{"id":59373,"date":"2017-10-05T08:37:05","date_gmt":"2017-10-05T08:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejoycollective.co.uk\/blog\/?p=59373"},"modified":"2017-10-05T08:37:05","modified_gmt":"2017-10-05T08:37:05","slug":"now-festival-2017-chapter-arts-centre-cardiff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/preview\/now-festival-2017-chapter-arts-centre-cardiff\/","title":{"rendered":"From Now On Festival 2017 : Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Eggs\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Into Chapter\u2019s dark spaces and weird corridors for the fourth year running, and From Now On\u2019s 2017 edition, which even in this year\u2019s slightly slimmed-down version is a fine splurge of noise, ideas and music that jumps genres and geographical borders. Is it smuggling high art into fun and dancing, or the other way around? Either way, Shape Records\u2019 curation works the brain and the heart, and feels like a pure celebration of people.<\/p>\n

In this context, a Saturday night Gruff Rhys<\/strong> premiere of an artistic response to a Catalan prison makes perfect sense, and, after a lengthy introduction that involves five separate people and touches on poetry, architectural drawings and photos of sculpture, anticipation is raging. A gang of musicians file onstage, armed almost randomly with clarinet, keyboard, melodica and more. They interpret various slides of flowers and insects at various speeds determined by their resting heart rates, measured beforehand, as a man called Kliph \u2018conducts\u2019 by slowly moving eggs from one box to another. It\u2019s a great honking cacophony that moves between invigorating, irritating and tedious like a hopscotching child, and is exactly what this festival is for. After 30 minutes the racket subsides to leave Gruff playing a yodelling record on a mini turntable, and the audience disperse looking bemused but mostly happy.<\/p>\n

Back to the opening Friday night, and some musicians playing actual tunes, the bourgeois sellouts. It\u2019s hard to overstate how good Twinfield<\/strong> is, or how sad it would be if they carry out their grumpy threats to quit playing. The music Tom Winfield makes (played live with Rhys Aneurin) is icy electronic pop, neon dystopias with hefty doses of squalor. A vocal similarity means the spectre of Datblygu is never far away, but there\u2019s also bits of John Carpenter, V\u00e5r and the Pet Shop Boys floating around, making magic.<\/p>\n

Also in the stark Peilot room, Yeah You<\/strong>\u2019s soundcheck becomes the start of their set, a gapless rush of hyperactive glitches and clanks that Elvin Brandhi tongue twists over, while her dad Mykl, the sensible half of the duo, attempts to make noises from the inside of the studio space\u2019s sink. While it\u2019s not as unhinged as some of their online, hedge-diving videos, it\u2019s still deliriously enjoyable, grin-worthy stuff. More blissful smiles greet Flamingods<\/strong>, cutting a typically bum-waggling psych set, and Yama Warashi<\/strong>, seemingly beamed in from some benign jazz fusion island between Japan and Britain. The latter band in particular, adept at fleshing Yoshino Shigihara\u2019s folk fairytales with shivers of guitar and brass, create a cloud of hazy wonder difficult to escape from.<\/p>\n

Four unassuming men in pyjama bottoms open Saturday night proceedings. This is Aftersun<\/strong> and their taut, full-bodied meanderings on organ and guitars prove terrific, a way-enjoyable melding of krautrock, garage and the kind of prog you don\u2019t want to push off a cliff. Preceding a serenely gliding slice of guitar scree from Thought Forms<\/strong>\u2019 Deej Dhariwal, and a weekend-closing, audience-roaming set from Islet<\/strong>, hailed as returning heroes, lies Roshi and Pars Radio<\/strong>, and a more gentle thrill, of delicate keyboard pop that loops vocals around snapshots of life spent between Wales, London and Iran. The closing number, a live score to a silent film that twists and repurposes the onscreen dialogue, is a rich and clever brew.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a faith in artists here that\u2019s reflected in the weekend\u2019s open-minded, welcoming audience. You could trust From Now On with your PIN number.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Into Chapter\u2019s dark spaces and weird corridors for the fourth year running, and From Now On\u2019s 2017 edition, which even in this year\u2019s slightly slimmed-down version is a fine splurge of noise, ideas and music that jumps genres and geographical borders. Is it smuggling high art into fun and dancing, or the other way around? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[458,459],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-preview","category-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}