In Praise Of: Saccade

A disembodied voice dolefully cries out over the packed Strange Brew in Bristol. It’s from Savages’ Prayer, but you’ve not heard it like this before, stripped of instruments, just the voice, with weird sounds below it, provided by Demdike Stare during an intense 45-minute set at the Saccade festival organised by Bristol-based record label and promoters Accidental Meetings. Soon the voice is drowned by a throbbing sub-bass. And some noise. Drums float in and out of the mix., clattering in, adding beats to the equation, making it even more danceable. Not that it wasn’t. A glance back at the packed Strange Brew, one of four venues used for the daytime part of the event, sees a mass of bobbing heads. The beats just make it easier to move.

God knows what Demdike Stare are actually doing. There’s CDJs that the duo, Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty, are manipulating on a table, along with plenty of bits of equipment, the proverbial spaghetti junction coming out of the back of the kits. Every now and then, you can see a direct reaction to their knob-twiddling. It is, as noted earlier, intense, heavy as you like, at times cacophonous, with the bass so deep, so sub anything, that you can feel it shaking the room, and inadvertently, your trousers, clothes, chest, organs and very being. Behind Canty and Whittaker, there’s a series of film loops and more, showing the pair’s love of European horrors and sleaze, as well as assorted more arty clips. No matter how dark and moody it gets, Demdike Stare are having a great time; laughing and joking with each other as all around them turns into madness and chaos.

All this and it’s only just turned 8 o’clock in the evening.

Demdike Stare’s set is one of the highlights of Saccade, the day and night, which runs in two parts across five venues, from the early afternoon right through until 4am. The Saturday is bookended by two separate events at other Bristol venues, a Friday night curtain-raiser and a Sunday evening closer, but it’s the Saturday we’re concerned with here. (Saccade, incidentally – and I had to look this up –  is “a quick movement of the eye that results in it looking in a different direction”. I spent the weekend avoiding saying it as I hadn’t checked on the pronunciation.)

It is, as organisers and Accidental Meetings and Saccade founders Lucien Calkin and Sholto Wilson say: “A grassroots city festival that shines a light on some of the amazing venues Bristol has to offer, featuring a mix of wicked Bristol/UK artists and international artists.”

The line-up features some of the Bristol label’s own acts and associated artists, with a nod to Bristol and its bass-driven musical legacy. It is, the Accidental Meetings pair say, not deliberate as such, but rather a subconscious thing. “We’re obviously massively influenced by Bristol’s musical history and has definitely shaped us a lot since we moved here. With the festival featuring a lot of Bristol artists too, I guess that contributes to it – but we definitely do try and rep the Bristol flag and are very proud to be based here and do a small contribution to the amazing scene here.”

We enter Strange Brew just after 3pm, greeted by the sounds of Mad Professor, down from, as he puts it, “London City”. (Sadly, he’s no more precise in his location details – at some point in the 1990s, someone pointed out a wackily decorated house between Lewisham and New Cross, telling me with some certainty that “that’s where Mad Professor lives”. This was unproven, although I’ve often thought at about it in the subsequent years.) He kicks off with his version of blues party and sound system favourite Kunta Kinte. It’s as good a place to start as any, setting out the stall for what is to come. The first rewind comes for his dubbed up version of John Holt’s Police In Helicopter, while the Professor (not sure of his exact qualifications) ups the tempo for a drum and bassified take on Welcome To Jamrock. He flits between heavy dub and jungliest carnival sound for a crowd pleasing set, dubbing the sweet Jesus out of his dub plates.

We pop into the next venue, the Crypt, to catch the end of DJ sets from Saskia and MISH and the start of Mike Levitt. It’s a beautiful space, your actual medieval crypt below a church, with lighting and dry ice giving it a quasi-spiritual feel. Tombs with makeshift signs (“Guinness £4 a can”) giving a genuine atmosphere to the proceedings.

All the venues – the Crypt, the two rooms at Strange Brew and our next port of call, an event space at the back of the Rough Trade shop, are all a short hop from each other, as are the late night venues (Strange Brew, again, and the Island, of which more later). This all helps with organisational elements too, as Accidental Meetings’ Calkin and Wilson later note: “There’s not a mad amount of thinking behind it.. We’d run gig and club shows for the last six or seven years and thought moving it to a larger scale thing could be a bit more impactful but also a bit better for our time management / lives. When the venues in Bristol are so so close together, it makes the experience and logistics a ton easier, when a multi venue thing done right – the experience is proper good.”

Over at Rough Trade, things are running a little late, but no problem, as it means fitting in the end of someone else’s set (Shell Company, who’ve popped up releasing stuff on Accidental Meetings, the imprint calls them dream-pop, they wouldn’t have sounded out of place on 4AD during that label’s heyday. Given that there’s four different stages, three in the evening, it’s a miracle that’s there’s not more delays, a slight hiccup is not too much for sure. “It is tricky [to put together] for sure,” say Calkin and Wilson after the event. “Luckily with just doing one of these a year, we can slowly build the line up together throughout the year, and then it’s a manic couple of months – we’re very fortunate to have an absolutely ace team on the day to pull it altogether. The venues are a massive help too, everyone pulls together and helps each other to get it over the line which is nice.”

Meanwhile the one we were waiting for was Elijah Minnelli. He’s had a steady stream of releases this year, not just on the Accidental Meetings label, but his own Breadminster County Council imprint, with the wonderful Clams As A Main Meal being arguably the pick of the bunch. It features heavily in his set at Saccade too, with the wonderful Donna Donna (Chwerthin) chief among them. It’s indicative of Minnelli’s output – a traditional folk tune, sung in Welsh by Edwyn Collins associate Carwyn Ellis, a heady blend of dub, cumbia and other global influences, it shouldn’t work, but, by jove, it does. Meanwhile, Elijah Minnelli is bouncing around, live dubbing the set, fucking about with effects, running on the spot as the beats drop. He ends with Canaan Land from Clams…, Dennis Bovell’s vocals coupled with a traditional tune sung by slaves and discovered by the dubmeister while watching Burt Lancaster as a religious grifter in 1960 film Elmer Gantry all stirred up by Minnelli’s dub mastery makes for a deeply uplifting combination. It’s compelling stuff and you can see where he gets his stage name from – part spiritual, part showman, shifting between enlightenment and entertainment.

It was a rush back to Strange Brew for The Wolfgang Press; goths before it became a dirty word in the early 1980s and a quintessential 4AD band, now back together. One of those bands everyone knows, without really knowing. They’re hardly going to be shouting “come on everyone, join in, sing along, you know all the words” on their return to the stage (they’ve reformed and started recording again in the past year or two, but even a committed 4AD fan from the 80s might struggle to name more than a handful of their tunes, influential as they may have been).

It’s suitably doom-laden and showcases their new material, which makes up roughly half the setlist. Wolfgang Press both fit on the bill and they don’t, further highlighting the disparate line-up put on by Accidental Meetings. “On paper it could look a bit scattered – but similarly with our label and gig/club shows, sonically it does make sense when you’re in it – and it helps when the artists are generally pretty incred too. The AM crowd/usuals that’s been built a bit over the years are really open minded and up for everything helps, which definitely spurs the curation on a bit.”

Off for a quick bite ahead of Demdike Stare, as noted above, one of the highlights. After the sheer intensity of their set, whoever’s on next is going to have their work cut out, but Spanish duo Dame Area have a bloody good crack at it. They come from a long lineage of shouty punk-meets-electro bands, albeit with their own unique take on the electro-punk thing, one that works best when both singer Silvia Konstance and synth maestro Viktor L Crux are going at it hammer and tongs on percussion, giving it a distinct tribal feel.

Day and evening events over, it’s on to the nighttime edition of Saccade, and in to The Island, a former cop shop, complete with its Edwardian police cells intact, acting as a temporary, ahem, chill out zone, where, one presumes, one can take time off from the rave and wonder what kinds of brutality the Old Bill could have visited upon innocent ruffians in a bygone age. The main room is effectively a long tunnel, it can’t be much more than a half a dozen yards wide, with girders and a primitive, pre-Acid House feel. At first it sounds a touch chaotic; the frantic BPMs seeming to create a cavernous echo and throb, but the arrival of Jamaican Gavsborg, alongside Carrier, changes thing. The sound improves, the beats slow down and this uncategorisable set is another key highlight. God knows what the music is, bass heavy, not techno, nor house, nor dancehall; it’s got a strong international feel, given the far-flung and much travelled lives of both DJs here, but it sounds ace in a big, dark room. It’s been a long day and I make my excuses and head out just as Om Unit and mad miran are shaping up for what sounds like another strong set following on from Gavsborg and Carrier, the strains of early electro boding well for what is to come.

We didn’t get a chance to see anything in full sadly, which is I guess how these things go – but a thing that we definitely want to change for next year work wise,” say Lucien Calkin and Sholto Wilson. “Our residents i-sha and marjai were both top as always – they always do their own thing but it’s always special when they playing home turf. It was amazing seeing Devon Rexi and John T. Gast perform, we released their record the week before the festival so was wicked to see it in action – both of them are incredible. DIALS were pretty insane for it being their second only live show ever, even though they’re made up of ridiculously talented musicians already (memotone, Batu, Bethany Ley, ELDON, Scaler). Dirtytalk repped Bristol hard and took the roof off the 1300’s Crypt and Turbo Sonidero was also a big highlight. Conor Thomas and Nosedrip was as good as a finish we could have hoped too to close the Saturday night – everyone was top to be honest, was very lucky!”

And where next for Accidental Meetings, apart from, of course, a decent night’s kip after their efforts? “Aye we’ll be sleeping this week for sure,” the pair conclude. “Saccade fits into AM as the main events focus I guess currently, with us only really doing Accidental Meetings showcases outside of that, for now. For the rest of the year we’ll really focus on the label where we’ve got about a record coming out every month and we can’t wait to share those!”