Reviews / Reviews
Review: Schwetfest, Strange Brew – ‘Joy and bliss in the avant-garde’
Strange Brew might be the most malleable venue in Bristol. Whenever I attend an event there, it seems to exist in a perfect limbo between the space itself and the night it hosts.
Sure, for your average touring gig, it’s one of the better places in town with its large open space and excellent speakers, but on a night like Schwetfest it emerges from its cocoon.
When you enter the space Schwet is everywhere, his spiked-out symbol canvassing the walls. Corners are divided up with separate band setups, an island of a drum kit and synth lying in the centre, screen for projection lying down in the front.
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Schwet has been a mainstay of the Bristol scene for over ten years now, consistently managing to gather esoteric sounds from across the globe and wrangle them down to Bristol.
Schwetfest is his yearly opus, an extravaganza of gonzo experimentalism, but this year seems more significant than ever: an all-outer towner lineup, most of them making their Bristol debuts.
It makes sense that Strange Brew is so dressed up tonight – this isn’t just a gig it’s a debutante ball.
While Schwet’s choices remain varied there’s a shared sense of disruption across the acts. Elements appear ajar, and even the space itself seems recalibrated.
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The multi-stage setup isn’t new to Strange Brew, they did a similar layout for Yamantaka Eye’s performance with various smaller stages allowing the support acts to play with no change over time.
For that gig it felt practical, allowing four varied noisemakers to strut their stuff in quick succession. With Schwetfest it leads to each artist having their own bit of land sliced out. The audience are kept on their toes, forever readjusting and repositioning to meet artists in the middle rather than observing.
Because this really isn’t the sort of music you simply observe.
Opener Kou retwists haunted folk through slacker surrealism and Lynchian soundscapes. Live vinyl and breakbeat loops bump off melancholic ukelele ballads, brief sax duels, and a bizarrely beautiful cover of blue moon.
By the end of their set the little lamp by their synths whirrs like a lightning bug caught in the breeze of their dim shimmering light.
Kou were part of what was described as a “sonically ethereal” lineup by one attendee
Visuals stain the sounds again on GGHED whose cryptic no-wave riffs and vocals echo across drum loops, to form a soundtrack to a ghostly flicker of a film.
The imagery projected is a calm soup of head circles and symbols evolving into one another, the noise allows you to dissociate into the projections deep pool.
After a short surprise set of anonymous cloud rap beats and mumbled gonzo lyrics things begin to shift tempos. Canada’s Drainolith take the stage with a series of guitar duels that wash acidic shoegaze over their Beefheartian Blues. The group’s choice to use an electronic drum set initially seems jarring, more a series of bleeps and boops than powerful hits, but as you adjust to the mix it appears revolutionary.
Drums there sheerly for a beat, like a modernised Big Black, Drainolith reduce the drums to their raw purpose of rhythm to focus on the riffs. And what riffs they are, true future shock psychedelia, grand interlocking pools of sound you could swim in.
Drainolith were on the bill of this year’s edition of Schwetfest, the 12th
But it’s not all meditative: with the appearance of Zohastre around that central drum synth island a sense of revelry emerges. The duo churns out an ever-impressive blast of primal futurism, the IDM-infused drumming rattling against synth work that at once gleams off to a far future and backwards into a deep gothic past.
Beaming vocals cut through the mix as do blasts from the drummer’s horn, brief bits of sea shanty jigging merging with the doomy drone, a grand symphony of wild revelry.
Foudre takes over the island from there bringing a similar rave energy but deconstructed into a choral post-apocalypse. Vocal loops that could soundtrack a cyberpunk classic bump against tension-snaring drums, shimmering pieces of drone, and shouts out into the void.
The DIY Sci-Fi Futurist Musick Ball also featured French outfit Foudre
By the time the final act makes the stage, you begin to wonder if anyone could close such splendid oddity, but Das Kinn might be the nights highlight. A blistering mix of blaring synth punk with EBM grooves and slight theatricals, the music provides a hardline groove for his waves of industrial synth pop.
His high-energy shouts and pumping beats are the perfect closer for a night of sonic joy. Because joy is what permeates tonight.
Topping off the night, Das Kinn was a highlight
Beyond experimentalism, boundary-pushing or esoterica Schwetfest remains a reminder of how much joy and bliss there is to be found in the avant-garde. That experimental music isn’t merely something to philosophise over or watch from a distance but, instead, an art form to take in live.
You can only truly see its vitality and beauty when it’s right in front of you kicking and screaming.
Main image: Didier Goudal / Other images: Schwetfest
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