On Sun, 8 Sep 1996, James Arnold wrote:
quoted 3 lines Anyone in UK get to the Big Chill last weekend? Personally I thought it> Anyone in UK get to the Big Chill last weekend? Personally I thought it
> sucked, but it was partially saved by great performances by Freeform and
> Morris...
I went and loved it. Don't know why you thought it sucked. What sucked? Have
you been to a big chill event before? What did you expect to see/hear?
Site-wise: After the storm that swept East Anglia on the night before, they
had to (re-?) erected the tents on Friday. So things got off to a slow
start. The weather wasn't great until Sunday - Friday was drizzly, Saturday
started cool and got really cold by 1am, Sunday was sunny and warm, it was a
bit squelchy underfoot. There were huge tractor tracks to negotiate
everytime we cross to the Big Chill tent. The food stalls were inadequate,
more were needed.
Event-wise: Apart from the conditions that came with holding the event in
Hingham (including a 12am curfew and lowish volume on the sound systems), I
really enjoyed it. My first camp out and introduction to some really smelly
toilet facilities.
People we heard and saw: the Stealth night (Herbaliser, Coldcut and DJ Vadim
from Ninja Tunes playing some funky tunes), Kid Loops going all d 'n' b,
Squarepusher having trouble with his equipment and not really getting going,
Talvin Singh doing the business with electric tablas, Zion Train sounding
really bad through a duff pa but people still enjoying it, Global
Communications with a rather ecletic set - that 70s and 80s disco stuff
isn't really to my taste, the Oscillate night (with HIA - nice set, Freeform
- second time I've seen him and he still sounds a bit sterile), Zoviet
France were very ambient - playing an large assortment of percussion and
pipes into mikes for just a reverbed snippet on top of a bare electronic
backing, Another Fine Day was a bloke playing a horizontal slide guitar - a
selection of tunes from Orb to Debussy, Autechre did a very minimal set
(people I was with saw them at the Reach gig and said they had much more
interesting set then), Being played a long and interesting set of wierd and
wonderful sounds (I was sitting outside the tent, enjoying the sunshine and
reading the Sunday paper), Earthtribe were cracking, caught the last 40
minutes of LTJ Bukem amidst a jumping and pumping crowd, and saw MMM start
his set to the in-now lounge sounds (later just before we had to drive back,
we popped in to hear him dropping System 7's Interstate - Doc Scott mix? and
moving into the dnb area [how did him end?]). There were loads more whom I
can't recall at the moment without the programme.
Other things we caught include the Mamalucous circus - jugglers, balancing
acts and rope artists (after a long wait in the freezing cold at 2am), the
"freak" show - a collection of pickled specimens and stuff toys with strange
deformities, an exhibit and demo of fire and ice sculptures and the
brilliant Hextatic visuals - video synched with top idm including lots of
visual and audio samples from THX 1138 [Samplespotters Q here: which artists
and what tracks has used such samples as "What's wrong"? I can think of one
from Fuse and one from Orbital.]
I'll be going to next years, definitely.
Ciao
Peter
--
Peter.Chang@nottingham.ac.uk +44 (0)115 951 3848 at work
For (my) amusement only: www.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk/~etzpc/