Showing posts with label flow festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flow festival. Show all posts

Monday, 15 August 2011

Flow Festival 2011 baby. Wow wasn't it crazy?

So once again Helsinki's Flow Festival came and went and I came and went somewhere completely different. That's right, I didn't make it to Helsinki much to the dismay of myself and not a lot of other people.

I felt like writing up a totally bogus festival review about how Kanye West had his voice so autotuned that at the end of his set an actual Daft Punk-esque cyborg erupted from his mouth, tweeted pictures of its own metallic penis and then fucked over Finland's version of Taylor Swift, who may or may not be called Ronya.

"Yo Ronya, I'm really happy for you and I'ma let you finish, but your song 'annoying' is just really fucking annoying, so actually I'ma not let you finish" -insert metallic penis here-Link

James Blake, the golden boy of dubstep, has definitely hung up his dubstep shoes as he proceeded to sit on a stool for 45 minutes repeating the same 14 words over and over for 40 of those minutes. Then he played a cover song.

Turns out that someone called Bridget Hayden played the best gig of the festival on Sunday at the Cirko stage but because there was literally nobody watching her, due to a) not finding the stage b) not giving a fuck, I'm the only person who knows this. The empty crowd gave Bridget an eerie sense of mystery and set every hipster on the face of the earth on to red alert, because as we all know there's no greater feeling than being able to slip "Oh, you haven't heard of her? Oh, please everyone has heard of her" into a conversation to make you a superior being.

Superior enough to look like this.

From http://www.hel-looks.com

Just days before the festival Q-Tip had to cancel his show and the organisers luckily managed to fill in his slot with MF DOOM. Unfortunately just before his gig, DOOM realised he's allergic to nickel and that wearing a nickel plated mask for all these years was a terrible idea. Needless to say, DOOM had to cancel as well because he'd ended up looking like Leonardo Di Caprio. Eesh.
The organisers yet again worked their magic and roped in Vanilla Ice to please the Hip Hop hordes. VN-ICE was right at home on the main stage and due to popular demand he played 7 encores. Every single one of them being 'Ice Ice Baby'. After his gig everyone rushed off to the merch stands to buy his super limited 7" prints of 'Ice Ice Baby' b/w 'who cares what track, you'll never listen to it anyway'.

Just before her performance Lykke Li found herself in a lot of pain and that she couldn't sing any songs and had to cancel. Turns out she had a trumpet in her head and just couldn't get it out. I blame Kanye. We've all seen what he's capable of and cranial insertion of brass instruments is probably a piece of piss compared to all the other shit he's done.

Someone said Hauscka was a bit of a let down after he forgot his piano in Germany and his gig was just 2 hours of complete silence (but you know the artsy type of cool silence). It was however miles better than Empire of the Sun who came on the stage in crazy headgear and played the entirety of MGMT's back catalogue in the hope no-one would notice anything was wrong. There was. It's not 2008 anymore.

Apparently everyone who knew anything about anything, went to see Finnish superstars Rubik who were headlining the cube stage. There was some crazy discrimination going on as the band attempted to segregate different coloured members of the audience to stand in their own sections in the front, back and at the sides of the stage. The gig however was deemed a failure as one stubborn white dude wouldn't get over to his own allotted section and just stood there with all the blue dudes. This frustrated the band so much that they've now opted for a name change and are now known as Sudoku.

That's it for my festival report, it's good to be back.

Toodles.

Wednesday, 6 April 2011

Flow Festival baby, yeah!

Today it finally happened. The artists for this year's Flow Festival in Helsinki were announced and holy moly is this a wicked awesome day to wake up and breathe in that ever so slightly drizzly air. Yessir! After the show Ruisrock are gonna be putting out this summer it seems Helsinki HAD to go one step further, pull out all the stops and beat its lil' baby euro-culture-capital city and announce the best alternative music festival Finland has ever seen (well at least in my time here).

I think it's pretty safe to say that if the weather ain't gonna be hot, well at least the tunes will. For the full line-up go here:
http://www.flowfestival.com/esiintyjat/

Now I'm just going to list some of my personal highlights. Incredible.


There's the odd chance I'll see Warpaint in Brighton next month, but I'm still hugely bitter after missing them a year ago, so maybe I'll just see them as many times as I can to make up for it. Oh and because they're brilliant.
Undertow by warpaintwarpaint



Lykke Li should be essential live listening, purely because her first album played such a part in molding this "identity" of mine.
I Follow Rivers by LykkeLi


Hauschka from Germany makes these immensely beautiful piano-driven classical tunes and I've always said people don't listen to classical music enough. Be it because concert halls usually have an awfully stuck up atmosphere or not, I don't know.
Hauschka - Alexanderplatz by Hauschkamusic


Pantha Du Prince (also German) and his amazing Black Noise album kind of became my minimalistic soundtrack of last winter. So looking forward to seeing him do his thang.
The Splendour by Pantha du Prince

These would have been more than enough to secure my 100+whatever euros for the weekend, but no they're also giving us:

James Blake



Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti'



and only bloody Kanye West!

Kanye West - Monster .



See you there!

Tuesday, 6 April 2010

Flow Festival 2010

Ready, Steady, Go!... And they'rrrrrre outtt-ah!

They are of course the first confirmed names for Flow Festival 2010. If their "twits" are anything to believe.

Now because all of the other festivals in Finland have steadily released their line-ups during the last few months, Flow Festival's choice of releasing it's line-up in April has brought mass speculation about who/what/where? and also some impatience.

Everyone has their own favourite that they'd love to see in Helsinki come August.
Personally mine would be Four Tet, but alas that has as yet not happened.

What has happened is that Ulver and Major Lazer are set to play in Suvilahti.

Now whilst it's hard to hide my disappointment with these two names, mainly because of such high expectations, I've still got to draw some positives from this.

Ulver are a bit good. Perhaps like you'd expect Norwegians to sound, with all their black metal and stuff, just without all that much black metal. Very epic, majestic but oh so very dark.





Still I find them a slightly odd choice for Flow.

Major Lazer quite not-literally bored me to death recently, so I took all of it off our Irish pub's jukebox.

Good move if you ask most of our patrons
Bad move if you ask the entirity of our Jamaican customer base.

I have no doubt that Diplo and Switch will rock the fuck out of the party, but as an act that relies so heavily on featuring artists I can really only see it being a sweaty DJ-set. Oh well, DJ sets can be fun too.

Major Lazer probably will be a last resort for me in August, if nothing else is on at the same time.



The baby crying in auto-tune is quite funny though.

Saturday, 12 December 2009

Clean Equations

Over the summer I had the pleasure of getting to see Vivian Girls and A Place to Bury Strangers live. In Finland. Wow! Both gigs were spot on. Vivian girls were at Flow festival in Helsinki and just sounded so good. Not to mention the fact that on-stage the guitarist and bass player looked proper fit! APtBS played at Klubi in Turku. Quite a small venue and quite empty which was a shame because it's rare we get anyone decent playing in our little city. A lot of people left during the gig and later I heard from someone there that they found it way too loud and frustrating how they kept building up the songs to end up amounting to nothing. For a band that's been given the title "Loudest band in New York" I don't find it too surprising that the music might even be a bit loud.

Anyway the reason why I brought this up is because I like these two bands, imagine my delight when I found a compilation LP with both of these bands on it + loads of bands i'd never heard of before from the brooklyn music scene and thereabouts.
http://www.statecapitalrecords.com/fieldrecordings.html

Apparently only 500 copies of this were printed so I consider myself privileged to have it. And after listening to it, one band firmly stuck to my mind:
Clean Equations. I had to listen to their myspace and turns out they've only got just over 1000 listens. They've got 6 songs on their profile.
The song thats on State Capital Records Field Recording called French Noise Piece features some tidy drumming and and a wicked wicked chorus.
The pretty piano-driven songs like Ohio Turnpike and Alison leave me wanting more. Turns out they've just released an EP. Coolio. Check them out.
http://www.myspace.com/cleanequations
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