‘Late on last year, concealed within a piece concerning extraordinary Amsterdam ethno-electronica outfit Mineral Beings, we took a cursory look at the contemporary need for everything to be a response, or perhaps rather a reaction to something; anything else. It’s a concept I can’t say I’d commend, nor even condone though were Belgium ever endeavouring to conjure some form of answer to the overwhelmingly all-pervasive blue-wave phenomenon that is Nicolas Jaar, then they’d need look no further than Antwerp’s LOUIDJIE. There’s no self-congratulatory PR guff, nor even so much as a perfunctory blurb about LOUIDJIE, which allows for his genre-exhaustive approach to speak up for itself loud, proud, and unperturbed. Mist, a hazy re-envisaging of Clint Mansell’s Lux Aeterna put through the Clown & Sunset filter and strung up with those grubby baroque strings of Love You Gotta Lose Again, it’s an outstandingly propitious, and with that accomplished prelude to what may yet blossom into something quietly spectacular.’
Posts tagged Nicolas Jaar.
‘The atmosphere now hellacious and having spent an awful lot of time entangled in atrocious wait, everywhere seems critically overpeopled and criminally undermanned. We scamper off toward any available exit as though fleeing Pamplonan encierro, the white flags overhead in the Main Arena signalling surrender. For although making the best of a bad situation has become the signature idiom of this year’s event – and certainly with what seemed an unquantifiable proportion of Twitter frenziedly arranging #notBloc alternatives there are positives to be derived from what is, as yet, an obfuscated disaster – said situation became unspeakably execrable.’
Dots & Dashes review the disaster that was the beginning and the end of Bloc. 2012…
‘With UK festivals conclusively on the wane, it’s a marvel in itself that not only do innumerable hordes continue to pack knapsacks and point toes in the direction of Cataluñan capital Barcelona as though on some hedonism-fuelled, Fenchurch-drenched field trip but tantos are still waxing lyrical about the city’s – and arguably the globe’s – one and indeed only International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art, Sónar.’
