Moogfest 2011 (Asheville, NC)

Review by Hilary Cadigan

Moogfest is a music festival with a clear focus.  When AC Entertainment’s Director of Connectivity, Jeff Cuellar, first described to me the rather nebulous criteria the festival organizers were using to select artists for their lineup, I was skeptical.  But what emerged this past weekend was a hand-picked selection of hugely talented musicians that truly did deliver “genre-bending music, a sound-splicing way of pushing the boundaries, artists who are testing the limits, coming up with new sounds people haven’t heard before, challenging what music can do, mixing art with soundscape and creating a great live show overall.”  Mission accomplished, Jeff.

Nearly every performance brought the thrill of the unexpected, and the weekend as a whole was not just fun but exhilarating and thought-provoking to boot. 

Upon arrival, I was immediately delighted by the awesomely bootleg decorations—main venue Asheville Civic Center had the look and feel of a high school gym set up for the big Halloween Dance, complete with dayglow streamers and tape lining the walls and grumpy parental figures passing out [unfortunately not free] refreshments.  But Moogfest upped the ante with some unique festival features, including 80s-esque blown up TV screens by the main stage, glittering space-age stilt walkers with bubble guns, and two-person bicycle cars with giant butterfly wings circling the area.  Best of all was the aptly named “Cluster Flux,” a spinning tube of colored patterns with a walkway inside that festival-goers entered with 3D glasses for the ultimate substance-free trip to the 5^th dimension.

After some initial explorations of the cavernous Civic Center, we headed up a ramp and through a set of heavily and inexplicably guarded glass doors into the Thomas Wolf Auditorium for Tangerine Dream. 

Stoic and slightly dated but still clearly legendary, Tangerine Dream’s mesmerizing performance was a great way to start off the weekend.  They followed their performance with a drawn-out curtain call that soon became the norm for the weekend—nearly every artist took a time out before, after, or during their set to speak directly to the audience about what an honor it was to perform at a festival honoring somebody as awesome as Bob Moog.  And folks, I’ve seen the documentary and Bob does really seem like a pretty awesome guy, beyond even his cataclysmic contributions to the music world.  This sense of mutual appreciation lasted all weekend and really gave a neighborly vibe to the festival as a whole.

I’m not going to lie—before Moby’s explosive live performance at the Asheville Civic Center on Friday night, I had somehow convinced myself that he was only a DJ.  Not so.  In fact, Moby is not only an expert at mixing beats, he can also make magic on just about every instrument that touches his hands—guitar, drums, keyboard, microphone—with a stage presence so compelling that it took me about half the set to gleefully realize that he and his bandmates looked like three bald triplets.  (Like Blueman Group, but not blue.)  At the end of the show, when he took off his shirt and squatted on top of a speaker, bald head shining in the strobe lights, it all became clear: Moby is Buddha. And Buddha knows how to make your booty shake.

Wrapping up Friday night at the Civic Center was TV on the Radio, a band that totally blew my expectations out of the water.  With their one-of-a-kind blend of pop-friendly art rock and indie electronica with worldly influences, their performances reek of cool, while their earnest passion and energy make them impossible to dislike.  Their new stuff is awesome and their old stuff is classic. These guys can do no wrong.

Saturday was a whirlwind of vastly different performances tied together only by the artists’ shared uniqueness. Our day began with the disappointing news that YACHT’s plane “broke” (YACHT, are you okay?), therefore rendering them unable to perform their 5:00 set as planned.  This ended up being one of several unfortunate cancellations, including Little Dragon and Glasser.  Saddened, we headed toward the Animoog Playground, Moogfest’s only outdoor venue, where the freezing temperatures that plagued us all weekend made the hammock tent a perfect place to burrow in and listen to New Zealand indie electronic ensemble The Naked & Famous rock out. 

Next up was Dan Deacon, but we decided it was too early in the day to listen to someone blather on about spirit circles, so we hightailed it to Thomas Wolfe to greet the legendary Terry Riley and his son Gyan, whose weirdly wonderful combination of psychedelia and minimalism provided a testament to the cross-generational power of experimental music.  Unfortunately, we had to cut our experience short to sprint over to SBTRKT’s show on the Civic Center Stage, which we missed almost completely thanks to the annoying bureaucracy of the venue set-up, which required us to take the absolute longest way possible in order to re-enter the building we’d just exited.  Boo.

Okay, let me be the first to say that I adore the Flaming Lips.  Always have and always will, but on this cold and blustery evening in Asheville, I have to admit: my patience was worn thin.  Maybe it was the weather, or the cutting edge newness of the other acts on the schedule, or the fact that I really had to pee.  Maybe I’ve just seen the same exact performance one two many times, but at a certain point, as I stood there watching the giant balloons drift southward into a nearby parking garage, I felt not exhilarated, but exasperated.  As Wayne, in a more long-winded mood that usual, admonished the crowd for not being excited enough (“Come on you guys, this is all there is, this is it! GET EXCITED!”), I felt the need to shout, “Hey Wayne, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND PLAY!”  I mean seriously, we’ve been standing in a freezing parking lot for an hour waiting for you to set up your damn hamster ball.  If you want the crowd to be excited, you have to excite us, not yell at us for not cheering loud enough. I’m going to stop there, because it breaks my heart to say these things, but Flaming Lips, hear this, from one of your biggest fans: It’s time to step up your game, and I’m not talking about song length here (believe me, 24 hours is long enough) or gummy encasements for your albums (although I would like to get my hands on one of those skulls).  I’m talking about good old-fashioned concert etiquette.  Also, I hope those balloons are biodegradable.

Next up was Amon Tobin, the Brazilian-born drum ‘n’ bass deviant who was said to be performing his new album, ISAM, inside “an 8x8 cube while 3D images – machines, layers of pulsating light – cascade from side to side, top to bottom,” according to the Moogfest iPhone app.  This was not something we were going to miss, so we dipped out of the Flaming Lips’ show early (something I’ve never done before) and sprinted over to the Asheville Civic Center.

Talk about cutting-edge.  The spellbinding visuals projected onto the giant cubist structure mingled with the futuristic space noise of ISAM in a way that seemed to blur the line between sound and vision itself.  However, part of me just kept wishing that Amon would drop a fucking beat.  Call me old fashioned, but it’s not easy to stand in a huge open dance floor surrounded by amped-up festival-goers for 75 minutes listening to a patchwork of electronic manipulations and field recordings that stop just short of forming into a steady beat.  It’s kind of like being constantly on the edge of an orgasm with no sweet release.  Plus, it was hard to see the visuals with everybody standing up, leading me to conclude that this show could’ve been better appreciated if it took place in one of the seated venues. 

The next two performances made me want to stand up and dance, but unfortunately took place in the Thomas Wolfe auditorium.  However, that did nothing to dull the glow of the artists themselves. First, St. Vincent a.k.a. Annie Clark, a woman so goddamn cool that you can’t help but just stare at her in wonder as she strums away on her electric guitar.  Annie hits the sweet spot between kick-over-the-speakers rock abrasiveness and swoony, swirly, feminine sensitivity so dead-on that it’s like she invented both genres.  I have absolutely nothing negative to say about her. 

I also have nothing negative to say about the act that followed, Battles, a band that would put anyone else who resembled them to shame, if anyone else actually resembled them. An excellent example of what happens when truly talented musicians get experimental without forgetting that music is supposed to make us dance, this quartet turned trio (they lost original member Tyondai Braxton in 2010) seems collectively determined to attain perfection by the most difficult means possible.  I’m referring to the playing-two-keyboards-at-the-same-time-without-looking-at-either-of-them agility of synth-master Ian Williams as well as the hey-my-percussion-sounds-like-a-machine-gun-even-though-I-decided-to-position-my-high-hat-three-feet-above-my-own-head absurdity of human drum machine John Stanier.  These guys redefine awesome, and were a wonderful way to wrap up a Saturday.

Sunday began with a stroll around beautiful Asheville followed by a trip to the YMI Center for the highly anticipated “77 Million Paintings,” a multi-sensory art exhibition created by the honorable godfather of modern ambient music, Brian Eno.  And let me tell you, Eno did not disappoint.  In fact, “77 Million Paintings” emerged as one of the biggest highlights of the entire weekend.  I don’t want to give too much away, but let me just say: multiple screens + ambient music + red velvet couches = one of the most mentally invigorating experiences I’ve had in a long time.  After two hours spent mesmerized in a darkened room, I’d decided I was going to move to Thailand, go back to school, and start writing poetry again.  This, my friends, is some powerful shit.

Lucky for me, my favorite art exhibit ever was followed by my favorite live performance of the weekend—Beats Antique. Any group that can flawlessly fuse experimental electronica with traditional belly dance tunes is a win in my book, and they didn’t even stop there.  The live Afro-Arabian beats! The live belly dancing! The live animal vs. pro wrestler battle finale! Does it get better than this? No, it does not.

Next up: another dose of totally unexpected brilliance.  Who knew Donald Glover, a.k.a. Troy from the meta-fabulous sitcom Community, could rap more ferociously than Kanye, and sing with more soulful soprano R&B charm than Usher (in his glory days)?  Not I, until Sunday night at Moogfest.  Did I mention he was dressed like an elf in a Christmas colored collared t-shirt, khaki short shorts, and a hat with a pom pom?  He was.  And he rocked it.

We had to leave Troy behind prematurely to rush back over to the Asheville Civic Center for the mysterious “Special Disco Version feat. James Murphy and Pat Mahoney.”  And by James Murphy, I do in fact mean the founding member of the all-too-short-lived indie empire known as LCD Soundsystem.  Murphy has also been named one of the coolest people on the planet by more than one magazine, and on Sunday he proved that he doesn’t even need to be a frontman to retain this lofty title.

But let’s be clear: LCD Soundsystem this is not.  As Murphy was quick to remind us the moment he walked onstage, “we’re just going to be playing some records, that’s it.”  And that was it, but damn did they rock!  A welcome break from the experimental bleeps and blips that dominated the weekend, this was a fresh take on disco classics, spun together into a syncopated soup of sound that had the whole room dancing our pants off while aerial artists somersaulted overhead.

Sadly, all good things must end, but we picked a great way to conclude our Moogfest weekend.  Over at The Orange Peel, an Asheville institution in its own right, Portlandian trip-hop up-and-comer Emancipator, a.k.a. Doug Appling, coordinated a live violinist over soothing synth beats that had everyone in the room bobbing and swaying the night to a close, with a lovely cameo from a female vocalist to boot.  Chilled to perfection—a perfect way to slip off into the night, back to our various abodes, and into our beds, where visions of Bob Moog would dance in our heads. 

Moogfest, I’ll see you next year.

Photos by Rachel Mills & Hilary Cadigan