STRP Festival

In October, I’ve managed to spend more time collecting friends than money to go to the STRP Festival this month. Fortunately, I had amassed enough of both to attend this event for the first time. While I haven’t managed to snag some Chemical Brothers tickets, as they were sold out by the time my friends made up their minds of whether they were going or not, I did manage to get a three day pass for the rest of the festival.

Expo

Once you’re past the Pneumatic Sound Field outside, which simply makes popping static noise when you walk through it, you get in, and the first thing you see is this:

This is the Braincar. It has four cameras mounted on it, recording everything that happens around it during the day. The magic, however, happens at night when it starts dreaming, projecting images of the day from within the fibreglass brain. You can imagine it’s rather trippy after a couple of drinks or you know what.

There were several other expositions that were rather interesting and captivating, such as WHITEvoid’s electric moOns and Marnix de Nijs’ Panoramic Accellerator, but what really caught my attention was this:

This, my friends, is the awesomest thing I’ve come across in a while. The i_Am installation. Just watch the video. Watch it. Don’t finish reading and then watch it, just watch it.

Right. Up and down affect the volume, and left and right affect the pitch, if I’m not mistaken. Not only is it cool, it’s cool to try out with friends, it’s cool to try out with strangers, it’s a cool way to pick up chicks… It’s just cool to have. I want it. I really do.

I hope in the near future that this, or something like it, will be ported to the Microsoft Surface. If there’s anything that could sell that platform, it’s this.

Music

Thanks to the pre-festival drinking session at a friend’s place, I managed to miss Apparat’s performance, but we managed to get there in time for Róisín Murphy, former member of Moloko. To be honest, I’ve only ever heard two songs by Moloko up until recently and never heard any of her songs until Friday. I’m not sure if it’s the genre or her style, but I can’t say any of it is that great or catchy. Not my type of music anyway.

Following Róisín Murphy was SebastiAn and Mr Oizo, which meant missing Modeselektor, unfortunately. I’ll never know the awesomeness that is Modeselektor, but that’s not to say SebastiAn or Mr Oizo are bad. Not at all. I was kinda hoping for more original tracks from both artists, though probably because that’s what I was hearing from miss Murphy. Both were good, though Mr Oizo really played to the crowd, knowing how to build excitement and not fucking up the timing at all, like some of the other performers that night. Both seem to be big fans of Daft Punk’s music though, as they both have mixed and remixed a few of their songs. By the way, this is the same Mr Oizo who made Flat Beat, and no, I didn’t hear him play it that night. Then again, it really is a fucking old song.

Saturday started off with 5MM, comprising of Marc Leclair aka Akufen and video artist Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, both fantastic artists. Honestly, with the combined audio/video experience of 5MM, it’s a near meditative experience. You feel like it’s just you and the music while you just stare at the visuals. Acknowledging the ambiance, the crowd, everything, and just letting it all go. You hear nothing but the music and feel nothing but the things you see. Mind you, I was sober at the time, so it’s definitely not the influence of anything else.

Following these were T. Raumschmiere and Lady Aïda. Lady Aïda was great, couldn’t say much for TR though. All to build up to the best performance, in my opinion, of the whole festival: Trentemøller.

Trentemøller is awesome.

Seriously.

Awesome.

From start to end. Every song was epic. Mixed epically. Composed epically. The visuals were amazing. Honestly, the best VJing ever. Great use of vintage footage. Creepy videos for songs like The Very Last Resort and Evil Dub, and sexy Bettie Page videos for Vamp.

All the songs were performed live with the help of a guitarist and drummer. All three would play a variety of instruments from time to time, which just made it even more amazing. Unlike rock concerts and pop performances, live composition during electronic music performances is a big deal. Instrument playing, audio sampling, mixing and remixing, all real-time. Simply amazing.

The track order and mixing of said tracks really built a perfect atmosphere, with great builds and releases of excitement. His timing was spot on, again, much better than some of the other artists. The climax was just before he played Moan, building the excitement by slowly fading it into the mix. Using the video clip, the VJ synch’ed it perfectly with the vocals.

The coup de grâce, so to speak, was Always Something Better. I couldn’t ask for a better song with which to end his performance.

Apparently he could.

His performance was already 10 mins over, but before the MC could take over, they had returned on stage to perform one more song. An unusual improvised version of Seven Nation Army. Kudos to him for pulling it off without making it sound cheesy or shitty.

2000 And One were to perform afterwards, but not a damn person in the crowd gave a shit. Every attempt by the MC to get the crowd excited simply failed. To be honest, no one could really follow Trentemøller’s amazing performance.

After a bit of Aufgang and YOTR, we enjoyed a bit of Edwin van der Heide’s Laser/Sound Performance, which is a bit more spectacular than the sound field I mentioned earlier. Somewhere during Speedy J’s great performance, I wussed out, thanks to an excruciating pain in my back that no amount of sitting would ease. I wish I could’ve stayed though, as I’ve heard Dave Clarke’s performance was great.

All in all, the STRP festival was a great experience, although I wish now I had gone to take part in the daytime activities such as the lectures, workshops and demonstrations of art and technology, which is what the festival is really about. The music was pretty much a bonus. A sweet, sweet bonus. Although, if there’s anything 5MM and Trentemøller have demonstrated, it’s the beautiful union of art and technology in the form of light and sound. May they, and all the other people involved in this festival be blessed for their talents.

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Bourgeois Du Jure

I love finding the little bits of irony in life, especially systems put in place that do quite the opposite of what they want to or should achieve, like police brutality or an abusive mother. Another example of this is political correctness.

People tell me that the objective of political correctness is to be able to communicate with others while minimising any chance of offending people. The irony I see in this is that the concept of political correctness is offensive in and of itself. This I can illustrate in a number of ways.

One: It’s hard to communicate when every time you speak, you sound like you’re reading from a damn scientific journal.

Two: The fact that you use politically correct terminology, offends the person you’re talking to because it completely destroys any informal setting, further distancing yourself from the person you’re addressing, thus breeding the animosity you were hoping so much to avoid.

Four: It is just fucking impractical.

Really. If I’m in a mall and a small dark man of a certain sexual orientation with a hearing problem and questionable fashion sense steals my wallet, I can guarantee you that I won’t be shouting “Someone please immobilise that hearing-impaired Afro-American homosexual in a female aeroplane crew member uniform! He, or she, if he prefers to be addressed as such, has wrongfully repossessed my faux-leather monetary container!”

If I don’t shout out “Stop the deaf black midget homo nut case in the stewardess costume!” I demand you strike me down with a baseball bat immediately. I’d rather offend a crowd of shoppers than look like a jackass with a ridiculously large vocabulary.

How people think that purifying, sanitising and polishing our existing language are means to an open and tolerant society is beyond me. The irony is that the savage underworld of society we call ‘teh internets’ seems to get it.

I can call someone an ‘AIDS-ridden donkey fucking whore’ and it’d fetch me quite a few ‘lolz’. Doing this in your local Starbucks will most likely get you a first class ticket on the Asskick Express.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that politicians and religious figures seem to be the only ones particularly concerned. I have yet to meet someone who isn’t heavily involved in either extracurricular activity that is wholeheartedly PC.

By the way, you might’ve noticed I skipped reason three. This would be that PC is completely pointless and unnecessary. To illustrate why, I’ll use the best example I can come up with: St Nicholas.

If you’re familiar with the Dutch holiday of Sinterklaas, you can see where I’m going with this. On the 5th of December St Nick on his pretty white horse goes around leaving gifts in all the homes for all the kids in a similar fashion to that of the abominable American fabrication of the Coca-Cola Company. Mind you, he does it with the help of his Zwarte Piet or Pieten, which literally translates to Black Peters.

Oh my. Black? Peters?

Why yes! Nicholas goes around with a bunch of black faced people in costumes more flamboyant than that of the Swiss Guard, handing out candy to little kids.

Racial undertone?

Well it seems that much of the Netherlands doesn’t seem to care. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone debate the ‘political correctness’ of it. If they have, it surely didn’t make front page in the media. Not even the Netherlands Antilles seems to mind that much, and the majority of people there are blacks. I guarantee you though, if this was done in the States, Jesse Jackson will be the first one up there with his panties in a twist crying “Racist!”

There are few people who do see the possible racial connotation in it, so they explain to kids that they’re just white people who got soot on their faces and hands when they were going through the chimneys to deliver the gifts. Sounds like a neatly gift-wrapped lie to me.

The truth is there really isn’t a racist thing about the holiday at all. Yes, the Black Petes are his slaves. No, they’re not African slaves, nor Spanish ones, despite their Moorish attire.

The legend comes from St Nicholas, the real one, who one day defeated a demon or devil, shackled him and made him his slave. Basically he goes around that day giving kids pockets full of diabetes with the help of the Beelz himself. In Austrian celebrations, they do portray him as a devil.

With everything bad having been called ‘dark’, i.e. the dark ages, it’s no wonder that the devil is portrayed as being black, the darkest of the dark. Try explaining that to the bourgeois du jure of America, I assure you they’d still label it racist.

In the Netherlands Antilles, kids look forward to this holiday as much as they do their own birthdays. As someone who was born and raised there, I can tell you there are some seriously ignorant retards in that country.

This one rich guy who built a colonial themed resort in Curaçao wanted to open a restaurant called the West Indian Company. I can see how this would fit perfectly with the rest of the resort, which is a very lovely one, might I add. I can also understand why it caused uproar among several black politicians there. After all, the WIC is the very same company that brought many of their ancestors from the African west coast. It’s fucking ridiculous because the restaurant in no way promotes slavery, but hey. I understand the concern.

I may hate political correctness, but in no way do I promote people acting like utter assholes. Words only have a value when used in context. I have no problem with a historian using the N-word when describing life in the 19th century. However, I do have a problem with a certain bounty hunter using it a couple of dozen times to describe his son’s girlfriend.

This is exactly the issue PC seems to overlook, though. As long as words aren’t used in a derogatory and insulting manner, I shouldn’t… no one should fear persecution for using those words. I know plenty of people who understand this. It’s called common sense. As long as you use common sense, there should, in theory, be no problem.

Despite it all, I fear that ‘common sense’ is nothing more than a misnomer, though, as day by day I get the impression that it’s hardly common at all.

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