Venue: Chanel Zero / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 05.12.2006
Attendance: 0
Ticket price: 1.200,00 SIT
Wednesday night, after St. Nicholas and the full moon had done their thing, those of us who were (luckily) touched by the Farmolution waited for Crazed Farmers to do theirs, with a heartfelt hope that it wouldn’t really be the last time! Well, the last time with this original lineup, anyway, the one that set exceptionally high standards…
Sharing the bill with them were, or rather this time were, The Magic Markers, who supposedly promised an extra dose of craziness.
CRAZED FARMERS:
Anyway, a few minutes before ten, someone shows up on stage whom the spotlights completely missed, so he has no trouble launching into a melody on the bagpipes in the half-lit hall. In his solo rendition, backed up only by stomping feet, it sounded like some kind of march or war dance. After a few minutes Borut (Švegelj) joins him on stage with a guitar, and together their sounds summon the rest of Crazed Farmers to the stage.
The Farmolution begins! Intense, direct and merciless, just like we know them from their two albums so far, “First Crop” (Nika, 2004) and “Because” (Nika, 2006), only with extra rawness, sharpness and (even) more improvisation. If we really were witnessing some kind of epitaph for the band as we knew it, it’s a real shame this wasn’t captured on any recording. A “live” album could have enriched the band’s discography with a new dimension, one that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t seen them in action. A live DVD would be even better, since for this one-of-a-kind experience sound and picture matter equally…
The songs kept coming, and along the way a special guest on bagpipes, Dario Cortese, was introduced. After the first song together he leaves the stage, but he came back a few more times during the night and, with his instrument, added a rather brilliant new, expanded look to the music, which was played from start to finish under extremely high tension! In a good hour they unleashed a whole army of songs that vividly revived the memory of great names from the past, with similarly unhinged and decidedly “non-Wednesday” music, like The Stooges, MC5 or Butthole Surfers, and maybe The Jesus Lizard too. With the song Beeffaarrt they paid their respects to the legendary Captain Beefheart, and the song Stand Up, with its lyrics, could have made the cult master of garage art, sadly no longer with us, Hasil Adkins, proud! Somewhere in between came a cover of a classic, Tovariši, jaz vam ne verjamem, by pankrti, the fathers of Slovenian punk. Stylistically it was closer to one of the bands listed above, and it was also one of only two songs sung in Slovenian that night.
Just as the musical madness was well taken care of, so were the stage “theatrics” and the below-stage ones, where Žiga Jenko, occasional guitarist but above all an outstanding vocalist and an equally outstanding performer, landed twice with his cathartic acrobatics. Mihael Kunšič, who together with the farmer’s wife is poison for weeds, proved that Hendrix and other fast-fingered shredders like him are by no means the only ones who can play guitar with their teeth! Suddenly it was almost eleven and the band was politely told their time was up and they’d have to slowly give up the stage to the band that was supposed to be the main act of the night. They play one last song and slowly march off stage, but it was more than obvious that the heated-up crowd hadn’t had enough of them yet, and sure enough they come back for an encore, with a more than fitting song for the white-hot atmosphere, Fridge.
No doubt about who took the laurels that night!
Lots of repetitive patterns, loud, distorted guitar sound and equally loud drums, spinning through somewhat looser rhythms as well as perfectly precise hits that you could even follow at times. The songs felt more like long meditative collages that put mostly the two performers themselves into a trance. Elisa played the guitar in some kind of open, down-tuned tuning the whole time, which allowed for fairly simple chord shapes and slide playing, and most of the time it was enough for her to coax the notes out of the instrument with one hand, leaving the other free to circle in the air and further prove her devotion to the music the two of them were creating together. There were also lots of musical “breakdowns” that mostly felt disconnected, like a free jazz ensemble that had wandered off course and was mainly testing how far you can push a given instrument, without damage, or at least with damage that doesn’t threaten vital organs. About 20 minutes in, technical problems hit when one of the amps refused to shut up, even when the song was over and there should have been at least a moment of silence. “Looks like this is gonna be our last song,” says Elisa, but they somehow manage to fix the “troublemaker” and launch into the fastest song so far, the closest to punk, as Pete claims about the music they make, but still at least a few (light) years away from typical punk, punk more in attitude and approach than in execution. With the end of the song came the end of the show, which arrived completely unexpectedly, and even when The Magik Markers come back on stage, it doesn’t mean an encore, as we expected, but packing up the gear. Short and sweet. After the show the drummer asks what time it is, speaking to one of the listeners who had come over to bargain a bit for just another minute or so, but the drummer answers, totally baffled, with something like, “but we always play this long!” The clock said eight minutes past midnight.
Well, definitely quite interesting, although to be honest I expected something more unhinged, more craziness and the like, probably mostly because of what the first half of the night brought, plus maybe an extra minute or so, considering the duo has an extremely extensive discography for such a short career. This year they released more albums (9!) than the number of songs they played that night! Interesting.
Setlist
01. Pinhead
02. 2 Slow 2 Hit
03. BSE
04. Youth To Die
05. Velvet Is Falling In Love
06. Beeffaarrt
07. Stand Up
08. Multikultivator
09. Tovariši, Jest Vam Ne Verjamem
10. Uč
11. C
12. Prebranac
13. Stimulation
14. Money B
15. Slow Motion
16. Swamp Dance
17. Alarm Cock
18. Psycho Therapy
19. Amazing Grace
—encore—
20. Fridge
Photo gallery
