The Monochrome Festival was a perfect mini-fest weekend and so many reasons for hope in these strange times: The youth ARE alright.
Aging and becoming old are inevitable; cynicism about “the youth of today” is not. When it comes to music, negativity becomes a way of bonding with others of one’s generation who either gave up active listening decades ago or who need to explain why the latest mutations don’t capture the alchemical magic they possessed in their teens.
It tends to take one of two forms: either “it’s all noise”, when it feels too threateningly new and different, or “it just sounds like *insert name of decades-old artist here*” when it doesn’t feel new or different enough. The young are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Surely, it must be something other than one’s physical decline that makes it so hard to remember lyrics these days?
That’s why, as a greying bloke who just hit his mid-40s, attending Bristol’s Monochrome festival was such a pleasure. It’s heartening to see that there’s always some small core of every generation doing what they’ve always done: making their own sounds, founding their own scenes, imagining twists and turns, and fresh ideas while spending fun times with creative and energetic friends. Across the two days, whatever moments of near nostalgia existed in the music were rapidly subverted into unrecognisable forms, and every time I thought things were settling into a familiar mode, there’d be a rapid rejoinder, a cut back to alien terrain.
Performers mingled with the audience throughout, and there was a palpable sense of camaraderie among the couple of hundred fans of the weird who showed up. People were courteous, holding doors for one another, making space, and helping overenthusiastic moshers stay on their feet. So much basic humanity and decency on display in what our screens try to tell us are unremittingly bleak and selfish times.
The organisers – credit to Rich of the Margin Forever collective – did a great job with the chuckle-worthy, yet apt subtitle “The Festival of Ugly Music”. The website attempts to assign a genre to each artist, resulting in a mix of deathgrind, avant-garde noise, blackened death, queercore, hyper-industrial, no-wave rave, cosmic horror, grindcore, absurdist noise, and Moog grind. It’s quite a feat to make harsh noise, noise punk, d-beat, death metal, power electronics, and crustcore into the conventional entries!
My favourite was HORSEBASTARD, the genre for which is ‘horsebastard’ – brilliant. Geographically speaking, the furthest-flung visitors are Wolf Eyes from the US, Concrete Winds from Finland, Svartvit and Mirusi Mergina from the Netherlands, and Matrak Attack from France and Italy, around a solid core of UK and local talent. Oh, and HORSEBASTARD hail from ‘HB’ and they are brilliant.
With traditional music venues often finding it hard to stay afloat given official disinterest in sustaining the creative circuits that have made culture one of Britain’s major exports, multipurpose spaces seem to be the future. It’s noticeable that there’s been a local proliferation of bare-bones, but very functional, black-painted oblong rooms with sound systems and low scaffold-based stages.
The venue for Friday was the Moor Brewery, which is gradually becoming a personal favourite, thanks to the stainless-steel vats adding a surprising level of atmosphere. For Saturday, things moved to Strange Brew, which is building a reputation for its imaginative programming and sound quality. Everything concluded with an after-party at the Gryphon, a deservedly respected stalwart of grassroots metal. The ability to keep underground and non-populist art coming to town is a massive positive of such multi-venue collaborations.
Making a full weekend ticket extremely reasonable at £50 for a lineup of more than 20 acts made it easy to take a chance on a program of mostly unrecognizable names and to forgo any pre-listening or investigation. In an increasingly predictable age where precarity makes people prone to refusing the slightest risk, it’s nice to welcome the potential for surprise and pleasing to report back on so many joys.
From the start, there are no prisoners taken: Conqueror Worm and Puddle Brain are a teeth-rattling first hour, followed by the righteous fury of Traidora and power electronics from Knifedoutofexistence whose live force is very different from his studio recordings, which have been keeping me enthralled over the past few days.
Omar Raja of death metal band Obnoxious Concoction wins the weekend’s award for crowd banter. In his finest crepuscular growl, he amused everyone with song intros like, “This is about the supreme evil… of not paying your TV license,” or “This song is dedicated to the vile demon that goes by the name… Microplastics.”
HORSEBASTARD then took the stage, combining obvious instrumental prowess with Liverpudlian everyman charm, a blast of riffs and ripping drums while the group’s frontman surged into the crowd, surfed over the top, or crawled through it! There was still time for Aja Ireland to bring high-energy industrial party vibes to the stage. Ireland carries herself with a lightness that could lead people to underestimate her, but based on the set here, she creates intensely detailed and refined noise, indeed, hugely skilled work.
The egalitarian decision to give each artist 30 to 40 minutes benefits the momentum. Every set is whittled down for maximum impact, gripping you from start to finish. Each one leaves the audience sated yet thirsty for more; no filler-stuffed multi-hour stints, no contractually obligated superstar bloat or sag.
Saturday starts with Dead Name and Victim Unit, the energy-boosting equivalent of a morning ginger shot, buoying the audience up before noise tag-team No Disc overwhelms the senses with a dense layer of sound. That sets the tone for the rest of the day, back and forth between the venue’s two spaces, often moving from rock music on the main stage to noise in the back room.
Gorgon Vomit might be imposing – having two six-foot-four face-painted giants in a group will do that – but the band members are a visible and cheerfully gregarious presence throughout the festival. Musically, their sound is a relentlessly rhythmic, yet varied attack that keeps a mosh pit swirling and heads banging.
A festival highlight follows, with Zbigniew Chojnacki performing on the “noise accordion”. From a seated position with a bulky accordion on one knee, Chojnacki frog-hops between pedals creating a surprisingly beat-filled mix, which makes it all the more joyous when he allows his instrument to show its range, blending in frantic polkas or moments where the accordion whines like a descending legion of dread angels warping the very sky.
Then we’re back to the main stage for Matrak Attakk, a crustcore group, who provide an off-the-cuff and beautifully performed a cappella of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. Then the drummer dashes off stage for a quick pee, a relaxed opening to what evolves into a fun outing with thoughtful, sweet song introductions.
Lithuania’s Mirusi Mergina is another very talented sound designer who captivates the eye and mind with a weave of drones, synthesizers, noise, and vocals. I don’t even know if this density of production, let alone the skills to create something coherent from all these elements, was even possible 20 years ago. Each generation built on the challenges laid down by those who came before.
You know it’s a great little festival when the thick and heavy motion of Slimelord, a death metal band, counts as a calming change of pace, the audience locking into some deep eyes-to-the-ground headbanging.
Swartvit then offers something I haven’t seen in many years: an act that genuinely jolts the audience beyond entertainment. Initially, it’s just music from somewhere in the power electronics realm. He clips two-inch-long mics to the sides of his mouth and proceeds to tamper with the sound of him attempting to swallow his own hand, choking and gagging, even trying to swallow the mics themselves, spitting up a huge sparkling gout of bile into the crowd. It was confrontational, a little shocking, revolting… and brilliant. I laughed with surprise.
There’s a wisely scheduled ‘tea break’ in the official lineup, ensuring that everyone gets a chance to eat – such an intelligent choice, there’s not one booze casualty or spoiled moment at the Monochrome Festival. One meal later and we’re back shaking up our digestive tracts with some ADHD dancefloor awesomeness from Petronn Sphene. I think this might be the nearest humanity has come to imagining the otherworldly sound of alien life; I kept thinking multiple wrecked tracks of BBC Radiophonic Workshop Dr Who themes were piling up all at once – I mean that as a compliment.
Black Curse offer up something akin to being beset by a swarm of bees on a pitch-black night amid heavy rain, a beautiful burring darkness, and guitar leads like lightning. Wolf Eyes make something that feels genuinely sick, each beat allowed space to detonate then reverberate to its end amid a churning fug of high-pitched tones and stomach-deep rumbles, even some ‘noise mouth organ’ and actual songs too, eerie little haikus like “Lawnmower Man”.
The energy roars back up with Concrete Winds, a two-guitar metal group with so much palm-muted action you don’t even notice the absence of a bass guitar. It’s metal and it’s fun and finest, an appropriate final curtain before we move to the after-party. Sevenyearwaitinglist provide a blizzard of cybergrind, amusing sound samples, a crowd-pleasingly warped rendition of “Teenage Dirtbag” and a lot of laughter-inducing silliness. A perfect mini-festival weekend and so many reasons for hope in these strange times: the youth ARE alright.