September 3: close to perfection (though this word may ring wrong bells, we don‘t speak of the clean and the aseptic here), with an unbeatable sequence of „main acts“ and remixes in the moment! Jan Bang and I (changing impressions en passant) felt the same about that long and winding road / arc of this evening. Unforgettable. Nils Økland, The Harpreet Bansal Band with Svante Henryson, Eivind Aarset‘s „Phantasmagoria, or a different kind of travel“. Just look at ijb‘s photos!
Afterwards, before deciding to fall into our beds or join DJ Strangefruit’s after hours-party, we were (some of us, for sure) just looking (what is the word) fulfilled, maybe filled with wonder, as if the musics had been a sequence of dances now adding peculiar figures and pirouettes in our heads. It would be a delight (and might happen quite soon) to dive deeper (in retrospect) into every live remix in retrospect – each of them a thrilling ride. The little stories will write themselves wrapped up with trivia, philosophica, sidesteps.
I might come back, too, to the „different travel“ of Eivind Aarset’s 4_tet, and I really try hard to not write what I’m about to write now, but sitting with my new Norwegian friends at the table, Nick (originally from Australia, finally someone knowing The Go-Betweens) and Marte and Hank and Sten (kudos!) – doing no air guitar, but some kind of miniaturized body percussion with hands and legs mirroring the double drumming – the quartet was kind of working the limits, and, yes, this old saying, shooting some stars from the sky without making a big fuzz about it. And didn‘t Fiona Talkington make some great introductions from her nature reserve in Reading bringing up front the magic of „thin places“!?