Wednesday 2 September 2015

Sniffing The Grass: An Into The Great Wide Open Warmup



As a yearly tradition for the past couple of years we close down the summer in style and are getting ready to travel back to our favourite island Vlieland for another edition of the Into The Great Wide Open festival. Somehow we got karma on our side and managed to get tickets, although unfortunately not for every member of our group. A close look at the line-up reveals that the programmers did too good a job and came up with an incredible program full of terrible dilemmas. Let me walk you through it.

This year no tent for us any more since we are staying in a small bungalow. Hooray for a real bed, a lovely shower and a toilet close by, fresh coffee and fried eggs in the morning!



Thursday
After we get settled in we have no time to waste, since Jaap Boots will be telling rock stories. My first time on this festival I learned about the wonderful Intergalactic Lovers and now they are back! Then maybe we can check out some German postpunk with Die Nerven and return later to the Fortweg stage for Dutch psychedelic rockers PAUW. At the same time Bombay are playing their soundtrack to the 1930s horror movie Vampyr. Damn those choices!





Friday
Rise and shine at the lovely island. After some first bare and breakfast necessities why not have Bruut! wake us up a little more with some crazy jazz. After that Maurits Westerik's new project Bewilder will keep us going and otherwise young Dutch garage rockers Afterpartees definitely will. Some of Kevin Morby's inspirations are Bob Dylan and Neil Young so I don't need any more convincing. Time for some dancing, hopefully in the sun, with La Sra. Tomasa and their dubstep rumba fiesta. We can can continue to dance at My Baby's trance funk. Now it gets tricky: HÆLOS' feelgood triphop or jazzy synth beats with Dorian Concept Trio or some wild garage rock with WAND? The ladies of Savages will definitely rock the main stage with their dark postpunk. Con Brio's soul sounds great, but then we need to make some really tough choices again. The Irish postpunk of Dubliners Girl Band, party hard with swinging brass band Gallowstreet or Los Pirañas' experimental electronic Caribbean music from Colombia. At least we better make sure we are back at the Fortweg stage in time for De Staat.





Saturday
I'm not sure if we can get up early enough to catch the gritty country of Deslondes. Maybe we'll start with some sunny reggae from Surinam singer Kenny B. I'm not too fond of singer/songwriters and folk but would like to check out Ryley Walker's guitar skills. Gabriel Rios should be good for a latin party. Should I go see the great Dutch alternative band Alamo Race Track or the melancholic ballads of Andy Shauf? The Memphis soul of Frazey Ford sounds tempting and punk poet John Cooper Clarke should be interesting. Leon Bridges' name is buzzing around so I would like to check his vintage soul music. Polar Bear is supposed to make some ground breaking jazz and Sophia will be playing melancholic songs that may just be what we need at that time. The psych rock and post punk of The Afterveins sounds really good before we need to make a tough choice between two Belgian delights: the wonderful sultry music of Oscar and the Wolf or the jazz of Tom Barman's Taxiwars. I'm definitely going to be on time for zZz's wild and gritty sleazy rock music.





Sunday
The music of jazz trio Kapok sounds good enough but I don't think we can make it that early. So we will probably wake up to the Turkish psychedelic 60s inspired music by Baba Zula. Time to dance with All We Are's indie disco or dream away with Jacco Gardner in the woods? Ought's postpunk sounds great and of course I don't want to miss punk veterans The Undertones. The last choice of the weekend is between Torres and The Slow Show who both play intense music in their own specific way. And who else than Afterpartees can throw a better afterparty?



Thank you so much Into The Great Wide Open programmers for this impossible line-up and the sore feet I will have afterwards.

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