Sugar Mountain Festival
Forum Theatre, Melbourne
Saturday, 14 February 2012

In a summer festival schedule that clusters around a very limited range of names and sounds, Sugar Mountain is a thing of wonder. Here, in one place, is the full set of weirdo bands that play early slots and forgotten stages at the bigger festivals. Here, those bands otherwise doomed to be names in 14pt font, filling out the A1 posters, are put in the spotlight. Mercifully, there wasn’t a single 90s reunion band on the bill. Instead, the organisers have charged on with their imperative: strong willed performers flirting at the edges where “accessibility” meets “experimental.” With lessons learned from last year’s hit-and-miss first attempt, this year’s event was remarkable for running to schedule and easy movement between the three stages. (And then, right when everything seemed as perfect as could be—the toilets backed up, just before the headliners went onstage. Mass panic was avoided.) Given the mundanity of the festival circuit these days, reduced to a “lifestyle” depicted in soft drink commercials, Sugar Mountain seems with this year’s success to have established itself as a place where a certain aesthetic seriousness and artistic autonomy can exist.

John Maus is the embodiment of this ethos. Playing an early slot, Maus performed his consciously hysterical karaoke versions of his songs. As Mr. Prescott wrote on this site last week, Maus pummels the audience with a “clipping vortex of groans and cries.” Bending down to his mp3 player, Maus skips from one song to the next without waiting for the track to end: pleasurable fade outs and wistful closing passages are not on offer. Instead, we are offered the brute “necessities” of the show. Chorus, verse, chorus. Next! This is a striking anti-spectacle. Maus offers gestures of the rock’n’roll performer but pushes them much too far. Pleasure comes out the other side as pain. He mouths the words “I love you” to the audience repeatedly, his face contorting with mock sincerity until it becomes an angry sneer. In Maus’s live performance, as opposed to the pleasures of mid-fi pop on his records, pop seems to be a kind of narcissistic desperation, a plea for connection and identification. How the audience reacts to this confrontation is where the action takes place. Many stare on, dumbfounded—particularly at an event like this, where full knowledge of Maus and his philosophy of performance was not to be expected of everyone in attendance. Others, trying to show their love for these catchy tunes, cheered and danced their way through his set. But dancing didn’t seem quite the right response to Maus’s challenge. It was like saying “yes” to a question with multiple options.

At the end of Maus’s short but intense set, the drift was upstairs to the smaller stages. Absolute Boys played their alternately reverberant and precise post-punk to a full and very appreciative cinema. They have been kicking around Melbourne for a while now, with a series of popular singles seized upon by scene devotees, although their debut album is not out until later this year. Rather than the caricature of rigidity now offered by most post-punk inspired acts, Absolute Boys slide around their grooves. The reggae and dub inspirations of bands like PiL were here resorted to their position, while a fairly pop approach to vocals reconciled the 80s punk edge to some of their onetime foes in smoother outfits like Talk Talk and Peter Gabriel. The enormity of the cinema suited their songs, even if the guitar work often defaulted into atmospherics over melody.

On the mezzanine, Sydney’s perfectly named Straight Arrows were playing garage rock numbers to an audience jammed tight against the stage. It was difficult to see anything other than the lighting rig and the wedged audience made the floor-level speakers somewhat muffled. In my mind, we drifted past to a clamour of treble and jangling strings—before deciding to carry on downwards. Downstairs, in the main theatre again, another local band was proving their stuff in a big venue. World’s End Press were the night’s best “big stage” performers, for my money. They bounced around the vast Forum Theatre stage like it was their rehearsal space. Their enormous, baggy dance-pop songs seemed calibrated to tear up a venue of this size. The timeslot was a little too early—and some of the songs still too new—to get the entire audience onside and dancing, but all the signs were there of a return to the Forum soon. If it carries on like this, it is probably not premature to call them the next Cut Copy: NME seems to have them tipped for this, which seems like either the kiss of death or a portent of their fate.

In the cinema, around the same time, an entirely different performance was underway. Julianna Barwick loops her voice over blurry, blunted beats and repetitive keyboard notes. The usual word for this is “ethereal,” although Barwick often undercuts a too-easy coasting on “atmos” by overlaying dissonant notes. Admittedly, it does sprawl into new age territory. Stood to one side of the stage behind a small keyboard, Barwick stared up at projections of macro-lensed bits of nature—and thus invited us to do the same. This was a good use of the cinema—which is one of the chief venues for the Melbourne International Film Festival—even if the footage seemed tenuously related to the performance.

Tune-Yards filled the Forum Theatre with her outsized voice. Arrayed either side of her were a bass player and two (!) saxophonists. There she stood, front and centre, letting fly with her catch phrases and various drums, hooked up to a loop machine. I haven’t been able to get through her LP of last year—something not connecting between her understanding of a pop hook and my own, I think. But the live show demonstrated the strength of her songs, as well as the devotion given to her by a very vocal fanbase. It was sometimes just annoying to me, but I could not deny its effect for others.

From two saxes to another, upstairs in the cinema, Californian trio Sun Araw started dripping their songs out of the PA. Dub was again in the DNA of this performance. Only here that core had been melted and become sticky, as bass bubbled up and lolled around some clattering guitars, drum machines and keyboards. As an audience member, the effect of this was a mesmerising attempt to find the precise groove the band was rocking for the majority of the set—until they would solve that mystery by locking into something simple and jam it out for a minute or two until the song’s end. It was a satisfying mix of exploratory gliding and simple gratification. Before Sugar Mountain, this is a group that had existed for me at the edge of consciousness—a name I had heard around the place without ever really investigating. For all the annoyances of festival timetables, which often mean yanking yourself out of one band’s set and arriving mid-way through the performance of another, the virtue of the pile-up is offering audiences the chance to make such finds. I have already bought Sun Araw’s past two albums. Unexpectedly, theirs was the only set I watched from (almost) start to end.

That meant missing the majority of the set by fellow Californians Thee Oh Sees—who, I noted, Sun Araw quickly rushed downstairs to see after packing up their gear. Cali pride. The back-to-back sets by Thee Oh Sees and Deerhoof were the only sets on the mainstage to, let’s say, celebrate the guitar as a rock’n’roll icon. Even in its fucked up form. Thee Oh Sees trade in a raucous, firey brand of garage rock and skewed pop, with cartoon vocals and a default 4/4 stomp. Two drummers make for double the stomp. The vocals, for me, were the weakest link of the band’s performance. Much more interesting were the instrumental passages, where weird anti-solos and strange amplifier emissions spluttered over the orthodox backing band. They bashed their way through crowdpleasers to huge applause, probably topping the night for many people.

Back up on the mezzanine level, Lost Animal suffered the only sound hiccoughs of the night (that I witnessed). A delay of around ten minutes to his set’s start meant only acolytes and devotees hung around waiting for the first song. It was an unfortunate thing to have happen, because Lost Animal’s album was one of the best local releases of last year. Rocking a type of stern Tropicalia, Jarrod Quarrell comes across like a punk Leonard Cohen in his uncelebrated 80s period. That is, the Cohen where moroseness was grafted to simpatico keyboard rhythms, 80s pop and so on. Likewise, Lost Animal sees tales of woe wedded to marimba, slowed-down keyboard drum patterns and sweeps of guitar chords. The set was undercut by a strangely muddy sound, but the performance carried across nevertheless.

Deerhoof were already well underway in the Forum Theatre by the time Lost Animal had impressed with a few songs. The band’s athletic, Pro Tools rock was impressive ten years ago, but I found it hard to get inside it at the festival. After hours of sets by bands who’ve come to maturity in the years since Deerhoof established themselves, the fidgety, deconstructed rock of these veterans felt like a throwback. Weirdly, the band seems to at once celebrate a type of anti-rock that refuses the familiar via uncommon time signatures while, in live performance, playing with a certain devotion to rock’n’roll flamboyance. John Maus had radically undermined such a performance earlier in the day. Perhaps it was the festival problem of arriving mid-set; perhaps the band had crafted a great setlist that lead up to this moment. Given the hour, there was amusement to be had in watching some boozed people try to dance to this like it was straightforward; reminiscent of seeing pilled-up people attempt to dance to Aphex Twin at Big Day Out a few years ago...

Some of the crowd seemed to head for the exit after Deerhoof’s set. Others headed upstairs to see what was going on there. This exodus combined with a subdued light show meant that Shabazz Palaces slipped onstage and into their set without it really registering. A muddy mix and the duo’s subtle approach to beatmaking didn’t help. Consequently, the first few songs seemed distinctly lacking in vibe. The group’s multi-part tracks are some of the best crafted hip-hop of recent years, but the live show wasn’t especially involving. They soon clawed it back, however. Even tracks not familiar from their popular Black Up of last year carried across, with audience response escalating as the set continued. The band and the festival closed with “Recollections of the Wraith”: a sweet R&B vocal loop over stuttering, round-bottomed kicks and the refrain “clear some space out, so we can space out.” The sentiment was a fitting way of figuring how Sugar Mountain now sits in the over-busy summer festival circuit.

Words by Ben Gook. Photos by Ian Laidlaw.