ATP Festival 8th - 10th December / intro
Some time around the start of November, I decided that I just had to make the ATP Festival - aka The Nightmare Before Christmas - curated by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. By then the whole thing was sold out and I didn’t have anyone to go with.
SY - Patrons of the arts
Rather than get into the practicalities and the exciting drama I underwent to get there, I’ve got some issues I need to work out about Sonic Youth, and I want to write a load of bullshit about this ATP festival. The line-up was mainly a comprehensive menu of the sort of noisy bands that Thurston has championed in recent years, many of which you can listen to and watch on the website of his label Ecstatic Peace. Many of these bands look like normal rock bands but specialize in creating juddering mountains of noise, and yet they seem to have been welcomed with unquestioning praise. And it’s probably all Thurston’s fault.
Because, as we all know, Sonic Youth have had this defining influence on underground rock. Not just with their music, but with their influence. All along, and with Dinosaur as the first big example, they have made friends with other bands, gone on tour with them, encouraged them and hooked them up with labels. That has always been one of the functions of Sonic Youth: they move and shake. Is it a New York art community thing? Could well be. Their major label deal with DGC around 1990 seemed to include an expectation that they would help that label snap up cool new bands. Anyway, soon after their DGC deal, they helped Nirvana get signed, and encouraged people like Pavement and Teenage Fanclub to break through. Since then they have acted as patrons to numerous bands, and the recent Ecstatic Peace deal with Universal (isn’t that a significant change in the musical landscape?) will move the focus further to the fringes of rock.
The alternative rock scene has fragmented. Free improv is now getting played with heavy rock instruments and yet it is being played and watched as if it’s rock music – that’s a lot of what the Nightmare Before Christmas is. It doesn’t work, because there are no songs. The alternative rock scene has largely followed the same trajectory as Sonic Youth itself: which means that it is now either boring rock or boring improv.