Earlier in the week, the Future Music festival visited Adelaide, featuring rock bands like Bloc Party but headlined by Swedish dance producer Avicii, testament to the growing popularity around the world of EDM. The term is an acronym for "electronic dance music", but tends to refer to the testostorene-ripped sound increasingly loved by pumped-up jocks.
At Future, there was a wrestling ring and a non-stop foam party, very much not the sort of thing you'd find at Unsound, a festival within the Adelaide festival. Unsound's founder is Mat Schulz, who hails from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales but established his celebration of challenging, experimental music in Krakow, Poland, a decade ago now. Since then, Unsound has travelled to the US, but this was its first visit to the southern hemisphere and as such as constituted something of a homecoming, as well as a coup for main festival director David Sefton, although he might also be thought a brave man. Previous incarnations of Unsound have been given themes such as "Horror: the pleasure and fear of unease", which staider patrons might yet find unsettling.
The delicious setting for this truly future-facing music was the oldest theatre in mainland Australia, its interior stripped bare. The first of three nights began with ambient artists Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin (the latter better known as Oneohtrix Point Never) facing off from each other behind their computers, a puff of dry ice the only visual embellishment. Soundscapes filled with lots of snap, crackle and pop never quite assumed shape, that tension seizing the attention of an audience for whom Sigur Rós have probably always been just too damned pop.
The Australian Robin Fox is as much an audiovisual artist as he is a musician, and absented himself from the stage, as far as I could see. Instead, a narrow green laser beam pierced the air and then swept the venue, resolving into different shapes and patterns to bass grumblings and shrill stabs of sound eerily reminiscent of the noise ZX computers used to make loading tapes. The 45-minute set conclusively answered the question of whether any of this could be classified as art, with the laser an equivocal object of attention: was it working like a searchlight, an authoritarian tool, or was it more like the beam of a lighthouse, even the sign of a benign alien intelligence? It made me think not so much of Light Show, an exhibition of art that deals with light that I saw at the Hayward in London the other month, but Apocalypse, the show devoted to the nineteenth-century painter John Martin at Tate Britain last year, who also dealt in visions of heaven and hell, sometimes using tricks of son et lumière.
Raime, the duo of Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews from Reading in the UK, operated in front of a huge screen on to which visuals created by Dakus Films were projected: a gnarly dude pouring sand down his back in ultra slow motion; shots of distressed urban architecture. Again, the marriage between imagery and sound seeemed complete, dark industrial noise commanding more head-nodding from the audience. And in the same vein were Trinity, an alias for ambient artist Lustmord (aka Brian Williams) and his accomplice MFO (not to be confused with LMFAO, although I would travel very far to see that coupling of talents in action). Drones resonated across the venue, interrupted by shards of noise and fragments of melody, this time to images of desert lanscapes where the US military have tested nuclear weapons.
It was bleak. But beautiful.
Unsound continues at the Adelaide festival on Fri 15 March and Sat 16 March.
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