I felt like a bit of a yokel not having the required hair (let alone haircut), glasses and scarf and skinny girlfriend at this weekend's Alpha-Ville Festival. But I enjoyed myself greatly in the lovely and sweaty two rooms of techno, dubstep, house and microhouse.
My first requirement of the evening was to meet up with Nick and check into my accomodation. We had one of those moments of luck when I just happened to be walking under Blackfriars Bridge just as Nick was crossing over from the other side. We had a few ales in one of the many boozers on the South Bank where Nick spoke of his trip to the Alps and his impending doom (sorry marriage) before he had to rush off.
Quickly scoffing down a rather plain Tesco's chicken wrap and bottle of some Polish lager in hand as I strolled towards Whitechapel, I discovered that the venues was rather closer than I expected. This of course meant that I was nearly sick because I'd eaten too quickly and then drained lager. Five minutes later however I was ready to hear some tunes.
Inside the gallery it was slightly disappointing to find out that we would not have access to the exhibitions but that didn't really matter as I'd come for the music and not the paintings. The building was rather cavernous and it took me a while to get my bearings.
Upstairs there was a video showing what appeared to be a set of wires that had read movements and could send electrical signals to your muscles so that you would repeat the same movements. Or at least that was what I thought was going on, the artist was not in the room, there was nobody to explain.
I then found a bar but was informed that no beer was available - for sponsorship reasons - a glass of nice but expensive wine is what I opted for. Soundhacker (I think) was playing in the bar but there was a great deal of chatter over the music which was a shame. There didn't seem much in the way of visuals to enhance the performance, instead there was some long haired bloke hunched over some buttons.
After this I caught the showing of a 3D mapping demo from esprojections which is all very clever and very much in vogue at the moment. Not sure where this type of performance can go from here as many of the things I've seen have been fairly similar, I suspect that somebody will do something to prove me wrong in not too short a time.
I was a bit skint and visited the off licence a couple of times for cans of Red Stripe rather than pay four quid for a shitty bottle of warm Brew Dog out of bin filled with tepid water. This didn't really impinge on my enjoyment of the night as there was just as much as show going on outside as there was in.
Back inside I traversed the stairs up to the loft room which had a cool view of the city and stroked my chin and bopped my head to the sounds of Scanner and Bola. The room was ridiculously sweaty and I did have to pop outside for some air a couple of times.
My favourite act of the night was Subeena.
Actress played a set of house, dubstep and techno, mostly techno.
Finally came Kettenkarussel who started off really really slowly and lot of people drifted off but they missed out because by the end of the night they had everybody dancing to their glitchy house music.
