LGW, which is listening in total, focused fraternisation

It is around 11 o'clock on Sunday evening. Jlin taps a rattling beat in the air with her index fingers. When the relentlessly sucking bass kicks in, she guides it down with an elbow. Her grin from ear to ear is met with cheers from the audience. Le Guess Who 2016 (hereafter LGW) is coming to an end, but these dancers are not thinking about that. The producer from Indiana gets full attention, even though Jonny - Radiohead - Greenwood is simultaneously playing elsewhere in Utrecht with a new project.

Jlin who?

A lady of whom you will hear a lot in the not too distant future; an immense talent who has made many friends in Utrecht. And not only her.

Big smile

LGW is like a family weekend, explained organiser and programmer Johan Gijsen in advance and that description hits the nail on the head. Once a year, dozens of nationalities come together, audiences and artists blend seamlessly, friendships are made among themselves. From fierce-looking bearded metal bear with trucker's cap to barefoot disco woman to grey-haired jazz-lover, at LGW they spend four days and early nights fraternising with hipsters, dance freaks, the lumberjack shirt brigade who come for the better seminal singer-songwriters and Elijah Wood who willingly consents to a group photo-with-fans in the smoking area.

The fraternisation follows from the programme being of exceptionally high standard across the board. All blood groups leave a hall with a big happy smile at least once every day. And it is that euphoria that fraternises.

Exploration

LGW celebrated its tenth anniversary this year and packed out. A quartet of artists - Wilco, Savages, SUUNS and Julia Holter - were asked to put together part of the programme. This yielded the bonus of the festival leaning just a notch deeper into areas within non-mainstream music than before. On Thursday, for instance, LGW was treated to Arnold Dreyblatt (pictured above). This American post-minimalist composer was the first to play a work in which he used the bow to drum rhythmically, manically and in a trance on his double bass strung with piano strings.

The instrument produced harmonic overtones and undertones that attached to a drone from a hurdy-gurdy were reminiscent. Small 'beatings' delivered a particular percussive pulse sound. In the swirling, somewhat sonorous-melodic part of this cloud of sound, thoughts turned to Steve Reich as well as Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier.

In the second half of the concert, Dreyblatt played the bass from behind his laptop. He brought the instrument to resonance, while motors under the strings ensured that the composer live created a blood-curdling dialogue between the played bass and the PA that simultaneously affected the vibrating strings and sound box. Subtle changes in direction only had major consequences after some time, when the feedback effect began to generate. It was thanks to Dreyblatt's skilful master hand that this symphony for double bass and electronics was far beyond experimentation. He brought the truly deeper musical eloquence of the sonic exploration for the spotlight.

Sonic Instruments of War

Electronic music and certainly its danceable variety was always rather a somewhat blind spot at LGW. There was less of that on the tenth anniversary. Not only the aforementioned Jlin got the dance floor moving. Before her, the young producer Samuel Kerridge Editing LGW with a penetrating and scorching industrial sound. After a classical build-up with an overture, laying out melodic and rhythmic elements - not without some human heartbeat (or even: romanticism?) - Kerridge brought his work to a resounding finale in which the grainy texture of his gritty ''sonic instruments of war' lured the audience like moths to a lamp, only to swat them away with machine-like force just as hard.

Wracked with nerves

LGW is also the festival that does not bring non-Western music as an exotic curio. Fendika, Bassekou Kouyaté & Ngoni Ba, or Les Filles de llaghadad were therefore in the middle of the programme and not tucked away in a 'world music' venue. The latter act was outside homeland Niger for the first time. The ladies were up with nerves when confronted with a frenzied and numerous audience in chamber music hall Hertz. They hardly knew how to handle the adulation. They crawled into their shells and sought support close to each other.

The longer the concert went on, the looser they came. And that 'longer' is very relative, as the women played a tribal form of Tuareg blues that hypnotised and anointed in mantra-like repetition such that an hour of show felt like less than 10 minutes.

Furie

Against this unaccustomedness was the extra dash of gas that most acts gave at this festival. The mere fact that they were allowed to play in this line-up, plus the festival's gourmand-and-flavourist reputation, meant that the audience could look forward to bands playing their very best.

Friends and girlfriends made an unleashed Savages for sure. Up front, a moshpit of gems. Stagedivers dove into the rippling sea of people and crackling white light kept the atmosphere steely, bare and chilly. The fury comes from the four women's toes. The in itself by no means negligible records from this band hardly foreshadow the thunderous violence that an unusually energetic Savages rolled out without fuss on this victory tour.

Just not derailing

Bo Ningen (pictured above) had it in their sights from minute one that LGW were not only eating out of their hand, the Japanese group also filled it generously. As if Can had been given a tap from the metal mill. While the requisite psychedelia had gone through the blender, Bo Ningen served up a show that threatened to shoot in every direction except forward. But that was beyond the string-tight performance of this four-piece, as what just doesn't derail turns out to be exactly the band's headstrong direction.

That playing together and yet just not quite coinciding was also the absolute forte of Deerhoof. The band switched effortlessly and extremely pleasantly from chanson to powerful rock to free jazz, mathrock, Zappa and 8-bit electro: sometimes in a single song. All this was quite manageable and even more so: highly amusing, especially live with the image of the drummer slapping away like Animal from the Muppet Show and the little hyperactive singer continuously making flight attendant explanatory movements (read: where are the emergency exits).

Legend

Kraut fumes also hang around Beak>, but the British did not appear to be completely forward. Dinosaur Jr. is also a diesel that needs to get going and we didn't give the mastodons that time, because there was an act waiting in the packed programme that you had never been able to see before or certainly wouldn't see again so soon.

As Elza Soares (pictured below), the legendary queen of samba. She was announced by organiser and programmer Bob van Heur as "a phenomenon of nature". Not a word was lied or exaggerated about that, as it turned out when, seated in a high throne, she gave her voice all the space it needed. The packed main hall of TivoliVredenburg probably largely did not understand what the Grande Dame had to say with powerful and at the same time fragile-abrasive intonation, but the eloquence dripped from every inspired syllable.

Even - or rather, precisely - at the end of her eventful, very tragic life, this singer proved that giving, passing on life force, can be the mission of music; is hers.

Pilot light

Soares' elixir was SUUNS axed on Sunday. With a petulant attitude, verging on disinterested arrogance, the group worked their way through the show. In doing so, it was very noticeable that the spark that Savages managed to bring to full ignition at the snap of a finger remained a somewhat weak pilot light here. The once again massive audience stood (and even sat) by and watched. Truly electric the atmosphere did not want to become; thunder and lightning remained absent, while the jittery electro-rock sound had solidity.

In thunderclap also showed Fennesz end his set.  Noise and melody that balanced on the edge of tinsel kitsch fought for the spotlight. The metallic, cutting distortion deployed the Viennese sound artist mainly as some obligatory ugliness next to all the baroque splendour. Thus, he put up two poles, between which no midrange was suspended. And then, after barely forty of the booked sixty minutes, it was also enough for him. Fennesz left many in confusion, as a shortened set LGW is not used to at all.

Making choices

LGW is also the festival of better band names. For instance, there was little swankiness to the brutal waves of noiserocking drone and conjuring vocals from Swans (pictured above). So you randomly wondered how Shopping sounded. Or: Drinks, Entrance, A Dead Forest Index, The Comet is Coming or Let's Eat Grandma. You can find the answer on LGW and Spotify and the like, because the festival programme in which as many as 13 venues were played at one time forced you to make choices. You missed more than you heard.

At the lesson

Although, there you think The Dwarfs of East Agouza yet quite different. Can, Cluster, Neu! together, along with a hefty serving of space-jazz and psych-folk with its Middle Eastern roots and you have a precious cocktail that hangs in a bizarre split between Cologne and Cairo: bewilderingly entertaining and astonishingly versatile.

The best and typical thing about LGW is not only that you might overlook a group like this as a stand-alone concert, but also that the trio managed to keep a packed auditorium on its certainly not easy lesson. And that at a festival, in the Netherlands, where elsewhere the complaints of chatty and inattentive audiences are nonexistent.

From the extremely abstract noise from Pita to the pumping and slick hip-hop that Digable Planets brings or the screeching guitardrone with free jazz improv-drums from St Francis Duo: LGW loves music, pays attention and listens.

So it could be that, when Beatrice Dillon transitioned the sound of the surf to softly buzzing singing bowls and moved on to the experimental electronics of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a chatterbox who came in unsuspecting was greeted with a polyphonic "ssssttt". He instantly bounded in shame and pricked up his ears. You rarely experience that kind of listening anywhere to this degree of focused fraternisation.