- Belgrade is better if you're not a vegetarian. That said, there is no lack of choice, as long as you don't mind it: The types of meat that most Serbians will eat on a weekly basis seems to be voluminous if my five day sojourn in Belgrade is any indication. The same goes for musical appetites during the city's annual Dis-patch Festival: While the tenor is resolutely experimental throughout, the shape that those experiments take is often radically different.
The two week-long festival in Belgrade had one current running throughout—most animals taste like chicken, you see—and that was Vladislav Delay, who was the "artist in focus" and spent the entirety of the festival performing work under his myriad aliases, recording work under a new one and basically becoming a fixture in the city. Despite missing an installation under his own name, a collaboration with >his girlfriend (as AGF/Delay), another collaboration ("artist in residence") Lillevan and a solo performance as Uusitalo, I was able to see him perform (again) with Lillevan and, in what was one of the most striking performances of the festival, with the Vladislav Delay Quartet.
Photo credit: Luka Strika Knezevic
Credit for the striking nature of the Quartet, though, is owed just as much to the trio of musicians around him, especially Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio, who displayed a softer side to his personality, acquitting himself ably to the improvised music by inserting light electronic touches that meshed perfectly with the bass, percussion and trombone elsewhere on the stage. Indeed, coupled with a powerful solo performance and a Pan Sonic gig that built from tentative beginnings to a thrillingly unhinged finale, Vainio was perhaps the festival's (second-half) superstar.
It's to Dis-patch's credit that it's able to allow audiences to see artists such as Delay and Vainio in a variety of different formations, highlighting the fact the remarkable possibilities that emerge when someone is allowed the latitude to indulge in different facets of their musical personalities. That said, even the artist who only had once chance to perform shined as well: Kode9's DJ set at Grad was yet another masterful performance from one of the dubstep's most relentlessly forward-looking acts. And he came after Byetone and T++ had already ripped the roof off the cavernous venue. It's hard to overstate how much Byetone's dance floor-oriented set now resembles a Nine Inch Nails show sans the rock theatrics, and how mind-bending T++'s live performance were.
Photo credit: Luka Strika Knezevic
Local talents, meanwhile, were hit-and-miss: Wo0's dreamy drones were a suitable lead-in to the Vladislav Delay Quartet earlier on in the night, but Grad featured a Serbian journalist, k.o.f.y., who performed in blackface. Word has it that he's quite smart about the whole thing and, considering Tito's strong ties to African nations during the '60s, it seems like there's a stronger affinity between Serbia and Africa than you might expect. But the soundsystem left his vocals frustratingly hard to hear, aside from some jokey toasting about his high-speed internet connection. That, coupled with the wonky and populist hip-hop of Felony Flats, made for an odd lead-in to T++, but as someone told me later that night, "It's Belgrade. Just go with it."
That advice was good for the entire five days, actually. Belgrade is a city where few people buy records at record stores. Instead, most music is consumed via the internet. Which means that the tastes of most of the people that I met ranged wildly, at home with the white noise symphonies of Pan Sonic as they were with the brief slides into mid-'90s hip-hop made by Felony Flats. It's this versatility that also guides the curatorial team of Dis-patch, making it among the most interesting festivals in all of Europe.