alisonboston.com

Same Rain: Different Town
I’ve managed to get to four small music festivals in-between my 6 weeks of work here in England this summer, and each has provided something unique.

At Finsbury Park’s FREE Rise Against Racism Festival earlier in the summer, it was three poets and a French duo (names and photos to follow). A couple of weeks later, the Ealing Festival delivered a mellow mix of world music (key players and pics to follow), with an equally mellow crowd comprised of families and kiddies on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Two week’s later, I missed all the good acts at Hastings’ free concerts on the beach, kicking off the Old Town’s week-long Carnival. This weekend, fed-up with the rain in Hastings, I decided to try the rain in Brighton and went over for the Loop Festival - a one-day celebration of digital arts and music - providing a full range of digital toys on a rainy Saturday by the seaside.

And oh what fun I had with the digital toys!

A digital arcade, tucked under a rather small canopy tent, had energetic players cycling their way through four games, including PacMan and Froggie. The player sits on a bicycle, facing a large TV screen, and pedals to make the icons move. The faster you pedal, the faster the icons go, while a nudge on the handlebars changes their direction. In the same tent, there was always a crowd hopping round the Sample Board (for lack of a better name and any information what-so-ever about the game): a flat, checkered board, wired-up to what looked-like a play-station control, programmed with samples (at least that’s how I can best describe it in this moment). Each square of the board plays a different sample - the sound triggered by pressure on the square with a wooden block, the bottom of which is embedded with metal discs. The idea, of course is to get into the rhythm and move your block on and off the squares to create a mash-up of samples. And the more the merrier: several people, each with one block, moving around the board, pressing different squares, their bodies jumping, feet tapping, heads bobbing, all keeping time with each other and the samples they are triggering makes for never-ending variety. Fun! and very cool! One fellow told me he had played for two and half hours straight!

Then there was Sim Suite in the Limits venue (the only indoor and hence only dry venue at the festival) , a kind of digital tic-tac-toe operated by three players standing on bouncy circles around a large, horizontal digital screen. Yes, you play your feet, like those dancing squares in arcades. (I don’t hang out in arcades so I don’t know what those dancing games are called.)

I met the creator of the Sim Suite - Manuela Jungmann from San Francisco, now living in Brighton. It was the end of a long day for both her and her game - which shut itself down while we were speaking, thereby demanding her attention and cutting our conversation short. She said the screen had been going since 9:00 AM and was over-heated (well, it is encased in a box).

But my absolute favorite was the Singing Sock Puppet created by Matt Brown. Put the thing on your hand and control the sound and pitch by opening and closing the mouth - the pitch being effected by how wide the mouth is open. It is an absolute hoot. Every kid - big and small - should have one of those!

As for music at the Loop Festival? Well, the tents were packed and the security guards were stopping them from getting over-filled, so I only got inside one tent (Futures) and the band that was playing was a good enough reason for there to be room in the tent! I never did get inside The Hub, so I ambled over to the Limits and Outer Limits stages. Indoors at the Limits I thoroughly enjoyed being out of the rain and settled down to listen to John Metcalfe on Viola, teamed with a violinist/pianist, a drummer and electronics. Billed as ‘John Metcalfe from Schoenburg to drum ‘n’ bass, the quartet played a tight cross-over, that showed-off the players’ expert musicianship.

Now I’m going to bed. Thanks guys for the wristband. I will edit this and put some more links and info at a later date - when I get settled in another location with a stable internet connection.
The WIFI connection I am using is on again off again. I got lucky tonight: it was on.

Later: My apologies for delay in getting peoples names and links added to this post. After a summer with patchy internet access, my old Toshiba laptop finally bit the dust and I’m now working on a brand spanking new MacBook! My attention is now focussed on learning how to get the max from this lovely, compact, sate-of-the-art tool - and sooner or later I will dig through my notes and get the names of those great poets I heard at Finsbury Park. The pics may take a little longer, as not only did the Toshiba die, but my digital camera also quit working. That happened right after I snapped a pic of a three wildly costumed chain-gang style punks at the Hastings Old Town Carnival. Thing is, this Mac doesn’t have a card slot (hmmmm) and the memory card from my defunct Sony camera doesn’t fit anywhere, nor do any of my friends have Sony cameras or cameras that accommodate the memory card, so one step at a time….I will sometime get the pics off that memory card and then this post will be properly updated!