WITCH, Flying Moon In Space, Kombynat Robotron, A Place To Bury Strangers, The Dharma Chain – they all delivered.
The timing was as perfect as the cowbell use at Helicon: On the first weekend in May – the extended edition – the Fuzz Club Festival took place again in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The two-day indoor event is aimed at music fans with a taste for psych, shoegaze, noise, space and krautrock in all its excesses. On May 1st and 2nd, on two floors, you could seamlessly experience one amazing live band after another with a full-body shake.
A wall of sound behind which every instrument finds its place
One of the first really enormous highlights was provided by Minami Deutsch on Friday evening. Recently seen in Berlin, they were only able to really expand at the festival. Not only was the development space on stage much more generous, but the sound was also more precise. Their show: a brutal wall of sound in which every single instrument still found its place.
However, the long, wide stage didn’t seem to be enough for A Place To Bury Strangers. The trio, which once earned the title of “New York’s loudest band,” soon transitioned from performing frontally to being in the middle of the crowd. There they set up their equipment and started booming until the last person in the venue had ear protection. Nevertheless, there was hardly a smile left during the group’s well-portioned riot attacks.
Six people, no standstill and a completely new storytelling
The Leipzig band Flying Moon In Space proved to be the final highlight of the first day of the festival. As soon as the lights dimmed, the six of them hacked away at their instruments, twitching and dancing in a daring rhythm – and people reacted as if standing still had never been an option for their bodies. With their newly released second record “always forever” they chose to move towards denser song hymns instead of improvisational art. Live, each piece flowed together so creamy that a completely new storytelling emerged.
Lulling was allowed – and then came the bass
Those who went to the long-known festival venue – Effenaar – on the second day in the late afternoon were greeted by The Dharma Chain with a particularly relaxed atmosphere. The Australian quartet, which is now based in Berlin, knew how to lull the audience. At times the bass rolled forward so prominently that it was as if you closed your eyes to feel better; then the singing moved again into a completely different emotional world. In any case, they knew how to play the game of duality.
Frontal lessons in tightness
Contrast fueling was provided by the Kiel Kombynat Robotron. They delivered a compact, powerful set and laced the sound package with wonderfully hypnotic raw repetitions. It was difficult to think about anything other than what was just happening in front of you – simply impossible with this frontal lesson in tightness.
No rivets, anywhere
It was difficult to limit yourself to just a few highlight acts when the lovingly curated fuzz club line-up didn’t allow for anything boring. Lorelle Meets The Obsolete gifted the crowd with ethereally beautiful strings of songs, Travo had so much oomph that they could have easily put Idles and Turnstile in their pockets, and Glyders, along with Helicon, were probably the top sympathizers of the entire event. Precisely because the latter then passed on their equipment to Dead Skeletons: The Icelanders’ stuff had probably been lost, which is why it was clear that they looked as if they were about to implode during their performance. It wasn’t until the final “Dead Mantra” that things really seemed to come together – the track lasted over 20 minutes, and at the end Jón Sæmundur Auðarson finished painting his picture on a canvas with black paint and happily presented it to the hall.
The tangerine
WITCH – acronym for We Intend To Cause Havoc – were one of the last groups on Saturday evening and stood out a little from the overall concept of the Fuzz Club Festival. The Zamrock band, which was already active in other formations in the 70s, decorated their concert with songs that were sometimes reminiscent of Deep Purple, sometimes Led Zeppelin or James Brown. People were encouraged to sing along and to carefully check the right choice of partner. Founding member and singer Emmanuel Jagari Chanda talked a lot during his time on stage – and dedicatedly slowly peeled a tangerine just to share it with the front row.
It was moments like these in which the festival manifested its meaning: as a place where people could not only pick up a real gift of sound once a year, which rarely existed in this form, but also experienced an event that enabled wellness togetherness, even in the form of a concert. Over and over again.
