Location: Ljubljana / Križanke / Slovenia
Concert date: 12.06.2012
Attendance: 1400
Ticket price: 29 EUR / 23.20 EUR (discount for pupils, students and seniors)
On Tuesday, June 12, Ljubljana’s Križanke hosted the premiere edition of a festival called Urbani festival. It’s conceived mainly as a showcase for contemporary musical currents, and the lineup already tells you as much. The Slovenian trio was N’toko, New Wave Syria and Barely Modern, the international trio The Ting Tings, Crystal Castles and Willy Moon. A seriously refreshing programming platform, no doubt. True, with Metelkova, K4 and Kino Šiška, Ljubljana does a pretty good job of keeping the alternative youth happy, but on the other hand it’s also a fact that the city has been missing a bigger festival for quite some time (ever since the end of the legendary Novi Rock), one that would steer between established, quality, world-famous names, and where so-called ”underground” bands and artists could present themselves to a wider audience without shame. In today’s flood of instant stars and assorted ‘idiocies’ like ‘X Factor and the like’, the musical-evolutionary parameters have been turned upside down. Getting tempered ”in the home garage”, years of gigging and maturing, authorship… all that is already a real anachronism in today’s ”mainstream” music world. What used to be the rule until the nineties is getting more and more absurd in the new millennium. And that goes double for Slovenia. We don’t just have political-economic cliques in Slovenia, there are also powerful music lobbies that look out mainly for their own geezer backsides and hold back a vital part of the Slovenian music scene. So it’s certainly not easy for a musician creating in Slovenia, who has to steer on the one hand between self-profiteering media houses, and on the other musical dregs who can’t even do plagiarism properly anymore. And the taste of the average Slovenian ear gets worse with the years. That’s why this festival is all the more welcome. At least in principle, it’s supposed to open up space for independent musical currents and productions.
While I can place the festival at least in terms of programming, I’m all the more worried about the festival’s name. Of course: ‘Nomen est omen’. Sooner or later we get to the questions: Why urban? What makes something urban? From the above it’s clear enough that this is about distancing from some empty middle-of-the-road Slovenian everydayness, it’s also true that it takes place in an urban settlement, and that musicians are inspired (also) by the urban, but I still can’t shake the feeling that the name itself belongs to those empty PR pigeonholes meant mainly for marketing (even though I have to admit the abbreviation UF! is rather cute). I don’t know why Slovenian alternative institutions still feel the urge to use these clichés. On the music show Aritmija, project head Matjaž Manček said in a conversation with Miha Šaleher that in Slovenia the problem is satisfying young people. I understand that an institution has to survive somehow on the ”famous” market, but this mindset of searching for a satisfying formula really isn’t much different from assorted quasi-shows like ‘Slovenija ima talent’. That belongs to the domain of commercial money-grabbing, not to the field of the independent music scene. If Mr. Manček and co. made a smart and fortunate choice with the first five acts, they rather missed the mark with the night’s headliner The Ting Tings, who are neither a musical peak nor currently relevant. This is mostly what the lower-than-expected turnout should be blamed on. An unfortunately chosen date played its part too, since the festival was held midweek, and it’s well known that June is reserved for exam season at the universities, while in high schools grades are being wrapped up these days. And the day before, there was the concert of the year: Bruce Springsteen in Trieste. Still, I think that in the end it all depends mainly on the names playing the festival. But let’s not jump to conclusions too quickly, so let’s go through the event chronologically.
The festival lasted six hours, from seven in the evening to one in the morning. The Slovenian acts worked as a kind of support slots for the international names (one Slovenian act per international one). Their sets could also be described as demo or promo performances, since they had only a measly twenty minutes, which N’toko wittily pointed out at the start of his set. The festival thus ran in the following order: Barely Modern, Willy Moon, New Wave Syria, Crystal Castles, N’toko, and finally The Ting Tings. Attendance peaked during the Crystal Castles duo, while the numbers for the first three acts were pretty meager.
The festival was opened in front of a sparse crowd by the locals Barely Modern. The guys have been going as Barely Modern since around 2008, and they come from Logatec and Ljubljana. Genre-wise, you could oversimplify them as ‘Garage’ or ‘Indie’. In 2009 they took part in the Klubski maraton organized by Radio Študent, just like New Wave Syria, who played later. From November 2010 to November 2011 they spent a year gigging and creating in the musical mecca, London. They played a little over twenty shows there, and their songs got successful airplay on local alternative radio stations. Barely Modern turned out to be a fortunate choice to open the festival. With an energetic, full-blooded and direct garage rock’n’roll language they filled the otherwise empty Križanke superbly. Besides the uncompromising, heavy, at times raw sound, they’re also marked by wonderful melodies and a danceable dimension that makes them different and stand out in the flood of garage bands. It’s worth stressing the kind of brotherly, comradely, democratic distribution of attention that we in the audience give to the different members of the band. Of course, the most attention goes, with his presence, his raspy, at times screaming, hard-to-understand voice and his off-the-wall ”outfit”, to vocalist and guitarist Žiga Petkovšek, who by no means acts as if he’s alone on stage, so neither bassist Miha Kononenko nor drummer Jan Vihar gets shortchanged. The influences are very clear and range from alternative legends The Velvet Underground, through Led Zeppelin, to the modern-day matadors and bearers of the so-called indie sound, The Strokes. Of the songs played, I’d single out BWS and Lion’s Throat, because they’re typical of their music: they beautifully show the influences, and also give us something typically ‘Barely Modern’: a blend of rock’n’roll elements and pop-song melodies. A textbook performance: confident stage presence, a distinctive expression, dynamics… Lately, the only other young Slovenian hopeful that surprised me this positively was Karmakoma. All the more impatiently I await their debut, due out in the fall.
After a quick stage changeover, it was time for the first international name of the night. The stage was taken, with his unusual appearance, by a young man named Willy Moon. He grew up in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, moved to Europe at seventeen, lived in Berlin for a while, and has now settled in London. The Guardian picked him as one of its faces of 2012. His debut is due this fall, and for now there are a few songs out, all of which he played in Križanke. Kino Šiška advertised his show as ”the arrival of a special guest from the moon”. Moon lived up to that billing as effectively as possible. A present, boyish, hyperactive, melodic but also eccentric, at times downright bizarre performance. A stature like a reincarnation of Elvis Presley and Hollywood glamour, a voice like a happy mix of Tom Waits and mid-fifties singers. He was joined on stage by two women, a drummer and a sexy guitarist who looked like a cross between ‘Catwoman’ and Megan Fox. Besides them, Moon shared the stage with a DJ. His music is hard to pin down genre-wise. It’s definitely a rock’n’roll revival of the 50s and 60s, mixed with modern production techniques. You can also feel hip-hop and dubstep influences. He writes and produces all the songs himself. Their hallmark is that they’re short, sweet and punchy, and the influences can be traced to the following artists: Bo Diddley, James Brown, Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, David Bowie, Michael Jackson… The setlist consisted of seven original songs and one cover. The standout was the already released single Yeah Yeah, marked by an eclectic sound and catchy ”na-na-na-na-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah” melodies. It was matched by the minute-and-a-half She Loves Me, which lays a hypnotic musical bed under a simple but charming lyric about that lovestruck human state where you’re not capable of much more than repeating the same patterns. Moon connected superbly with the crowd, which just kept growing during his set. The reaction was downright positive. Already a second successful overture, promising a great night. We’ll certainly hear more of Moon in the coming years. A charismatic young man who knows what he’s doing and what he wants.
The musical action in Križanke started shifting from rock’n’roll spheres into more electronic waters. Although the next act might not agree with that claim at all. New Wave Syria are a duo, Urša Golob and Rok Pezdirc, and they say they’re closer to rock’n’roll than to classical electronic production. They’ve been working under that name since 2007, released their first album ‘Hello, Yes’ in 2009, and are preparing its follow-up this year. They earned wider public attention through their collaboration on the film Izlet by writer and director Nejc Gazvoda. The film’s title track is their song Let it out, for which they later won the Vesna film award for best music of the year. Their music is marked by live electronic performance, using all kinds of synthesizers, circuit bending, assorted electronic gadgets, drum machines…, all of it always spiced with a ”do it yourself” philosophy. The melodies are often distorted, the vocals are subjected to all sorts of effects, the musical landscape is often unconventional, with lo-fi approaches, minimalism and a constant interweaving of clean lines with the chaotic world of distortion. But for these refined touches to shine in an ever fuller Križanke, the duo would have needed at least roughly the same conditions that Barely Modern and Willy Moon had before them. Sadly, New Wave Syria had to make do with 2×2 square meters of space, much worse sound (Barely Modern were obviously the test run, after which there was no need to do the job again) and an ugly red curtain behind which everything was being prepared for the Crystal Castles duo’s set. So they were heavily handicapped from the start and put in a subordinate position compared to the other acts of the night, except for N’toko, who had a similar experience. That’s also why there was no real interaction with the audience. Many people didn’t even know someone was playing. Despite that, New Wave Syria did everything in their power to draw at least some attention. Hypnotic, psychedelic, dreamy electronics took those of us near the stage far away from Križanke to some fairy-tale lands. They built the set up beautifully and got stronger by the minute. The dance moves had barely started, and it was already all over (much too soon). They did present quite a bit of new music, which might also have contributed to the lukewarm response, since the unfamiliar is always risky to present, even though festivals are made for exactly that. But the Slovenian crowd is clearly specific here too. If the first two performances could be described as extremely positive, this one, thanks to the organizers, came off as completely amateur and botched.
But the next duo, Crystal Castles, quickly fixed all that. The duo consists of genius producer Ethan Kath and excessive singer Alice Glass. They come from Toronto, where they started working together more closely in 2004. To date they’ve released two albums with simple titles: Crystal Castles “I” and Crystal Castles “II”, and a third studio record is just being prepared. This is an alternative, antisocial, dark electronic band that wraps its experimentation in pop packaging. Their music is one big ‘trippy’ ride down a dark slide: wild, bombastic, euphoric, ”out of control”, noisy, melancholic, emotional, epileptic… On stage in Križanke they were joined by drummer Christopher Chartrand, who gave the mystical electronic foundation some extra ‘live’ energy. The show was pompous, dark, extravagant, polished ‘to zero’. A real little light show. At times the visuals even overpowered the sound. They created a one-of-a-kind atmosphere; the ‘sci-fi Darth Vader’ aesthetic dazzled people, while Alice’s howling, jumping and screaming intoxicated them. Charismatic Alice was really the main driving force and focal point of the show. A modern-day ‘femme fatale’. Her unpredictable moves, excessive stance and hedonistic dancing with a bottle of Jameson in her hand set off a real little hysteria in the crowd (does anyone still remember what Iggy Pop was up to forty years ago?!). Shamanic energy. The whole performance felt like a kind of mini ritual. The aggressive, heavy-metal electronics kept pounding and pounding, pressing us to the ground and in the same instant lifting us up to the heavens. From hell to heaven. And back. Self-destruction. The crowd finally got the adrenaline dose it had come to the festival for. At this point you could already call the festival a success. Yes, it achieved exactly what it set out to do. In that moment, alternative was a superpower. The setlist consisted of eight songs. Besides the already cult Baptism and Celestica, the biggest crowd reaction went to the alluring Not In Love, known to a wider audience from the version with The Cure’s singer Robert Smith. Still, the following lines ”And we were lovers / now we can’t be friends / Fascination ends / Here we go again / Oooh / Cause it’s cold outside, when you coming home / Cause it’s hot inside, isn’t that enough” echoed loudly around the neighborhood of Križanke in Alice’s effects-camouflaged version. If Barely Modern’s set was textbook, this one was one for the annals. Historic. All the other performers fade in comparison with the masterpiece Crystal Castles created on stage. It’s also true that every band needs years of playing big stages in order to grow. When I saw the duo two years ago at Exit in Novi Sad, they didn’t impress me nearly as much. They were a pleasant refreshment, but this time they were that something extra. A deserving top name of the night, ripe for closing the festival.
Second to last on stage was N’toko, aka Miha Blažič, the number one name in Slovenian rap. Everything this Ljubljana-based Novo Mesto native takes on can be rated as exceptional. N’toko = (musical) excellence! We know him as a two-time national freestyle rap champion. He’s released three successful rap albums in Slovenian, most recently the excellent Parada ljubezni in 2010. On top of that he’s put out three more albums in English. He’s also part of the funk-jazz-rap collective Moveknowledgement, which last year, with the more rock-leaning album ‘Pump Down!!!’, delivered the Slovenian record of the year. He’s considered the most innovative, versatile and technically polished Slovenian rapper. He mostly writes uncompromising, multilayered socially critical lyrics that, with their freshness and sharpness, cut very quickly into the listener’s inner life. He has a unique approach and style, and the wider crowd recognizes him by his distinctive voice. Križanke were his last stop before heading back to Japan, where he’ll be performing and spending this summer. N’toko has a lot to offer, yet the organizers limited him in time, in space and in sound. All the way through he took little jabs at the organizers, and about the space he was given he said the following: ”on this square meter of space, I can’t brag that I played on a big stage.” Whatever, he still pulled the set off. Lively, concise and sweet, and at the end he even premiered the song Superhuman. With the poor conditions he’d been given, he coped better than the New Wave Syria duo before him. His mix of intelligent lyrics and a punchy performance got the crowd dancing dynamically again, even though he said right at the start that it’s a problem to play after the festival’s peak, which goes by the name Crystal Castles. Those two set a mood that couldn’t be topped that night, but N’toko followed them decently. He doesn’t have that kind of crew and production behind him, but he’s still a real magnet for the Ljubljana crowd. Because of the aforementioned problems, he had time for only five songs. He opened the set with Neznosna lahkotnost življenja from the latest album ‘Parada ljubezni’. The chorus goes: ”I’ve got enough of everything, enough of everything, the more I get the more restless I am, suddenly I have everything except a chance to escape – the unbearable lightness of life…” In a satirical way, N’toko put into words the ”program” lines of today’s young generation, who want everything but do nothing for it, and if they already have everything, they’re still not satisfied with anything. Materialism is the guiding principle of life and (even) of the spirit, and the authenticity of life gets lost year after year. Questions of apparent choice, being blinded by power and money, apathy, boredom… and more and more, this brilliant song carries it all within. The next track is about a guy they call Joe Le Taxxxi. A taxi driver who hands out advice for the perfect life: ”1.) if you’re poor, at least be dangerous, 2.) if you’re rich, at least be extravagant, 3.) if you’ve got too much free time, don’t be boring, 4.) if you don’t have any, don’t waste it complaining and you can go anywhere, anytime, with anyone, do whatever work”. A free spirit who borders on today’s average ignoramus caring only for himself, but who on the other hand carries within him (even if only seemingly) some primal quality of existence. In the next song, Zig Zig, N’toko criticizes today’s hypocritical society. A punchy chorus alluding to Nazi propaganda material from the past (”One People!, One Leader!, One Faith!, three words: Security (zig zig), Comfort (zig zig), Privacy (zig heil!”) brilliantly points to the real modern danger. Not skinheads and "čefurji", the problem is the average meek people. They hypocritically get outraged over society’s everyday problems (drugs, alcohol…), while all they themselves care about is their private peace and neighborly ego-tripping. That’s exactly where the seeds of every Nazism and stereotypical condemnation lie. Next came the songs N’toko ne obstaja, in which N’toko wittily clears things up with his ego (though on the other hand, that’s exactly what takes him to a new level), and the already mentioned premiere, Superhuman. Twenty very condensed, powerful minutes that prepared us for the festival’s midnight finale.
Closing the festival was the duo The Ting Tings. It’s made up of Katie White and Jules De Martino, who come from Salford, a town near Manchester. Salford is much more famous in the music world because it’s where The Smiths, in the period of The Queen Is Dead, shot one of the most important photos / covers in the history of modern English music in front of the Salford Lads Club, and because the founders of Joy Division and later New Order, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, come from there. So this is a town that, despite its small size, is no stranger on the musical map. The band formed in 2007, and just over half a year later recorded what is still their biggest and most famous single, That’s Not My Name. The single first took the top spot on the British radio chart, and then the rest of the world. This February, the 2008 debut ‘We Started Nothing’ got a successor called ‘Sounds From Nowheresville’. Both albums got very mixed reviews from critics. You either love them or hate them. On the one hand, they won the famous Ivor Novello Award for the debut and got Grammy, MTV, Brit and NME nominations, but on the other, many outlets gave them markedly low album ratings. It’s a very dynamic duo, most often described genre-wise as a kind of punk pop, or crammed into various labels prefixed with ‘indie’. Their set was the longest. They played for over an hour, with nine songs in the regular set and two more as an encore. We heard all the biggest hits, the older Great DJ, That’s Not My Name, Shut Up and Let Me Go and the newer Hands and Hang It Up. At the start, The Ting Tings even addressed the crowd in a prepared, fairly long bit of Slovenian. Explosive and varied rock’n’roll with touches of R’n’B and techno nicely filled the whole stage. The set design was imaginative and simple, and the show well thought out, filled in places with backing tracks and accompanied by plenty of interaction with the crowd. Still, they didn’t manage to stimulate the audience anywhere near as well as the Crystal Castles duo did before them. Maybe The Ting Tings are already too ”radio friendly” a band for a festival like this. It’s true that their music is very listenable and glides smoothly through your ears, but at the same time you have to admit it’s not exactly exciting, and at times it’s even monotonous, boring and one-note. A likable, easygoing show that in the end lacked a bit more character and bite. Too polished and not sincere enough.
Let’s hope Urbani festival doesn’t end with this first edition and continues on an even bigger scale next year too. Drawing the line under the show, you have to admit the event was a success. It didn’t just meet expectations, it exceeded them. But a few things were not thought through enough from the start and were carried out too casually and then by force. With this festival, Slovenia has finally got a decent music event that, for the first time in ages, isn’t organized and sponsored by a mobile operator. The Kino Šiška team deserves our thanks, but also constructive criticism so that it can fix the mentioned weaknesses by next year. Personally, I pointed out mostly the sense of the ”Urbani” label, the selection and the order of acts, and the question of equal opportunities for all performers. See you in 2013.
Setlist
THE TING TINGS:
1.) Great DJ
2.) Hang It Up
3.) Give It Back
4.) Guggenheim
5.) Hit Me Down Sonny
6.) We Walk
7.) Fruit Machine
8.) Shut Up and Let Me Go
9.) Hands
encore:
10.) Keep Your Head
11.) That’s Not My Name
CRYSTAL CASTLES:
1.) Plage
2.) Doe Deer
3.) Baptism
4.) Alice Practice
5.) Celestica
6.) Black Panther
7.) Intimate
8.) Reckless
9.) Not in Love
encore:
10.) “medley”
WILLY MOON:
1.) Shakin’
2.) She Loves Me
3.) Company
4.) Railroad
5.) I Put A Speel On You (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cover)
6.) Yeah Yeah
7.) I Wanna Be Your Man
8.) My Girl
N’TOKO:
1.) Neznosna lahkotnost življenja
2.) Joe Le Taxxxxi
3.) Zig zig
4.) N’Toko ne obstaja
5.) Superhuman
NEW WAVE SYRIA:
/
BARELY MODERN:
1.) Pain Is The Disco
2.) Bubba Lemon
3.) BWS
4.) Lion’s Throat
5.) They Don’t Say Hello
6.) Things In My Pocket
7.) Television
Photo gallery
