Master Musicians of Bukkake / Ignatz, Scheld'apen, 17/07/09

I like the concert venue Scheld'Apen for different reasons. First, concerts start late, gives you time enough to get there on time without stress while you still can order a few drinks and have a talk before the shows start. It's a nice evening and we order some fine beers and enjoy the evening outside. A bit later, seated on the floor, Ignatz kicks off with his very personal 'broken' folk blues. His guitar & vocal work that is sometimes melancholic/nostalgic and often drenched in delay gets from the quiet & introspective to the rawer, distorted edge and back. A nice and ideal support act. After the break smoke fills the nicely filled concert place and 6 people, each dressed in a long red robe and with some sort of a bee-keeper's hood on enter the stage. Master Musicians of Bukkake open the set with a drone/atmospherical instrumental. After that, a hairy thing crawls up the stage. It looks like a Yeti or Bigfoot or perhaps it's the sort of monster that lives in swamps most of the time, feeding itself with water plants, frogs and toads. But look, it learned how to pick up a microphone and it actually knows how to sing (which can't be said of Madonna and Britney Spears, according to their very recent 'concert ' performances - thousands of people pay fortunes to see them playback, find the logic in that). Meanwhile the band gets in a rhythmic mood and with two drummers, two guitar players, a bass/guitar player, one guy on synths and that singing creature, Master Musicians Of Bukkake know how to build long multilayered psychedelic/krautrock-ish jams. The music strongly refers to the psychedelic & kraut stuff from the seventies, but they produce it in some sort of upgraded 21st century form. Perhabs they don't make anything really new or revolutionary but they sure recycle interesting music from the past and they don't confine themselves to simply reproducing the stuff. Combine that with their excellent craftmanship (some of the band members play in Asva, Earth or do production work), a good sound and a sense of putting things in the right perspective and you get a great show! I buy an Ignatz-cd (I already have the two MMOB-cd's, good ones btw) and have to convince the drunk guy from the merch that it actually costs 12 euro in stead of 5.

We drive home and get lost in Hoboken. While we try to find our way out of there Harappian Night Recordings is on. The fascinating, weird south-asian music influenced experimental pieces mix well with the night images of nearly empty streets. We conclude the evening at the bar and try out a Boskeun beer, quite a strong beer (with a ridiculous label on the bottle) but our verdict was unanimously that it didn't appeal to us very much. The La Chouffe (that's the one with the stupid gnome on the label - is it supposed to attract children or what?) afterwards tasted much much better.

Enjoyed the show with different sorts of beer, which is obviously the best sort of booze for this kind of music.