Seven years is an old dog for a festival. Some things comes and go in a year or two, raves live and die in hours. But Sean Horton and the Decibel Festival family have just pulled off another amazing festival and after seven years, it’s only getting better.
Should this go in Places? Maybe. But when the music is this damn good, when four days out in Seattle don’t hand you a bum artist, you got to show love for the Cascadian brethren.
Thursday was all about Portland and Australia. Seriously! The Room40 label has spent the last ten years pioneering its own brand of Antipodean ambient goodness, toeing a fine line between digital edge and analog scruff. Between label founder Lawrence English, Grouper, Seattle’s Rafael Anton Irisarri and Ben Frost, it was a label showcase to die for.
Clyde Drexler smiled somewhere. The Lodubs label has their own fine line in dubstep and garage, avoiding wobble or photocopied Burialisms for their own distinct brand of high topped funk. Flagship mystery man Clubroot debut North American live set at decibel broke hearts and shook booty, not unlike his last two records.
Friday was about bass. Headhunter, Mount Kimbie and Modeselektor are all hot button names right now for any discerning dubstep fan, but it’s on the live front, normally not the home of dubsteppers, where their wizardry and wonder comes to love. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen one man and an 808 juke a crowd into a frenzy, two quiet guys with a laptop and a snare drum go all two step and then two swarthy German lads finish the night lip-synching and laying air guitar to their own Björk remix.
Saturday was about intensity. Christian Fennesz is another whose live records belie his live intensity. Liquifying My Bloody Valentine into a swirling ecstatic rush, it may have sounded like an airplane taking off but it felt really, really good. Detroit legend Carl Craig was the flipside, all hard, hard epic-ness. A kick drum, a melody and a smile is usually the man on record but as a DJ, he takes you that much higher. This is what being part of 25 years of Detroit techno since day one will do for you.
Sunday brought a glorious mixed bag. Mary Anne Hobbs may have given up on her BBC Radio 1 job for greener pastures but she still has a bag of dubplates that most people would kill for. Fax on the other hand, took live techno and guitar to a gleefully poppy and gently melancholic tip that reflects that divergent sonics of his spawning from his home in Mexicali. A guy with a new album that feels very much like an album of the year candidate.
Five days, 17,000 attendees and more amazing music, both live and on record than can be absorbed. This one will take a while to get over.