the uninitiated, it seemed unclear what the gorilla was actually doing—singing, pretending to sing? Though it was an entertaining spectacle for a moment, the mystery of the gorilla’s role and purpose quickly lost its appeal because it didn’t offset the rest of the performers’ bland delivery. I stopped in on Menomena’s show for a bit, but I’ve never been able to appreciate the sometimes rambling and slightly whiny quality of this experimental pop group from Portland. Boris followed with an eardrum-bursting array of drone noise, and though I’ve seen the Japanese group play previously, and know its reputation for painful sound levels, I thought I could soldier through. But when I stood waiting for the show to begin, hearing the ominous buzz of the monitors and surveying the giant stacks of amplifiers, I heard someone behind me say, “Oh, this gonna hurt,” and I knew I wouldn’t last. Twenty minutes into the intense shrieking feedback of Boris’s performance of Feedbacker, I left to preserve my hearing for The Flaming Lips. And I was glad I did, because when I exited the building, the roof was shaking, and it sounded like it might blow off at any moment.
The Flaming Lips, the curators of this year’s ATP who have been twisting psychedelic noise into pop structures for almost 30 years, ended the night with a big-budget (by indie standards) production, a giant digital display behind them, along with unending balloons, confetti blowers, cascading streamers and a zillion laser pointers that zigged and zagged across ever surface, particularly Wayne Coyne’s face, dispersed throughout the crowd. More sentimental than ever, Coyne gushed about his love for the audience, the bands at ATP, and ATP as an organization, which, while endearing, at times detracted from the show, because he was constantly stopping the music to expound. But Coyne’s overwhelming exuberance, and the infectiousness of the Lips catalog, particularly the songs from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, carried us through the slow moments. The encore of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was an appropriate end to a festival that was, in many ways, like a trip to an ephemeral alternate universe that would soon disappear as all the fans journeyed back home.
Photos by Abbey Braden © All Tomorrow's Parties 2009
