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Lee Fisher steps into the warmth of Boundaries Festival. Good music, good people and good vibes
Image by Lee Fisher
It’s a cold and unforgiving night out on the mean streets of Sunderland but the moment you step through the door of the mighty Pop Recs, for the first night of this year’s Boundaries Festival, things get warmer. Good people, good music, good vibes. A community, even. And it’s pleasingly rammed too, proof that organiser Grassi is doing something brilliant here.
First up on a madly diverse bill is Glasgow’s Alex Mackay, a solo electronics artist who also plays with the touring incarnation of Mogwai. The first part of his set sees him torturing a fairly simple tabletop set-up, calling up alarming synth tones and hellscape bass notes – at one point, they’re so reverberant his mixing desk threatens to vibrate off the table. This is the good shit, the stuff you feel in your organs, the stuff that makes your eyeballs vibrate. For the latter part of the set he produces a guitar and indulges in some reverb-drenched, Sunn O)))- style amplifier worship and I’ve never been so glad to have sorted out my Musicians Union-approved earplugs.
The Unit Ama continued to be one of the most thrilling and essential bands around, and it’s a mystery why they’re not looking bashful and awkward on the cover of The Wire at least twice a year. The Tyneside-ish trio are post-everything – post-hardcore, post-jazz, post-folk, post-genre – and whatever it is we’re calling what they do, there’s nobody better at it. Christian and Jason’s rhythm section is fluid and finessed, capable of amazing subtlety but entirely comfortable throwing it down too; Steve’s guitar takes elements of all his ventures – Stem, Horse Loom and the rest – and creates something fresh and innovative every damn time. The Unit Ama rock.
Arriving at Boundaries riding on the wave of acclaim that greeted his little knee bob in the video for Hen Ogledd’s Scales Will Fall (imagine Serena Williams’ crip walk at Wimbledon, but in a pagan panto costume), Rhodri Davies gives us a particularly vital set this evening. Using the small, simple harp which seems to be his main instrument these days, he works through a series of short, fiery pieces, perhaps heavier on rhythm and percussive qualities than usual, with clanging riffs underneath the cascades of notes. There are hints of kora and early classical, but everything is challenged or dismantled, everything explodes in hums and harmonics. Davies rests his forehead on the harp’s frame between pieces, communing and connecting, before launching off into another puzzle made of strings and wood.
The vagaries of the public transport system mean I had to miss most of Aja Ireland’s set but I was fine with that: I’ve seen it before (literally and more generally). Marrying Torture Garden x Cyberpunk post-human imagery to huge industrial rave stabs and punishing beats has its place and I’m sure it’s impressive – even transgressive – the first time you encounter it, but it felt a bit dated for me. But then I’m very old. Still, people seemed into it and it was a shame to leave the warm, lovely Boundaries / Pop Recs vibe for the cold hard Sunderland wind.
