Øya Festival: the DiS blog, part three

Tom: Leaving Al seemingly unconscious, fully clothed and slowly stewing in his own filth, I headed over town to a special performance. Terje Isungset is a musician and composer, who works solely with ice. His instruments slowly melted in his hands, each detuning and declining until he was hitting water, the music degenerating from a Bjorky bliss to atonal howl. You could look at it all as conceptual brilliance; a perfect metaphor for rock and roll regression. But I just thought it was cool. Attention UK clubs! Book this man through here.

Al: Fatigue’s taking its toll, the money’s all but gone – no use denying it, DiS is in dire need of a kick in the pants. Maybe Lady Sov will be the one to do it with her set this evening, we’ll see. After a pretty good spell of weather for the first couple of days, Norway finally turned nasty on us yesterday and we got piss wet through. Before the heavens opened, we’d caught the second half of Spoon’s set, more out of curiosity than anything – Pitchfork seem to be up this band’s arse at the minute but they sound a little underwhelming to me, a suspicion confirmed by their middling set.

Then we watched Devendra Banhart invite some Swedish fellow from the crowd onstage to play one of his own songs. The plucky Swede proceeded to delight his unexpectedly upsized audience with an unremarkable ditty, ’True Love’, sung solemnly in an inexplicable, vowel abusing English accent. My favourite bit was when everyone thought he’d finished and gave him a condescending round of applause, only to be stopped in their tracks as he launched into yet another lugubrious verse – you could literally see the goodwill in people’s faces draining away there. Nice chap though… As for beardy one himself, he played a few tracks off his forthcoming album, some good, some ‘a bit meh’, but it was a solid set. Far be it from me to casually insert hyperbolic statements into otherwise humdrum blog entries, but it looks like he’s DEFINITELY WRITTEN HIS ’STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN’ with one new song.

Battles were predictably, blissfully great, and The Jesus And Mary Chain were imperious without even really trying. Which is how you’d want it really. Rumours of a Scarlett Johansson collaboration proved sadly unfounded, but we did get to have breakfast next to them this morning, which was exciting. Jim had scrambled eggs and baked beans.

Tom: The evening brought fraught attempts to avoid the rain and run from free drink to free drink. Low were playing across town. They were met with a truly a rapturous reception, playing three encores. Al got told off for being a little boisterous, presumably thinking their quietcore fumblings more suited to the bedroom than a crowded club at 2am. The philistine.