ArcTanGent Festival 2024 – Saturday
Fernhill Farm is set in a landscape that has hosted assemblies for time immemorial. In nearby Cheddar Gorge archaeologists have found some of the oldest complete human remains in Britain – dating back 10,000 years. It is easy to imagine our ancestors congregating in these damp fields after a day of hunting and gathering, warming themselves by the fire. And after catering to their most immediate needs, they would have set about satisfying their creative urges.
Even among the earliest recorded human artefacts, there are items that serve not just a utilitarian, but also an artistic purpose. The desire to express one’s aesthetic instincts and to consume the creative output of others seems to be a universal trait of humanity – whether it be poetry, drawing, painting, basket-weaving or artistic swimming. In the musical performances at ArcTanGent, 10,000 lucky people gather to enjoy a shared creative experience that nourishes our very sense of what it is to be human, that reaches deep into primeval needs that serve no evolutionary purpose, except to enrich our existence.
And how better to enrich one’s existence than by experiencing Torpor at 1100? Early risers were rewarded with a stupendous performance of the band’s viscous sludge oozing invidiously out of the amplifiers of the PX3 Stage to overwhelm the happy crowd. Playing three songs from their latest release Abscission, Torpor put on the perfect morning performance.
Opening with Interior Gestures, the sheer heaviness of the bass tone shook the entrails and rattled one’s primeval needs to great satisfaction. Bellowing vocals, like the enraged roar of a hunted aurochs, issued forth as the music progressed – mercilessly pummelled ever forwards by the intense and accomplished drumming. There were quieter, more contemplative moments as well, when the music slowly fell away, leaving only the mournful keening of the guitar, before resurging in an unstoppable cacophony of drums, bass and hollering. Torpor closed their set with Island Of Abandonment, sending hordes of gleeful festival-goers to enjoy the rest of their days – and challenging them to find any performance of similar quality and punch.
Not every band, of course, rises to this challenge and we must also account for the rich and varied nature of the musical offerings at ATG, knowing that not all of them will be our cup of tea. But there are only so many times that one can write ‘this wasn’t to my taste’, or ‘this might be suitable for the recently lobotomised’. As critics, while not seeking to deride the enormous effort from the organisers, bands and associated parties that goes into the festival, there are times when venting one’s spleen about a particularly meritless performance feels apt.
Thus begins the SnarkTanGent section of the review. Bands will remain anonymous to protect feelings. There was the emo-adjacent whining trash. There were multiple post-rock outfits who chose to ignore Ian’s Theory of Post-Rock (see Friday’s Review) and took the path of shoegaze inadequacy, rather than metal-infused righteousness. There was a band whose electronic pop set sucked happiness out of all those in its orbit and left them bereft at the hopelessness of life in this vast universe. The bands peddling tired hits from 20 years ago with the all the faded charm of syphilis and goitre. And the instrumental post-everything band with a singer whose main stage performance featured a grating trumpet.
OK – the last one is obviously [REDACTED], but we think that they can probably take the criticism on the chin and comfort themselves with their tens of thousands of Spotify listeners and apparently complete domination of the merch market. And members of the band did remark to one of us on the way home from a DVNE gig that ‘post-metal is dead’, so best for them to focus on keeping the show on the road while the corpse is still warm. Our advice to them: just play your good songs (of which there are several), and not the bad ones.
Fortunately for us (and The Shaman’s libel lawyers), we can affirm that Briqueville were a wholly enjoyable experience. Having borrowed some robes from compatriots Wyatt E. they presented themselves on stage looking like a particularly malevolent murder of crows. Briqueville set about creating an atmosphere of creeping dread with slow, repetitive build-ups that broke into intense outbursts of cacophonous guitars, synth, growling, wailing and despair. Akte XVIII was a particular highlight, and the catchy hook from Akte XII is a verified earworm.
Love Sex Machine were a more boisterous affair – providing a superb travel-sized set of three to four minute explosions of sludgy, groovy post-metal that they worked through with no great ceremony. There was no whipping up of the crowd or histrionic demands that the audience imperil their joints by creating death pits – just straightforward, in your face performances of blistering metal delivered with aplomb and nonchalance.
KEN mode provided a jagged and discordant approach to their noisy hardcore – enlisting the shriek of a saxophone in the pursuit of their fast-paced, jagged performance. With the chaotic energy of a caffeinated toddler, KEN mode certainly got the crowd moving, but by this point we were after something slightly more sedate, so we pottered over to Stuart Braithwaite’s side project, Silver Moth. We caught the final strains of Elisabeth Elektra’s delicately mournful voice on Sedna, followed by Hello Doom. The latter uses the same refrain as Mogwai’s My Father My King (which sadly has not been played live yet this year and would not feature in Mogwai’s later performance) but is a gentler affair that melds wonderfully with Evie’s vocals.
Pijn proved that, along with Torpor and Hundred Year Old Man, the UK scene is truly blessed with some incredibly talented musicians. Opening with Our Endless Hours from their new album From Low Beams of Hope, they crafted an exquisite tapestry of delicate guitar, lamenting cello and maestro percussion with occasional snippets of northern-accented poetry. The song drew the listener in and then faded to quietness, before erupting in a joyful frolic of powerful guitar riffs and soaring strings that tugged at the emotions.
More was to come in the form of Carved Expanse, where a mid-section of glowering guitar and choppy riffs enraptured the audience before fading to the gentle thrumming. Pijn also played the punchier Denial from debut album ‘Loss’ and concluded with ‘On the Far Side of Morning’ to the acclaim of the gathered masses, who went out into the fields of ATG knowing that they had been sanctified by the benevolence of this band’s supremely accomplished performance.
Next up were some bands that, for legal and ethical reasons, cannot be described further (see SnarkTanGent section above), before Slift provided an ecstatic show of vigorous heavy psych that got the audience jumping with unbridled glee. More grooves than a corrugated tin roof rained down from the stage as the French rockers fizzed and popped their way through a set of songs from recent release Ilion and some choice cuts from 2020’s brilliant Ummon. The atmosphere was utterly euphoric and probably makes the case for more psych to be on offer at ATG – Slift being the only band that we noted that fell into this category. The sheer bacchanalian energy they provided (S)lifted spirits for the final set of the day – Mogwai closing the festival on the Main Stage.
Mogwai opened their 90-minute set with a parade of softer, gentler songs from their extensive back catalogue, opening with To The Bin My Friend, Tonight We Vacate Earth, followed by I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead. The band took a while to hit their stride, with their performance of Hunted By A Freak not quite meeting the usual high expectations created by the opening strains of this fantastic number. But Drive The Nail saw them accelerate the pace and increase the volume, and Like Herod demonstrated that they are no slouches when it comes to pumping out cranium crushing riffs.
Newly invigorated, the crowd pranced merrily to Remurdered and were finally treated to the sheer magnitude of closing song We’re No Here. Then, twelve hours after the day had begun with Torpor, ArcTanGent was finished for 2024 – and what an experience it was. An overwhelmingly positive four-day event, the festival is a fantastic fixture in the heavy music calendar and we wholeheartedly recommend attending – not least cos it would be a sin not to.
