Bloc Festival 2011

So, Bloc festival 2011. Now in its 5th year and established as by far the best electronic music festival of its kind the UK has to offer. For the untainted Bloc virgins amongst you, the past few years have seen the Bloc venues housed in the creamy white domes of Minehead Butlins.This brings with it all the trappings of a surreal seaside family holiday. All 5000 guests are housed in chalets of varying luxury within the complex, and all the amenities are open as normal. This means that if you want to, you can go bowling, chuck yourself down some water flumes in the adventure park, play crazy golf, or leave the complex entirely: go for a walk on the beach, have lunch in town, whack-a-mole or pump money into a grabber machine at the seaside arcades to your heart's content. It's worth venturing out at least once, if only to see what sleepy Minehead makes of the sporadic droves of weird beings flocking up the main street, like exercise hour at a compound for sectioned nocturnal marsupials.

It's enough to make a slightly more, erm, 'seasoned' festival goer like myself never even think about camping at a festival again. Why bother when it can be this comfortable, this convenient? Not to mention, and by far most importantly, so suited to my musical tastes. All of the extra things there are to do here are overshadowed by the fact that with the terrifying amount of quality acts they cram into the weekend, you'll struggle to see everything you want to, let alone have time for anything extra-curricular. Throw in the irritatingly vital human bodily function known as 'sleep' and you've got problems. Doing a comprehensive review of every act would have required a team of sober ravers (...aaaye) scattered around the complex, so what follows are the highlights of what I was lucky enough to catch, and remember.

It's also worth mentioning at this point the sublime visuals, created depending on who was curating the stage at the time but with clearly no expense spared festival-wide. There would be something quite strange about dancing about in the (somewhat scabbily) carpeted bingo hall-esque tacky Butlins areas if it wasn't for the effort spent on the aesthetics. And, oh, the eargasmic Funktion One soundsystems. Warm and rounded, clear and defined. With a resonant frequency on the bass just on the right side of causing total body evacuation, walking up to the big sexy stacks is like being born in reverse, slipping into a welcoming amniotic aura of noise. If I'm not mistaken, it was louder this year, at least more so then the last time I came in 2009, but I still never felt the need for earplugs.



Plenty of quality dubstep early on from the Subloaded stage, with Guido and Gemmy, Pinch, Loefah and the master, Mala, if you like that sort of thing. Due to my taste for dubstep of this kind having pretty much vanished, and the presence of an MC at all times, it was far from my favourite part of the weekend. I understand the tradition of having an MC for this kind of bass driven music, its place in history with dub and jungle; the migration to dubstep seems natural but I am increasingly unable to bare having to listen to someone talking over music, when it's not an integral part and designed to work with it in unison. This was especially apparent with acts like Untold and Joy Orbison following on. Untold was playing techno (dirty and highly enjoyable techno) at points and I thought it was totally inappropriate to have someone speaking over it. Same for Joy Orbison. The guy now basically makes house music, and his impressive DJ sets rarely seem to venture out of house and garage these days. Call me a miserable old techno head; I know this is generally going to be contentious, millions will disagree; I know it's maybe a London thing, yeah? It has its place and for me it just wasn't during these later sets. Do modern ravers still need to be reminded just who the ladies and the fellas are amongst them? Kind of reminded me of last year's Outlook Festival. The Hessle Audio stage on the Sunday was marred by an MC who not only chatted shite over all their genre bending future music, but was actually reaching over and spinning the records back himself, to the apparent annoyance of the DJ. I was outraged.

That's my wee rant over, anyway.

Moving into Friday night brought the need to flit around a few of the main stages, with a few clashes in the billing calling for some difficult decisions. Rustie absolutely blasted the Numbers stage, then a wee chalet break to prepare for what turned out to be the highlight of the festival for me.

The remaining half of bass techno true creators, Mark Bell of LFO blew my fucking socks off. Revisiting LFO's back catalogue after the gig was a testament to how much the material for the set had been re-worked. The classics that tore your face off all those years ago sounded reconstructed by a factory of angry automatons. Utterly, relentlessly, clankingly brilliant.

Saturday night, and another of the acts who really injected some jack into his already cosmically funky material was Space Dimension Controller. A smooth and sonically soothing wind back into another night of cramming in as much as inhumanely possible. He's an enviably talented wee guy, and puts loads of energy into his live sets. Jumping forward a few hours, and with every intention of catching the start of Aphex Twin's DJ set, I found myself at the back of a long queue to get back into the arena. I think this is the secret of forward planning at this festival, as some of the arenas can and will reach capacity; think about who you might not be able to see if you want to, and if it's worth camping out in an arena in anticipation. I missed it, and heard mixed, but by and large positive reports afterwards. For all that he is without peer in terms of his production, I've never been blown away watching him DJ, so for me it wasn't a great loss. I went to see DJ funk for some trademark ridiculousness and (at times bordering on pretty shocking, really) bootybootybooty etc. At the end he was promoting his new single out this year, Somethingsomethingtittiestitties. Another highlight of the night was Legowelt at 6am, as charlestonjigger commented at the time felt suitably underground to make my body do things at that stage in the marathon. Riotous Test era robolectro-techno and great fun. I'm disappointed to have missed the Thursday night in that respect, with some great underground techno from the likes of Ben Pest and Jerome Hill in a worthy tribute night to Ben Bracket, as detailed here.

Crow-barred out of bed at about 8pm on the Sunday, it's a credit to the acts on the closing day that squeezed the last drops of my will to exist out of me: Lone and his delightful retro sampling rave-house, Jacques Greene and Kyle Hall, Toddla T for getting even the most uncomfortably costumed heroes and villains bouncin' about, and the mammoth 4hr Laurent Garnier closing set. Truly an epic last stand (and nearly a fall over...) and the perfect way to guarantee that I'm still feeling a wee bit burst almost a week later.

There was a new feature within the main venue this year, the RFID Ableton dome with 360 visuals. I'd love to tell you about it but the truth is I never went inside. Putting someone like A Guy Called Gerald on in a tent that can hold about 150 people was a pretty questionable decision, and the whole thing seemed a tiny bit gimmicky. In the end though, managing to see something in here was just another case of having to think ahead.

The crowd is absolutely one of the most appealing things about this festival. After the first time you inevitably find yourself on your own, this becomes immediately apparent. Great range of ages and walks of life, no doubt due to the variety of acts from old school pioneers to the sharpest tools in the new cutting edge box. A lot more foreigners seemed to have made the journey this year than I remember from the last time, which was great. I challenge you to go and not make some new pals. It's also quite handy that it falls on my birthday every year too. The only way I could feasibly have had more fun would have been if there were 5 of me.


(Images taken from www.blocweekend.com.)