Photo credit /
Steve Turvey - Lead, Grass
Lara Maysa - Sudan Archives
Giles Smith - Erykah Badu, People Just Do Nothing, Swing
Danny Seaton - Objekt & Batu, Daniel Avery, Camcorder
Carolina Faruolo - Fever Ray, Crowdsurfing
Joshua Atkins - Scarf, Race
Field Day 2018: Five key performances
- PublishedJun 5, 2018
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- On June 2nd, 1892, Brockwell Park in South London was opened to the public. The day didn't go smoothly. At the unveiling, Thomas Lynn Bristowe, the local conservative MP, died of a heart attack on the steps of Brockwell Hall, the building for whose renovation he'd long been campaigning to raise funds. Almost exactly 126 years later, the London festival Field Day had its own unveiling in Brockwell Park. It'd spent the last 11 years in Victoria Park in East London, but, along with Lovebox, was forced to find a new home after AEG and its subsidiary Goldenvoice, who run Coachella, secured the rights to the site and started All Points East, which took place at the end of May with a backdrop of brand activations and massive headliners. Needless to say, the festival market in London is in flux.
On Friday evening at Field Day, it seemed like the enforced move had turned out OK. The sun was shining, people were generally relaxed (despite the temporary Europe-wide Visa meltdown) and the music programming fit the mood. The site was more compact than the sprawling Victoria Park, but relative to the number of people who were there things were comfortable. Getting off the tube at Brixton on Saturday afternoon, the foot traffic leading to Brockwell Park showed that the site was going to be under much more strain for the festival's second day. I didn't notice any obvious problems unfolding, but later in the afternoon word got around that The Barn, the enormous structure that in 2017 hosted Aphex Twin, was suffering from overcrowding. (Only around half the venue was in use this year.) The main stage's closure around 9 PM put extra pressure on The Barn, and a decision was made to temporarily stop Four Tet's set in order to disperse the crowd. It was concerning to see words like "dangerous" and "scary" used by festivalgoers in the Twitter post-mortem. There were many great moments throughout the weekend, but it's clear that if Field Day returns to Brockwell Park in 2019, some big changes will need to be made.
Here are five key performances from across the weekend.
Sudan Archives The smaller site meant some sound bleed between stages. The kick drum from NAO's performance on the main stage rattled through the nearby Moth Club tent, where the US artist Sudan Archives was gradually bringing her Friday evening set to life. A less engaging performer might have lost some of the crowd. Dressed in dazzling orange shorts and a top, she casually and confidently occupied the stage, playing an impressive range of instruments and singing with emotion and control. The audience responded particularly well to the violin, which she plays in a Sudanese-influenced style over tracks at the intersection of R&B, hip-hop and house. Violin lines were performed and looped through a Roland sampler, which she also used to smash up beat patterns. There was a constant collision of contemporary and classic. Her set climaxed and finished with the fantastic "Come Meh Way," its shrill violin line representing in a single sound why Sudan Archives is unique.
Erykah Badu Erykah Badu defies categorisation and her headline performance on Friday night was suitably idiosyncratic. She arrived onstage at her own pace, wearing a comically oversized green coat and towering sun hat from which flowed billowing hair. For the first seven minutes not much happened. Then, suddenly, she began playing two drum machines at the same time and incanting the word "rain" repeatedly. Her band launched into 1996's breakthrough hit, "On & On," though the live rendition was radically different from the studio version. It included sections from Mobb Deep's hip-hop classic "Shook Ones (Part II)" and "... & On" from Badu's second album, Mama's Gun. This mazy performance style continued throughout to create several blink-and-you'll-miss-it medleys. This gave the set a real party atmosphere. On top of that, Badu dished out some of the strangest crowd banter you're likely to hear. She hyped the crowd, praised the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians and discussed the iconography of the human reproductive system. "Next Lifetime" had couples sweetly embracing in a way you rarely see during a headline performance. But all too quickly, she had run out of time, with officials backstage gesturing to cut the music. Field Day's new location came with tight regulations that even soul divas had to adhere to. This was a shame—it felt like she could have gone on for hours.
Objekt b2b Batu As an artist, does it damage morale when a tent clears at the start of your set? That's what Objekt and Batu were faced with after Ross From Friends played to a packed Resident Advisor stage early on Saturday afternoon. If they were phased by it, the two UK DJs didn't show it. They patiently rebuilt the audience across their 90-minute set, starting with groove-led techno and loosening up the vibe later on. You could sense them increasingly getting a handle on what worked and what didn't in such a large space. Batu dropped a track with a strong broken beat pattern and Objekt quickly followed suit, perhaps realising that subtler music wasn't translating. Dynamite's "Brave," DJ Sliink & Sinjin Hawke's "Raw" and what sounded like a Vybz Kartel tune marked a particularly fun flurry. We got a couple of ravey '90s bangers—Acid Jesus's "Faith In Acid" and CJ Bolland's "Camargue"—to finish, as Objekt and Batu stepped back from the CDJs and looked out at a dance floor that was in a much better place than when they found it.
DJ Seinfeld DJ Seinfeld is having a moment. His profile as a touring DJ exploded last year, when he played 16 times as many events as he did in 2016. Now a seriously in-demand act, his online following, fostered on YouTube and Reddit, is now making its presence felt IRL. Field Day wasn't an especially youthful event, but it seemed like everyone below the age of 22 had crammed into the Bugged Out tent to catch the Swede. It was by far the busiest I saw that space all weekend. Seinfeld brings a youthful enthusiasm to classic house. There was nothing revolutionary in the make-up of his set—distorted four-to-the-floor kick drums, hip-hop samples, disco a cappellas and Italo disco riffs—but they were delivered with an undeniable charisma. It's worth saying that the sound was far from ideal, even if nobody seemed to care. As his set entered its final moments, he dropped Frankie Knuckles' 1986 classic "Your Love" to huge cheers. Seinfeld is making house music, a genre more than 30 years old, sound fresh to a new audience. That's something to be celebrated.
Fever Ray It's worth looking back over some videos of Karin Dreijer performing as Fever Ray in 2009, when she released the project's first album. The record, its songs and the live shows were draped all in black, Dreijer's gothic persona often obscured by cloaks and hoods. The contrast between then and now is striking. Her closing set at the Crack stage on Saturday night was a brilliantly colourful celebration of queerness, sex, femininity and getting down on a dance floor. The stage design by Sarah Landau framed the all-women performers with bars of vivid light, which was matched by the vitality of the characters—apparently an eco-warrior, a body builder, an anarchic scientist, a fashion hag and dumpster diver—onstage. From the middle of the vast space, it was difficult to tell where Dreijer was and who was performing. The role of "front person" was constantly interchanging, a seeming riposte to the ingrained dynamics of concert performances and an act of subterfuge that was in keeping with the Fever Ray project and Dreijer's work as one half of The Knife. Tracks from Plunge, her recently released new record, like "Wanna Sip," "Mustn't Hurry," "IDK About You" and "To The Moon And Back" all sounded excellent; like Erykah Badu the night before, the set was a powerfully alternative way to close out a festival.
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