It’s that time of year again – Meatwaters. I come in to Happy on Thursday as Disasteradio’s set gets going. It’s electronica that doesn’t go üns-üns-üns, but rather has a kind of bouncy swagger to it much like Luke Rowell himself. I can just imagine Mark E. Smith biliously toasting over it.
One good thing about the Meatwaters festival is that the acts are all totally different from each other - while the umbrella of the festival shows that the differences are just fine detail, they’re all part of a wider canvas. The two members of Armpit come from opposite directions, Dunedin and Hamilton, and meet in the middle with a couple of nicely evocative feedback/atmos pieces. I like the first one better than the second but couldn’t tell you any more detail than that, this is music that lives in the moment.
Throughout the festival, performers are accompanied by Mike Heynes’ video projections which alternate between imagery of blood, cadavers and meat in unsanitary-looking conditions on one hand, and light/colour/energy patterns on the other. Each band gets a different projection and they all seem strangely appropriate for the music.
If I Had A Gun’s ‘good ol punk rock’ image belies the fact that they have a pretty good dynamic sense and range of moods happening. It rocks but could have done with a bit more volume to give it physical impact. Golden Axe then follow with the festival’s most spiritual/religious set, using keyboard synths and prams with fairy lights, and wearing full head bandages. It’d be great to come across them busking under a bridge or in a random dark alley somewhere. Then a perfectly-timed shriek from Diamanda Galas goes out over the PA after their set. It feels somehow cleansing.
The Fingers finish off the night with a fascinating trawl through a range of rock styles, from New Wave to Chuck Berry to blues and a hint of Messaien, all without actually quoting any of them directly. Chris Palmer’s guitar and scat-singing shows an enormous range of musical influences being twisted 90 degrees and given a mainline caffeine injection, and festival curator Kieran Monaghan matches him all the way on drums. I’d buy their album for sure.
The second night is the most epic in terms of length. The Nether Dawn’s set makes a good overture, Antony Milton starts with a nugget of singer/songwriterism and then blows everything up through a microscope to reveal the vast terrain of peaks & valleys on the surface of a seemingly flat piece of paper.
Milton then joins the ten-piece Ascension Band, who have a seedy 70’s pimp look about them. About the only way they could be construed as a John Coltrane tribute is that they have no sax players. I can’t comment further since I was one of them.
Campbell Kneale’s solo project Ming gets the award for the festival’s loudest act; I suspect some covert negotiation/bribery going on between him and the sound guy. I’m not sure the difference between Ming and Birchville Cat Motel, possibly this is less of a monolithic glacial drone and more a tapestry. It somehow has the texture of really good rock guitar and there’s a lot happening in there. The long comedown is just as important as the buildup, as the noise calms down and gradually resolves itself into sounds of laughter. Is the audience in on the joke?
After this Backyard Burial’s metal set comes across as strangely peaceful. And then Gfrenzy’s alt-country is downright pretty, at least until they start singing about chopping people’s balls off.
The Flower Orphans represent a new paradigm for many of the regular free-improv crew from the Space if you can remember that far back. This is no longer free music, it’s very structured but the lessons learned from long periods of improvising together have been taken into account and used as building blocks for something new. Their ongoing Thursday residency at Tupelo is taking on a legendary status of its own. And it’s great to see the way organist Nigel Patterson’s been branching out in the last year or so.
Saturday night I start the evening with a trip to the Michael Fowler centre to see the NZSO perform Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’. It’s not strictly anything to do with Meatwaters but it could happily fit in. Squeezing the whole orchestra inside Happy might be a stretch though. With its sudden dynamic shifts, staccato bowing attacks on the strings, brass & percussion blasts, and unresolved tensions my Californian friend Jesse called it “the birth of heavy metal”.
We head over to Happy where Cortina get the evening going with a cohesive set which benefits from Richard Falkner’s return from Melbourne. Ian Goldsmith looks like he’s having fun dancing, they should let him play an instrument next. Guitarist Ace Hurt, who bears a surprising resemblance to Peter Jackson, comes up to me afterwards to talk about William Blake.
For his duo with Kieran, Jeff Henderson plays bass guitar, reminding us that he’s not just a brilliant breakdancer/saxophonist/pianist/everything-elseist. It’s aggressive distorted funk improv but doesn’t quite reach the heights of the San Francisco bass/drums duo Sabot who were here a while ago. The omission of saxophones throughout the festival is interesting though, given the strong presence the instrument has in the Wellington scene, and in an odd way helps define the festival through ‘negative space’.
Go Genre Everything are the penultimate act, with some dirty surf rock that gets people dancing – so that’s what that short Aussie guy who was hanging around by the door the other night tape-recording conversations was here for. Then Meatbix from Auckland conclude the festival. As well as the inevitable cow getting chopped up and sped-up porno imagery, the face of Buckminster Fuller appears a few times on the video projector – another intriguing piece in the grand Meatwaters jigsaw. There’s a great Celtic feel to Meatbix’s music, which blends perfectly with the metal element. I’m impressed by Dogphart’s guitar playing, he sounds truly on fire – as you’d hope a man would be on his wedding night. He and vocalist Tenessee Pussy get married on stage a couple of songs in, making this September 11th a truly singular event and a celebratory high note on which to end the festival. Punk’s come a long way since the ‘no future’ days...
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