- Day three of Coachella is sort of like the end of the Vietnam War. Morale is low, the mission is unclear, there's unrest on the home front, the drugs are rampant, dudes are starting to frag their commanders. Shit gets all confusingly sinister and Heart of Darkness real quick.
Enter Supermayer, the ambiguously rad duo of Superpitcher and Michael Mayer. Two well-known Teutonic mixologists in their own right, these dudes are known to get silly when you get them together, as evidenced by 2007's (wack? awesome? both?) effort, Save the World. And to be fair, they were fighting an uphill battle. The crowd was shifty, small and exhausted and probably didn't have any idea who they are, why Kompakt has a lot of Ks in it or where the fuck Cologne even is.
Photo credit: Andy Vermeulen
That said, Supermayer was playing goddamn melodica. Come on, comrades, our patience is a little threadbare. Thankfully, they soon eased into an unambitious but feel-good collection of sun-bleached soundscapes. Keeping it mellow and downtempo was probably the right call. A few die-hard technoheads managed to throw a couple lazy shapes in the church of trance, but most folks ended up ass-in-the-grass for a good headnod to the beats, most of which never ventured north of 120 bpm.
Interlude: there was a weird abortive DJ set-cum-spoken word rant from corporate brandjammer-turned-corporate brandwhore Shepard Fairey. He talked some crap about using t-shirt design to subvert the public space, yada yada yada, threw a bunch of Obey Giant stickers into the crowd, bragged about getting in trouble with Boston's finest and then mixed some Clash tunes. Pffff, what the hell was Fairey even doing at a music festival?
Photo credit: Andy Vermeulen
As was the theme of the weekend, the subtle and contemplative got curb-kicked by the loud and raunchy. Supermayer's set got upstaged by king-of-all-French-douchebags Pedro Winter, AKA Busy P, owner/manager of Ed Banger Records. Don't get me wrong, I heart me some Daft Punk as much as the next guy, but Busy P, for all his boom and bluster, missed the obvious point that the previous DJs understood: You can't keep us jumping all the time, man, we're tired.
Conversely, the highlight was the very wise and very significant move of turning the already danceable "My Girls" off of Animal Collective's fresh opus Merriweather Post Pavilion into a fully arpeggiated bass-bumping world-beater. DIY folktronic and French Touch have a lot in common, I just never noticed it before. Pedro for president.
Photo credit: Andy Vermeulen
Almost unnoticeably, Pedro handed the ones-and-twos off to Patrick Bodmer and Phillipp Young, who—unless you stumbled onto this website by Google accident—you know as M.A.N.D.Y. And the subtle transfer was appropriate...who could say where the Ed Banger wailing funk guitar ended and the Get Physical tech-house whistle-distortion began? Mainly, I suspect the crowd was slightly less mobile and slightly better looking. (Aside: Some people are gorgeous. Some people are weird looking. And some lucky bastards are gorgeous and weird looking. These people are all Coachella techno fans and look like they are from some sort of post-apocalyptic modeling agency and I hate them.) As for the M.A.N.D.Y. set, I was almost catatonic at that time. I remember it being good 'n loud, but I am so out of insightful things to say about house music by now that I'll just leave it there.
Add a devastatingly brave and earnest selection of songs by Antony and the Johnsons doing a sort of sampler + cello chamber pop routine that brought tears to my thankfully sunglasses-covered eyes, and that about sums up Coachella. Antony radiated sorrow and wisdom and world-weary kindness and incidentally, he looks exactly like my Aunt Cheryl, who radiates those things too. I bailed during My Bloody Valentine's deafeningly meticulous reproduction of Loveless's deafening bar chords and missed The Cure. Which in and of itself was an instant cure for both the crippling exhaustion that is three days of techno and for the embarrassing sadness that is watching a rotund, rat-dreaded, middle-aged Robert Smith don the makeup and struggle through "Pictures of You" for the trillionth time. It was better for both of us.
Read the RA review: Coachella 2009 - Day 1
Read the RA review: Coachella 2009 - Day 2