Ideal Festival 2006

Atalante and Nefertiti Jazz Club, Gothenburg, Sweden

March 10-12, 2006

The first thing that strikes you entering the legendary Nefertiti Jazz Club for the first night of the Ideal festival is the sheer number of speakers and amps. The stage is filled to the rim, and the explanation is simple. This night's line-up features Pita, Earth and Sunn0))).

Pita, a.k.a. Mego co-founder Peter Rehberg, opened the festival with a harsh set of electronics. Standing in solitude and absolute silence, Rehberg functioned as the antithesis of his sound, where the piercing, stabbing sounds sometimes threatened to fall over the abyss. Earth followed, battling its reputation as a dark machine by emphasizing the trombone over the guitars. And, surprisingly, the trombone drones really are beautiful.

Louder than loudness, darker than Darkthrone, Sunn0))) entered the stage, dressed in its trademark robes. For an hour and a half, darkness, smoke and the evil drone mayhem produced on-stage completely enthralled the audience. Halfway through, when a corpse-painted Satan of a singer enters the stage to start hissing his lyrics towards the crowd in slow motion, the illusion becomes perfect. These men are not ordinary people; they come from someplace else, from where time passes slower.

On the festival's second night, Kid 606 personified the anxiety of the '70s generation: Should I slow down, or should I hide my increasing shirt size and growing fondness for staying at home by increasing the speed? The Kid has chosen the second option, unstoppably touring the world to deliver his slice-and-cut music. As always, his set rests somewhere between annoying and interesting: his music being produced from two laptops, accompanied by screaming, dancing, and losing his hair at the speed of light.

As with many bands with a busy release schedule, you may sometimes be unimpressed by the quality of all of Wolf Eyes' recordings. But in a live setting, the band is always flattening. One day after the Sunn0))) set, maybe the Wolf Eyes riffs and drones do sound a little bit on the thin side at certain points, but under the circumstances, who could blame the group? It's still an impressive show.

The final day of the festival is a much mellower affair, aside from Leif Elggrens' tin cans threatening to fall of the table, as he has prepared them with some sort of vibrating devices to be able to create noise. The Elggren performance lost its edge a little, but became entertaining in unsuspected ways, when the video camera used to capture all of the vibrating action, (projected on a large screen behind the artist), went into demo mode and started superimposing cartoon airplanes, cute wrapped gifts, and other ill-suited material over the intended pictures. A bit of a shame as well, since Elggren tends to be an enjoyable artist and this specific performance had an interesting setup.

Viktor Sjöberg is one of the hidden treasures of the Swedish avant-garde scene, moving eclectically and effortlessly between pop, hip-hop (in the broadest sense of the word), and art sounds. For this occasion, Sjöberg had put together an all-star ensemble out of the Swedish underground. The pianist, turntablist, guitarists, trumpet player, and all the laptops created a dreamlike state of past pop culture, as snippets from musical history were studied, elongated, inverted, and expanded on. Sjöbergs take on ensemble member Johan Gustavsson's take on Billie Holiday's take on "Gloomy Sunday" was very close to breathtaking. An out-of-tune instrument ruined the trance-like state in the audience for just a minute. The break was just long enough for people to wake up and enjoy the look of it all: Some ensemble members may have been wearing suits for the first time.

Petter Ottosson
Photos: Lisa Nordwall