Oneohtrix Point Never, Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh
As the Fringe's more performance-based elements kicked into life, so the Edge festival returned. Run by the promoters who put on T in the Park, it is a weekend's worth of music stretched out to three weeks, around the venues of Edinburgh. This was its first must-see set.
In a black box at the base of Cowgate, hipsters crammed in for a performance by Daniel Lopatin, the Brooklyn-based experimental electronic musician whose most recent album, Returnal, has built up a tidal wave of word of mouth.
Those who might have expected a more demonstrative show were to be disappointed, and sadly a few attention-deficit chatters in the crowd didn't follow the very small number who gave up and left. For those with focus and an open mind, however, this was a stunning show.
Forget the lone, young, bearded man we couldn't quite see on the stage – the music was a sonic adventure, a chorus of glitching, chopped-up beats, echoing the late-night rainfall outside, and half-heard ghost transmissions swooping in and out of blissful, Enoish keyboard ambience and stark, indistinct vocal intrusions in the style of The Knife.
It was a soundtrack to fire the imagination and an exercise in formal style to match almost anything else in Edinburgh this year.
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