The Meoko-team went to LEAF (London Electronic Arts Festival) on Friday to attend the LEAF conversations and concerts at the infamous Tobacco Dock. In the late morning we walked into this stunning venue… Coffee in hand, we scouted the place and checked out what the event had scheduled for the day. Four rooms were reserved for talks about a variety of subjects related to electronic music.
While multiple Grammy award winning artist Nile Rodgers already started his appearance in the biggest room, we decided to go to a much smaller room where Pip Rush and Bertie Cole from Arcadia held their talk about their amazing trip around the world.
Arcadia is the name of their company, which excels in building gargantuan constructions. For a big festival, these constructions give an added value to the crowd, music and atmosphere. Bertie and Pip grew up in the countryside where they started building iron constructions. They never had an engineering degree, but with a lot of passion they turned their hobby into work. They came up with most of their ideas by wandering around on scrapyards and they built their amazing constructions together with their friends. You could catch these guys on several festivals in the UK such as Glastonbury with their iron and fire-breathing spider. They even transported the whole construction to Thailand.
The mechanical and fire-breathing spider constructions, which they took on a tour last year, left a big impression on the festivalgoers. The purpose of Arcadia is to create a spectacle where the sound and vision collaborates together, so the crowd can enjoy a huge spectacle.
Next up in ‘The Wapping Room’ we went to a talk hosted by Joe Muggs, who works for Fact Magazine and Boiler Room, about the revival of ambient music. Four musicians were seated in the panel - Mr. Mitch, Mixmaster Morris, Mira Calix and Mica Levi (Micachu). These musicians have all been busy making music without beats. The discussion was more or less about the ambient music in the past in comparison with today. It was remarkable for the panel that ambient music becomes more popular in times of uncertainty, such as in the end of the seventies and nowadays. Today more and more ‘beatless’ music is being made, which made the panel fantasize about a proper chill room in a club, with a DJ playing ambient music, just as it was back in the days. However today, promoters want their audience on the dance floor and not in the chill-out room.
After we ate something, we decided to watch the 1990 film ‘A Short Film About Chilling’. This 30-minute movie features the guys from 808 State, Peter Hooton who is the vocalist of The Farm, DJ Terry Farley and other English musicians. The movie shows the dance music culture on the island right before Ibiza exploded into the mainstream. It gives a nice view on how things were 25 years ago on the island. It looked more authentic than it is now. But overall it didn’t really change. Sex, drugs and dance music is still a conventional slogan for the island, only in the nineties it became busier than ever before.
Moving on, we headed to the Pennington Room, where there was a talk being held about drugs. A recent documentary on BBC tackled the sensitive topic of drug usage and distribution in the UK. They featured Professor Fiona Measham, who is committed to helping those that go out to party and who are under influence of drugs. She pleads for the testing of drugs at a lab or at a party. This way people would be familiar with the substances that are mixed in the drugs, which would definitely help partygoers all over the world. It was mentioned that drug testing would reduce the amount of deaths due to overdose. Most open-minded party people would think this is a great solution. After all the ‘war on drugs’ has failed. There are more drugs available than ever before and punishing the drug users hasn’t helped people of not using it anymore. This was an animated discussion among like-minded souls. But this was also the problem of the discussion. We would like to have seen some conservative reactions from people, who are against this measure.
Ryan Keeling from Resident Advisor moderated the following conversation about techno music in London in the early nineties. Steve Bicknell and Sheree Rashit were invited to talk about their infamous ‘Lost’ parties, which shaped the techno scene in London in that period. They were the first to invite the real techno DJ’s out of the States such as Derrick May and Richie Hawtin. They did the same as many promoters of today: always looking out for new and cool venues. The only difference is that there were much more possibilities 25 years ago where there were plenty of warehouse places. Now due to gentrification it is more difficult to find a location. Further pioneering individuals Inigo Kennedy and Evil Eddie Richards spoke about their experiences as artists today.
For us this was the last conversation of the day. We really wanted to check out the interview with DJ Harvey, but the room was full, so we decided to visit the Boiler Room where Inigo Kennedy was mixing heaps of techno records followed by Evil Eddie Richards. 808 States presentation of its album ‘Ninety’ had already started and we agreed to check them out. In this amazing room with very nice visuals, we really enjoyed this concert. It really felt like a blast to the past. When Modeselektor started, we felt tired after a long and illuminating day and we decided to go home.
The day as a whole was really fascinating and LEAF seemed to be a success. Most talks were completely occupied and it lent itself to talk to likeminded people and other music enthusiasts. We had a really great day and the testimony from professor Fiona Measham about her stance on drugs was the most intriguing!
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