The Dramarama “Homocore” fest was a 2day-festival organised by Jelle Crama at KC België. The festival was not only about undergroundmusic, but focused on the broader spectrum of creative networks and underground collectives in general. This resulted in the presence of quite a large number of distros, that were selling not only music on whatever format ranging from tapes over CDr’s to vinyl from labels like Imvated and Veglia, but also comics, DVD’s and posters. I traded some 20 records during those two days, so expect some reviews of those over a period of time.
Next to the gigs and distro there was also an expo running with posters, silkscreenprints, drawings and other stuff by and from the creative hands of Andy Bolus (Evil Moisture), Glamorous Pat, Dennis Tyfus, Jelle Crama, Mat Brinkman and Xander Marro to name just a few. Quite many of these also did a musical performance in the course of those 2 days. Check the complete list with bands and participating artitsts at this location, while it’s still online. Here’s a small review of those 2 days.
Day one: 20 january 2006
So what good excuse did you have for not showing up at the Dramarama-fest on the 20nd and 21sth of january 2006? First you miss Metalux in the Bunker, and then you don’t show up in KC België for the Dramarama festival, a festival that at the end of this year will – without doubt – figure on the best-of-list of quite some people that did show up.
Kites opened the festival on friday – described as the “Michel Jarre with the stench of short circuitsâ€? this one man-project did quite a good set of 30 minutes worth of stop’n go cut-upnoise. Take a bunch of effectpedals laid out on the floor, a homemade filterbank on a mike-stand, a mike, and add to all this a guy in artpunkrags, quite at ease in front of the crowd, swiftly switching and moving from one effect to another, sure a good opener for Dramarama.
Orphan Fairytale is one of those bands that I missed because I lost track of time, either at the bar, or in the distro-room. I saw her do a set on New Years eve at the Rotkot, which was quite promising, so I reckon her set a Dramarama was at least as good as then, if not more powerfull, but again, can’t say anything on her set.
Mat Brinkman‘s set was a live soundtrack to a 16mm-movie of about 30 minutes: beats at 120pm, a thick layer of noise, and on screen pulsating flashes of what looked like his studio annex study room, shelves, books, things laying around all filmed in quick succesion, music and images working very well together – one word to describe his set: fast! Mat and Xarro also projected a 16mm film at the beginning of the festival.
I had already seen Glamorous Pat in the Living the monday before, must say that I liked the set that he did on that occasion better: Glamorous Pat was one of the few acts that played in the larger hall, where the sound was a tad less good than in the adjoint “black hallâ€?. What I said about his set in the Living goes for this set as well: fast changing click’n stop noise, I like his style.
One word to describe Grey Skull: trashing! These guys sure have a lots of energy to throw into their set, smash’rock at its best, beating up the drums, and trashing that damn guitar to pieces – the singer came to Belgium for just this one gig, the two others had some more gigs planned – hope they have a spare guitar with them, cause the ones they used at the Dramarama-fests were *umh* quite kaputt.
Compared with Grey skull, E*Rock was pretty boring. E*rock was basically a guy sitting on the floor moving two walkie talkies towards and from each other behind a laptop which produced some kind of feedback with effects on, while a psychedelic movie was projected behind him. The sound he produced was quite thin, soundscapepsychedelica with some beats, the film wasn’t any better.
Eats Tapes was a bit of a dissapointment as well, as someone told me it was going to be something with beats, I had imagined something in the line of Metalux: a blend of harshnoise with hardcore beats, which wasn’t quite the case. Did it ever happen to you that you got in a trance while playing a casio you just bought at a fleamarket or a thriftstore? Well, then you kinda have the picture. In the description of Eats Tapes it says that “you’ll be moving your ass… with a smile on your mouthâ€? – that’s excactly what happened to most people present, which all well considered was a pretty scaring thing. Not my kind of thing.
Andy Bolus closed the first evening of Dramarama in true Evil Moisture style: it looked like everything was going wrong on stage, and the line between soundcheck and actual performance was quite thin, but that thin line is where Evil Moisture is at its best (Ah! That brilliant show he did in the Verzuz a couple of years ago!). He had some cool circuitbended thingies with him, and a currentinterruptor on which the mixing desk was hooked, and in Andy’s words “caused the guy of the PA to come over a couple o’times, basically to be helpful you know, but -â€?. Interesting.
Day 2: 21sth of january 2006
When I was processing the films that I had shot at Death Petrol last August I wondered what it was that made me shoot close to 28 pictures of The Bongoleeros. I remembered when I saw them open the second day of the Dramarama-festival: these guys are brilliant. And not only on stage, they were among the most pleasant blokes to talk with at the festival, you won’t be bored for a second with these guys. The Bongoleeros on stage are a dirty-mouthed duo with heaps of energy of which they rid themselves smashing up oil cans or wastebins and (yep) dirty-mouthing while moving on the groove of a damn funky backgroundtrack, and these guys do show dick, roll over the floor, and seek physical contact with the audience.
Tomutonttu was boring in comparison – toysynthscapes without much happening during the set – the guy also played in Avarus that was next and sounded like three Tomutonttus put together, producing a fatter sound, while a very nice movie was projected, a burlesk cartoon in childhood style with some really nice morphings like a masturbating guy turning into a hapy elephant walking in a garden, turning into a car turning into…, so I liked the set as a whole, it’s a pitty the movie was put in a loop, I think the movie made some 4 or 5 cycles before the show was over.
I missed Groote, cause I was talking with Xander Marro in the distro-hall, which is damn pitty, I’ve only seen the last 30 seconds, which were composed of a fat sytnthesiser hum and exactly one well-aimed fat beat, so I can only say that the last 30 seconds of their set were brilliant. Damn.
I didn’t miss Hardline Elephants, normally just Carlo of the Freaks End Future with Eva of Orphan Fairytales, but for this occasion they teamed up with Green Mist, Glamorous Pat and Luke Younger, who all of them played in the Living a couple days before and had stayed over in Antwerp, so a jamsession with a couple of cheap beers is in that case an excellent passtime – just for the record: the recordings of that particular jamsession at the Freaksendfuture is out on Audiobot, including the intervenience of the police that interrupted them. Now for their set at the Dramarama-fest: a slow beginning of gradually growing static noise with dry crackles, growing into crescendo of harsh cutups and drones. Dark and Macho!
Yellow Swans were as smashing as Grey Skull the evening before. Line-up: two guys, one on guitar, with some fat distortion on it, the other one doing the electronics: either a deep underlying noisebeat like in the first song they did, or just a plain layer of noise like in their second, and also last song. This was a festival without stages, so the table at which Yellow Swans was playing stood right in the middle of the crowd, one stood at about 10 centimeters of the guys playing, much as was the case at the Metalux show a couple of weeks before. Strange that these guys till now almost only did local gigs in the States – check out their stuff, they have quite some records out.
Fckn Bstrds were a fckn crnvl – I’ve seen this baggernoiseband on quite some occasions the last six years, and their sets gets better and better with each time I see them, but they tend to stretch their sets just that bit too long, though that can be intended – it’s quite an achievement to go on for 45 minutes like they do by times. Check out the Hondenkoekjesfabriek.
After the Fckn Bstrds I kinda got noise-saturated, cause none of the bands following – till somewhere halfway the Dreamhouse-set – sounded particulary interesting. So here goes nothing.
Hetero Skeleton: line-up consisted of two drums, sax and some guitar and they sounded like a band playing drums, sax and some guitar. Back to the bar.
Hacky Pack Sac Sac: Dennis Tyfus on drums, some blokes behind boxes and an older bloke screaming the guts out of his body. The latter, and the ugly face of Tyfus were the only two things that really stood out of this set that mainly sounded like blamblamblammerdabam yell blamblam yoo yell blamblam blammerdablam. Liked the mc-act of Dennis at the end of the night better. Played in the larger hall, so the way to the bar was jammed: fuck.
Fat Worm of Error: how did this rockband got in? Back to the bar.
Extreme Animals: promising name, but not my kind of thing: cheesy beats and cut-ups – I liked the show-off he did at the beginning of his set, but after that it was back to the bar for me.
Dreamhouse, with quite a conventional line-up of drum, bass and guitar, played as if music was invented to kill instruments with. The drummer for instance can only play 4/4 rhytms. They had a bit of a difficult start, but after some 5 minutes the large sail that was tied up over the large hall was cut loose, covering both the band and the audience, and that gave things quite a boost, fun to watch from the balcony, especially when this guy from Paris tried to do some crowdsurfing by jumping on the sail – great show. Apparantly the thing they did with the sail is what they usually do – bit like hide-and-seek under the drapes, maybe their definition of a dreamhouse?
Next was a last minute jamsession with Evil Moisture, Eats Tapes, Matt Brinkman, Extreme Animals, E*Rock and the audience. Nice end of the night.
Also worth mentioning is the Naked Guy at the very end of the event – apparantly this bloke already had been acting quite fucked up during the Dreamhouse-set, things got even more bizarre when just before leaving he treated the 20 people standing in the black hall on a demonstration of airguitar, followed by a striptease show – at one moment he was on the quite beer-soaked floor making swim-movements. He left the place by walking backwards to the door while fingerpointing – it’s on those occasions that I curse myself for not bringing more films with me. Pictures will be online in due time (read: a couple of weeks) – I’ve got six rolls of Kodak T-Max ready to be processed. Yow!