The Primavera a la Ciutat concerts draw a panorama as appealing as those at the Fòrum. Appetizing and also ungraspable: here it is also time to choose and suffer from overlaps.
My route starts on Monday at Paral·lel 62, with Alasdair Roberts and Current 93neo-folk priests. Alasdair is an old-school British Scottish folk singer-songwriter, in the mold of Shirley Collins. Alone with the naked guitar, tall and skinny, installed in a corner of the stage, barely moving, he offers a dense and pastoral concert. Like a medieval minstrel, he uses his fine, but intense and expressive voice to sing traditional songs, of which the lyrics do not fully reach us, but the feeling does. And at the end, he gives us two more lively songs, like those from a tavern. Arid, but beautiful.
The Current 93 concert opens with disturbing projections and music handled by a single person: now an abandoned country house, now the outskirts of a city, accompanied by ambient music. Little by little, the images are more abstract and disturbing, the music more industrial. We’ve been like this for a good few minutes, the band doesn’t come out, the audience begins to stir. Half an hour later, a second person appears and starts playing… ‘Rivers of Babylon’ by Boney M! There we already looked at each other in disbelief. Will we be victims of a joke? Well no: later we found out that the first part is a film by visual artist Davide Pepe and that the person who played Boney M was a member of Nurse with Wound, who accompanies Current 93 on this tour.
Because after these 40 minutes of screenings, when David Tibet, leader of Current 93, jumps on stage, the atmosphere changes. Accompanied by violin, piano, even bagpipes and without drums, Tibet offers a great recital, charismatic and dedicated to the disturbing narrative, with his expressive raspy evil elf voice, which is sometimes refined to give it a feminine tone. Now they approach the psychedelic pop of Love, now they approach murder ballads. He is capable of giving a party tone to the shout of “Death!” in ‘This Carnival Is Dead and Gone’. Or that the little birds heard in ‘Bright Dead Star’ end up seeming disturbing.
Current 93 want to offer us something primal, but with an expansive will. There are dodgy English pastoral ballads based on flutes in ‘Mary Waits In Silence’ and they also approach hard techno if necessary. There is tense calm but also moments of rapture, as in the sense ‘Imperium V’. And as if to laugh a little at his own transcendence, at his guru image, Tibet is dressed in white linen and is wearing a T-shirt with… Minnie Mouse! A transcendent, intense and also tremendously entertaining recital.
On Tuesday I made my way to 2 Apolo. The main course was Cardiacsbut the day opened with a proposal as different from that of the British as Faten Kanaan. There is very little information about the Jordanian on the internet: only her music, landscape, environmental, on the platforms. Remember Suzanne Ciani, because of how applied she looks behind the table, managing programming. There is ambient and escapism, quite gloomy, too ceremonious, almost ecclesiastical. The public is quite attentive, but the proposal is still arduous.
But here people are for Cardiacs. There is a large representation in Apollo 2 of sixty-something Brits giving it their all. Its leader Tim Smith died in 2020 and his brother Jim Smith now runs his particular ship of fools: A large uniformed band relentlessly distributes lively, psychedelic rock, which can sound like an impossible mix between They Might Be Giants and Devo at times. Or dedicate yourself to hard rock with crazy saxes. They offer no respite in their concatenated songs, very catchy and, at the same time, very unobvious. Party up and down the stage.
On Wednesday, between the Geese hype at Paral·lel 62 and the opening day at the Fòrum, it was surprising to see the Razzmatazz packed to the rafters to see the Scots Mogwai. The attendees are, ehem, tall (40-50 years old) and mostly local. The concert? Spectacular. A perfect example of communion between the group and the public. A pure collective ecstasy of post-rock, guitar distortion, landscapes, calm and fury. The sound in Razzmatazz is great.
Mogwai start off calm and bucolic with ‘Yes! I AM a Long Way from Home’ from ‘Young Team’, but they’re picking up steam. Its distortions sound curiously balsamic. The public begins to joke at those who dare to speak. Here the only things that count are the music, the lights, and letting yourself go. The development of the concert is being strangely emotional, even light. ‘Haunted by a Freak’ sounds even cozy. But when ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ arrives, a brutal moment of communion unfolds. Everything is red. Nobody speaks. Mogwai are going down, they are going down, volume and rhythm. Calmer and calmer. You only hear the breathing of the attendees and the noise of the glasses at the bar. And then…the BANG! The entire Razzmatazz roars as one person. Goosebumps.
To reduce the intensity, ‘Fanzine Made of Flesh’, from his latest album, makes us dance with his vocoded voice. In fact, the final section of the concert is forceful, but less dense. ‘Lion Rumpus’ even sounds like conventional distorted rock… until they show that they are marching to RETURN with ‘My Father my King’: twenty minutes of hypnotic and deafening journey, with the drums especially thundering. Like being in a sonic centrifuge. On the way out, a colleague joked that, after this, the festival could be over. Man, no. But it will be difficult to find a concert as intense and ecstatic as this one by Mogwai…
