Planet Notion - Bloc Weekend in Pontins, Great Yarmouth

23/08/2007

Bloc Weekend

Pontins, Great Yarmouth

There’s something endearingly straightforward about Bloc’s shy hedonism; hiding behind a simple logo stamped on a garish red flyer, this was the very first weekender. Making no great claims to relevancy, immediacy, to being a festival, exploration or suchlike, nor being curated as a celebration of any one vein of electronic music in particular, Bloc is simply an opportunity for the punters to coalesce and celebrate. They were confronted with a line up of impressive depth and breadth, and while it was a superficially homogenous crowd of aging ravers and East Anglian crusties, it was refreshing to be transported to an external scene, spared the day-glow face paint now so ubiquitous in London, Edinburgh, Manchester, and every other city I’ve danced about in lately.

Though the event had decided to sit heavily somewhere between techno and dubstep, the highlights were undoubtedly the live performances from old school heroes. As Newcleus morphed into AUX 88 and then Kool Keith, Friday night saw the parabolic development of a particularly American electronic sound, and in those three hours it was possible to watch hip hop crawling from the crackling swamp of early electro, and gazing towards its turbo-charged and slightly unhinged future, 2001, with synths instead of bones. On the other hand, Autechre, for whom there was a palpable buzz the whole weekend, brought a tangible chill to the proceedings. About thirty hours into the weekend, I stood to the side and watched a motionless crowd absorb those trapped beats and ponderous low-end murmurs, and wondered why they bothered. By that point everyone had been staggering about like sharks, moving to breathe, waiting for their second wind, and somehow, right when everyone was crying for entertainment, this intelligent vacuum had sucked it all away. They were not the only acts molested by the hand of dull; Mary Ann Hobbs played one of the most egregiously boring dubstep sets I’ve ever lacked the energy to walk away from, while Mrk 1 & Virus Syndicate were so much uninspired Brit rap posturing, which seemed bemusingly pathetic following Kool Keith. As Saturday night hammered ahead, you got the increasing sense that you weren’t going to witness anything revolutionary, that the weekend had already peaked the day before - Two Lone Swordsman, Kool Keith and TTC all having been so supremely fun. Luke Slater was impressive, plucking and twitching at a complicated array of sequencers to great effect, while Alex Smoke played a nice set, though perhaps a little early, preempting as he did a truly pedestrian offering from The Advent.

The night proper ended with a pair of masterful performances, the first an uncompromising display of Detroit virtuosity from Rob Hood, followed by CJ Bolland. The heavyweight Belgian provided what was in my opinion the best hour of the evening, between five and six on Sunday morning, reaching several frenzied crescendos, the best of which, during ‘Erotic Discourse,’ drew many audible and thoroughly appropriate sighs of physical delight. It was engaging to watch this man, this toddler scaled up to the size of a gorilla, nodding his head metronomically throughout a set of high rhythmical complexity, as if there was really nothing to it at all. The next ineluctable frenzied high was dealt with so unassumingly that not for the first time was the crowd’s attention directed inwardly.

The whole weekend in fact was so pleasantly free from DJ worship, there was never any real need to gaze towards whatever unlit area of the stage each in turn set up on. You could focus entirely on the often quite challenging music and get carried away dancing between the three enormous rooms. In the true spirit of ‘rave’ rather than ‘club’, this was about the punters and not the performers.