This is a bit of an abridged review as I had to dip into and out of this two day showcase of diversity, musical adventurers and some good old fashioned weirdness.
SWG3 is an almost invisible venue from the outside.
A converted warehouse in a faceless industrial estate on the wrong side of the railway tracks.
Once you get inside it’s like walking into another world.
There is a huge main room with stages occupying two sides and a bar occupying the end wall.
Through the back there’s a dance studio that is a big white cube of a room.
With the calming blue lights it feels like a flotation tank.
(Not that I know what a flotation tank feels like but you get my drift)
I had a real drouth when I got there so after checking out what was on offer I plumped for a pint of the old ‘wife beater’ over the local blonde ale, then headed into the dance studio to see Sarah Kenchington.
She had what I can only describe as ‘apparatus’ set up in there.
It had a seat, you could pedal it, the side looked like it came from a washing machine, or a wheel for a massive hamster, there was a thumb piano type thing, some sort of stringed thing, some horns, some percussion type things, and she wore a miner’s hat with elaborate tubing connecting a mouthpiece to a horn on the top.
Imagine if Graeme Obree had become a one man band instead of an Olympic cyclist and you’d be somewhere there.
To begin with all of this just made noise.
No tune no rhythm just noise, and I wasn’t really enjoying it.
Actually I was thinking my pint had been spiked because none of it made sense.
The noise became beats, the beats developed rhythm, suddenly there was singing, and hooting, pedaling and crashing from what I need to describe as drums and by the end it came together to become something truly unique and original.
I cannot describe to you what I witnessed here and can’t say “if you liked *insertbandnamehere* you might like this”.
What I can say is that I’ve never heard anything like it and yes I could not take the grin from my face.
Sarah was followed on the second stage by Two Wings, who for some odd reason were in darkness for the first couple of numbers.
They have this whole Kate Bush/Fleetwood Mac type thing going on in their music.
It’s not really to my taste as I’m not a great fan of either of those so on paper I should hate Two Wings, right?
Yet I really enjoyed seeing them here.
I think their mix of vocal harmonies worked really well and I can’t get their tunes out of my head.
They had the same role here as Withered Hand did the next night (my scribbled note about Withered Hand reads “a delight”).
”How can you be happy when you listen to death metal records?” Because it’s balanced against something else, Dan.
I’m more interested in Two Wings when they play up to the folky side of their music, though I do wish they had a tiny bit of the unpredictable madness of Volcano the Bear.
This duo started on the other stage as Two Wings finished, making the crowd run from one corner to the next.
It all felt a bit ‘Top of the Pops’.
They started off as a fairly standard guitar/drummer duo bringing back some fond memories of Come in Tokyo and then things started to get a bit weird.
Their instruments were slowly replaced with what looked like homemade horns or (shudder) vuvuzelas and by this point they had abandoned the stage in favour of dropping cymbals off the stage and blowing the horns into the crowd’s face.
And I mean actually in the crowd’s face.
It was all a bit much and was freaking me out so I got as far away from the stage as possible while still being able to see and hear.
The short lived horn duel soon became metronomic drum and bass which soon brought them back to where they started.
Unpredictable, unclassifiable and utterly brilliant
You could probably apply that last line to cover both days of Music is the Music Language.
My only real complaint was there were rather too many noise bands.
It loses impact after a while.
The Sunday was better when the insanely good fun to photograph wall of guitar noise band, Opaque, appearing like the four guitarist of the apocalypse blended into the almost chamber music styling of the One Ensemble.
Otherwise, great stuff all round.
