OFFF Festival, Lisbon, Portugal - May 7th-9th 2009
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Venue: Oeiras, Portugal
Date: 7-9 May 2009
Soundscaping recently visited Lisbon, Portugal. Our main goal with the trip was this year’s OFFF festival, a festival dedicated to digital art and design as well as electronic music. This year’s OFFF festival was held in Oeiras, a small suburban town to Lisbon which this year commemorated its 250th anniversary. In previous years, OFFF, a Barcelona-run organization, has been held both at various venues both in Barcelona, Valencia, New York and as of last year it homed in on Lisbon. This year, this successful formula was repeated and with a spacious, warehouse-location in the Fundição de Oeiras, the OFFF festival felt immediately like it had its own distinct character, something more underground and like a hybrid of possibly the big brother in Catalunya, Soñar, with its day-time venue in MACBA and night-time venue in a huge expo park.
Lisbon is a lovely city; a port town very much facing the Atlantic ocean instead of the mainland of Europe, with monuments to honour the great seafarers like the one found in Belém (also famous for its shop selling port wine and home-made cinnamon-topped cream pastries, mmmm!) and other buildings again financed through funds that have come from trade travels, like the Jerominos monastary built from pepper. Lisbon is furthermore a lovely city with narrow and steep streets, tile-clad walls of buildings in colours influenced by the sea, sky and sun. But we digress, but feel we should do justice to the underground-feeling of Lisbon and naturally its great location for an festival celebrating digital art & music and culture.
For 2009, the OFFF festival’s musical contribution came almost solely from Raster Noton. This is a two-edged sword. The label can present the artists they prefer, can form the sets to accommodate the performers and so forth. But if the music that is played is hard to destinguish, and if the performances are very similar, then the inevitable backlash of monotony kicks in. Unfortunately we experienced both the good and the bad side at Oerias, but luckily the ending performances of both the Thursday and Friday nights hailed from outside the Raster-Noton camp; but with peers like Vladislav Delay and Fennesz drawing a bigger audience than the general crowd, possibly due to the fact some graphics designer from the OFFF seminars and talks being more familiar with the latter artists, at least one should say Fennesz.
The Raster-Noton roster consisted of Nibo, Frank Bretschneider, Atom tm, Senking, Pixel, Kangding Ray, Coh [pronounced: Shan], Pomassl, SND, Alva Noto, Byetone and Signal. But the programme also contained other music names, as well as some installations, among which was the exciting pyro-motion-sound performance by Rudolfo Quintas – whos lighters triggered sensors that resultingly blurted out washes of static noise – more interactive and a different visual performance where music and rhythm was not necessarily present in large quantities but nonetheless sound was produced and arranged in patterns.
From these Raster-Noton artists, however, Signal was one that stood out, naturally as the trio of Bretschneider, Nicolai and Bender joined forces. Soundscaping also liked the sets by Kangding Ray – a set which transgresses the minimal and machinistic of Raster-Noton fame with traces of traditional instruments and the introduction of vocals. SND – despite someone pulling the power plug on the visuals – also put on a great performance with scattered rhythms that evolved into interesting textures of sound, and we also had a great time interviewing the very hospitable Mark Fell and Matt Steel. Signal was the last of the raster artists on stage, in fact, Signal was the last artist at OFFF. After witnessing the full scale of raster-noton, Signal was a good way to end the auditive onslaught from Mittel Europa.
For lots of pictures from the live performances, visit Soundscaping on flickr
For more information about the OFFF festival, visit the official OFFF website
