Robert Henke at L.E.V. 2016. Photo by Piru de la Puente
L.E.V. Festival 2016 - New Forms on the North Spanish Seaside
Gijón is not the first nor the fifth destination that comes to mind when one thinks about Spain. This little seaside town is pretty, but it's not a particularly tourist-friendly place, as evidenced by the confusion in the eyes of bartenders confronted with the request for beer. The answer to the reasonable question "Why go there?" is at least threefold: the food (assuming you can navigate the menu), the cider (if you're not afraid to get it on your crotch) and L.E.V festival, which is short for Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual.
This was L.E.V's anniversary edition, and the line-up had solid names a-plenty, including Biosphere, Monolake, Paul Jebanasam & Tarik Barri, J.G. Biberkopf, Kuedo, and quite a few others. With gigs in several spectacular venues, mostly based around the beautiful complex of La Universidad Laboral, L.E.V is a great event for those in search of the visual as well as the aural. The connection of the two senses here is paramount, and the festival is more than equipped to handle this mission. Here are some impressions of our pleasant stay in Northern Spain.
Friday
Friday struck a high note with beautiful performances at the Laboral theater. The vast seated venue was comfortable, and the quality of sound made it the preferable space for the whole event. The scenic view of the Laboral building’s grandeur just outside was a perfect afternote for the sound adventures taking place inside. A building with a large square courtyard with the beautiful Church in the front was indeed one of the most amazing venues we have seen.
Biosphere at L.E.V. 2016. Photo by Piru de la Puente
Myriam Bleau “Soft Revolvers” spinned around familiar soundscapes with deconstructed hip hop beats, pop tropes and samples uploaded into several revolving plates, reminiscent of large top-toys. The remaining part of the evening had these sublime cosmic pulsations reaching their height in the live performance of Biosphere’s “Patashnik”. Hiroaki Umeda was an exercise in physicality, with particles scattered in black space moving the artist’s body. It was difficult to tell whether he is being controlled by the particles or the particles are being controlled by him. The unity of motion, sound, and the visual element was so powerful that it was hard to dissociate the details. It was not a sound performance as such, but rather an exploration of the possibilities of human physicality, a one-man theater for the digital age.
Paul Jebanasam and Tarrik Barri at L.E.V. 2016. Photo by Piru de la Puente
Sublime and ethereal science fiction dominated Subtext label boss Paul Jebanasam’s show together with the abstract visuals of Tarrik Barri. If Hiroaki’s physicality was expressed in various aspects, Paul’s performance was a pure exercise in sound and visuals in the classical sense. The drones and heavy bass was intercepted by melancholic ambient textures, making the show feel like a storm. It was as if the uncontrolled romantic and chaotic paintings of J.M.W. Turner transferred into the narratives of the digital age. After this, neither Alex Smoke nor Komatssu managed to captivate our attention and were in a way subsumed by the large hangar of Laboral Centro de Arte with its flat sound. The venue could have been good for warehouse type straight techno raves, but the theater would certainly have been better for the more atmospheric, less rhythmic performances. The bar for these was set quite high by Paul and Tarik. Biosphere was another highlight. The entire visually textural core of Patashnik with all its cinematic beauty was revealed, with the music complemented by movie scenes where the samples for the album had been taken from. This performance reinstated the significance of Biosphere’s masterpiece and reminded us why this album is so stunning. It was really cool to see these movie snippets taken out from their original contexts and weaved into Geir’s retrospective cosmic romance illustrating the significant textural elements of Biosphere’s space era. It was one of the most convincing audio-visual journeys of the festival and Geir did not need cutting-edge high-res computer graphics or fancy lasers for that. Just a few accurately chosen retro-film extracts were enough. The sonic progression of the set was also smartly arranged, marking the shifts into “Phantasm”, “Tranquilizer” or the grand “Patashnik” with spacious ambience, reinventing the narrative and essential core of the album. The only major drawback was the poorly chosen venue: how much more power could it have had in the theater with its comfy seats and stellar acoustics? The huge hangar space with its scattered sound, club-like atmosphere, and perpetual chatter didn’t do it justice at all. It is not clear whether the public completely did not get the context of the performance of if there was a clash of expectations or just not the right time and place, but the artist-audience relation was very one-sided. It really is a credit to Geir that his sounds still managed to successfully get through this, enter our minds and resonate so powerfully.
Lastly there was Monolake - precise, structured, cold and focused as ever. Playing after Biosphere also presented a nice contrast. If Geir opted for a cinematic romanticism and emotional adventurism, then Monolake gave us a plastic-glass and cold-white display of technology and the future, of form and light.
Saturday
The daylight of a rare sunny Asturian Spring day illuminated the four acts scheduled for the Botanic Garden, an impressive and warm environment, uniquely fitting to taste the sounds of Bass Boss, Ametsub, Pole and the local LCC. It is therefore quite unfortunate that we could not attend this part of the festival due to meetings and interviews. It was all the more painful because of the great reviews we heard for the live performances of Pole and LCC.
LCC at L.E.V. 2016. Photo by Piru de la Puente
The Theatre of La Laboral was again the spot chosen for the evening gigs to take off. Its magnificent architecture and sound system fueled the impressive first act - the young New York-based Chinese artist Cao Yuxi, who presented his AV show, “Macrocosm”. This was an overwhelming mixture of Sci-Fi aesthetics, synesthesia and abstraction, where images and music melt into one single space. Yro & Sati were next in line. They stepped on stage to share their combination of craftwork and a forward-looking approach. “Inside the Black Box” was unanimously described as a deeply emotional spectacle. Yro is not new at LEV and the audience had already marked this performance as a must see. The outcome seemed to satisfy every single soul in the audience. The last one at that venue was Herman Kolgen, also a well-known audiovisual artist. He divided his performance into three different pieces. All of them offered a mix of handcraft and technology. The first couple of performances were significantly shorter than the last, but were unfortunately quite a lot more captivating. The last one - Seismik - was a mix of science, video, and sound, and for all its pretense at being cutting edge, it seemed to us to have been inspired by the type of graphics showing the "science" of toothpaste commercials and real time strategy mission briefing sequences. It was neither a fitting tribute to science nor art.
Again, the gigs moved to La Nave located at La Laboral modern art museum. The audience was lucky enough to witness a good bunch of miscellaneous acts. Indeed the artists scheduled for the last night at La Laboral were so eclectic that at times the attendees were lost between ambient, danceable beats, sound collages and experimental genres. Dasha Rush was the first of the six. She went up to share her “Antartic Takt”. Perhaps the audience was expecting or hoping for a disco, but this could not be further from what they received. This time, her sound was a mix of electronic experimentation and evocative soundscapes, which was definitely miles away from her usual club sets. Deep and intense at some stages, it was one of the most surprisingly beautiful of the night. Sunny Graves was next. The Spaniard brought in his distortion and power, inviting the audience to take his hand on an exploratory trip at various levels. Ariadna Serrahima and No-Domain contributed their black and white fragmented shapes to an AV set that exploded the contrast between abrasiveness and tenderness.
J. G. Biberkopf at L.E.V. 2016. Photo by Piru de la Puente
The next, and one of the biggest surprises in this year’s edition, was the Lithuanian J. G. Biberkopf. His one-hour long set was a mind-blowing collage of sounds. With a high-quality cross-genre display, he allowed everyone at La Nave to travel from rhythmic violence to mellow atmospheres, from atonal pieces to melodic compositions. This guy must definitely be followed up in the near future. Kuedo brought with him an intense live show. His brand new AV show, where he premiered some of the tracks off his upcoming album, built a futuristic landscape of dramatic layers and profound atmospherics, but still amazingly suitable to dance both physically and mentally. Afterwards, Robert Lippock, one of the big names of this tenth edition, presented some of the tracks off his album-to-come for Raster-Noton. His offering was a dialogue between wrapping melodies, dense atmospheres, deep rhythmic structures and white noise. Every single aspect is “carved-out”, as if making a sculpture of his spectacular and diverse set. The British producer Datassette was the one in charge of closing the night. It wasn’t as good as expected, but, to be fair, that could be because of the eclectic offering that preceded him. Although his funk-laced electro lines and beats were in themselves a good choice to close the night in a party mood, he could not attract the audience’s attention and build the temperature up in the way the organizers had surely expected. Maybe the audience was, at the end of the day, looking for some pure hedonistic experience.
Putting Oscar Mullero’s industrial dark techno set in a Church at 9 PM on Sunday was one of the oddest line-up and venue choices we have ever seen. The beautiful Church seemed like an interesting place, but Mullero’s intense, almost prime-time set of fairly generic techno felt really out of place. It was an intense set, that would have been ok at Berghain or Tresor in the middle of the night, but it felt strange to listen to it and then go outside into the sun shining down on the seaside in its evening light.
Robert Lippok in Lanna was a nice finishing touch leaving a pleasant aftertaste. He balanced between melodic textures and moody undertones with heavy IDM beats drowned in noisy layers of sound. It was a punchy, catchy, but smart performance, emphasizing the danceable and more accessible face of Lippok, but still having a sharp and edgy touch, and strong atmospherics.
All in all, it was an audiovisual adventure in a nice town on the seaside of Spain - an unexpected mix of the calm life of a resort and the technological showcase that is L.E.V. Even though the experience was fragmental and not homogenous, L.E.V. is still able to make strong statements in terms of innovations and multidisciplinary explorations. The forms here are many, as are the devices employed - whether it’s spinning discs of samples or a disused TV set. Occasionally it did seem that the performances were too concentrated on form, but perhaps this is to be expected of an audio-visual festival.
