We asked a fellow media correspondent about Portola a few weeks ago if they were attending the novel alt-electro festival:

“No, but oh my god”. 

It’s still the best way to describe it. Portola instilled a chain reaction of freakouts across the world with friends of friends showing friends this lineup. 

Fred Again. Huge. Though we’re on the tail end of his surge now the Boiler Room set was stashing 100k views per day. A slew of unreleased tracks is only available to see in person. Flume just released his 3^rd album and Jamie XX was dropping a new song the same day of his performance. All this, and more, on James Blake’s birthday. 

Chemical Brothers took it personally. That live set was like nothing else: Cryptic thespians on screen playing with the music and lights simultaneously. A shaman casting spells with lasers burning forth from his hands and into the crowd. They’ve been in the game for three decades now and after jamming a 25-year-old song live that still hits, I mean that’s it right there, we’re done.

Jamie XX’s IDs are in high demand. I can’t fathom his vault of hard drives with the secret sauce. His music is minimal but pervasive and insinuating, he doesn’t need a lot to set the tone. A few chops of Arabic vocal phrases over garage rave kicks is the recipe. “Idontknow” went hard, especially with people now anticipating the switch-up.

Fred played the hits and then some. He’s armed with just as many IDs as Jamie XX but his are the talk of the town. The Future collaboration just dropped and you already know the crowd went stupid I couldn’t get over the absence of his Romy collab. The XX vocalist/guitarist wrote a beautiful song, perhaps one of the more evocative songs in Fred’s repertoire, and her set was just a few hours prior. It did not play, though I have no merit to genuinely complain.

There was a focus on a wide array of artists during the day. Shy Girl, Dawn Richards, L’Emperatrice, Drama, and Sad Night Dynamite, who went on to demur “they need to put us on later, we should be on at midnight. We’re not a daylight kind of band.” Slowthai and Young Franco, who I spoke with here, seemed to be the most favored acts of the openers. 

Over on the ship stage, Arca had no regard for anything beyond cathartic sub-bass death rattle. She is the late Sophie morphed with Death Grips, and this is the part of the fest that most interested me. Some of these artists ventured so far out of conventional songwriting that it’s, like, occasionally incomprehensible. The music is abrasive and quick and sick and violent and annoying, but she found her people.

Oneohtrix, however, did not find his people. He was a last-minute replacement for M.I.A. (though not last min enough) and folks were quite bewildered. They switched him with Yves as well because it’s pretty much agreed upon that the latter has more closing potential. I liked it though. Electronic music doesn’t need a drop to be enticing, though the fervor live can go either way.

Portola is a new festival, but I trusted Goldenvoice after Second Sky last year and expected good things. Four stages: warehouse, ship, crane, and pier looking exactly how you’re expecting. The harbor boasted a solid foundation for a festival. If not too solid, because hot damn that’s a lot of asphalt. If only for a moment, it seemed like we all together disrupted the western shipping trade routes to rave down.

With Flume, it felt like this was the case, his sounds very loosely comprise the human definition of music. In fact, he hawk-style rail grinds the exact moments between rhythm and lunacy ad nauseam. Those tracks were the port lighthouse that evening. Jasper’s Song was a notable recess from this nonsense, but mostly everything off of HTIF was unreal.

The warehouse stage was a social experiment. They funneled the entire crowd into one small back entrance, usable only after a maze of cross-weaving lines, ignoring the literal garage-size entrances layered across the warehouse facade. People preferred to watch PinkPantheress and Charli from outside the zoo. But it’s only mentioned because there’s nothing else to complain about. 

Admittedly, I’ve never been too into Bicep. They exhume the sophisticated frat boy, only active deep into the warehouse rave where they gather and talk draft kings. So the context was there and the music was fine. It was bouncy enough but I was satiated. I prefer their live stuff over their recorded material. Cold take.

Peggy Gou was awesome too. I only knew her from live sessions over the pandemic. Her house music was so refined and smooth – comfy attacks and smooth releases. Her and the Four Tet / Floating Points mix set was the Crane stage summed up.

What Portola sought to do was kind of accomplished before it happened. The music showcases how much there is outside of the term EDM, a heavy term that Portola very lucidly sidesteps. This isn’t Electric Daisy tier, and the senescent grandeur of festival bangers is few and far between here. Portola ships you off into alternative electronic: micro house, glitch, dark ambient, post-dubstep, breakbeat, and hyper pop.  

Mainstream dance festivals have their place, in reality, you can’t run from it. But now there’s balance. A sub-world of glitchy, above-ground weirdness, and to be fair only a little pretentious, on a huge scale. The SF skyline in the background was a nice touch too.

Check out our Portola interviews with Young Franco, and keep an eye out for the Sad Night Dynamite and Palace features upcoming.

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Bicep Isles tour was sold out in most cities nearly immediately and none of those dates were in Canada. There were a few options for destinations but New York is dear to my heart and the Knockdown Center seemed like a very cool venue to see the duo play. This 100-year-old building was originally a glass factory and has lived many lives since but today it is a rather unique event space. People came early for this one. The people, patiently waiting for the doors to open, seemed to be from all over the world, psyched for the concert, vibing on friendly energy.

JDH and Dave P began to play as soon as the crowd poured into the briefly empty space. Looking back you could see the dark room being illuminated by red spotlights crisscrossing the floor, it’s just the calm before the storm; the rave is about to begin, as soon as we all get hydrated. Dave Pianka and Josh Houtkin (aka JDH and Dave P) are two people behind NYC’s infamous FIXED parties and have been bringing some of the most credible DJs and live bands to local music-friendly environments for over fifteen years. Their skills and music choices naturally translated well with the audience tonight. 

Bicep’s Matt and Andy have known each other for a long time. Bloggers turned producers put in sweat into establishing themselves in the industry and refining their sound (more on that in this interview). Bicep sound is unique in its vision – mixed influences, rigorous sampling and mixing, tedious self-editing – nothing is rushed and everything is thought through. The dynamic of that effort and the years of familiarity show on stage. Standing opposite one another Matt and Andy performed seamlessly with nearly no interaction, it’s like they’re reading each other’s minds, or more likely, have done this many, many times before. 

For roughly an hour and a half Bicep worked their way through Isles. From “Rever” to “Atlas” to “Cazenove” and all the other tracks in between, naturally saving “Glue” and “Apricots” to the end. The record was written in a time when there was no live music, in a sense it was written to be listened at home, but seeing these tracks come to life in front of a massive digital screen making shapes behind a thick fog was an entirely different experience. The music, intentionally so of course, was produced for a live rave experience and this room full of 21+ starved ravers and friends of alike was ready to receive. It was an ethereal musical experience in an environment where everyone was ready to be everyone’s friend.  It was perfect. “Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.” – yes, I am quoting a TikTok, IYKYK.

The post Today we rave: Bicep live in Brooklyn appeared first on Quip Magazine.

Matt and Andy met in school, way back when they were eight years old. The coming of age years were spent clubbing and as they got older their paths split geographically but that did not stop these friends from setting up a joined music blog, Feel My Bicep, at the age of 20-ish. 

“This is before YouTube or Spotify. YouTube existed, but not for the music” shared Matt. “It was just cat videos. And we did focus on this music blog. It was a chance to [uncover unheard] music. We wanted to put music online that didn’t exist anywhere else. We wanted to put up b-sides, rarities, strange edits.“

For a few years the duo focused on the blog, which led them to consider a career in music and eventually, to begin experimenting with beats. The early taste of success lead to a few gigs and so Matt left the Middle East, where he had been living for a few years, and joined Adam in London. This was the time they both decided to focus on music full time: “That was three years of eating only bread and like deejaying only in clothing stores, [it was] really tough. But we kept going.” Eventually, the blog took the backseat and the music production took the wheel. Fast forward 11 years of slow and steady production Bicep release Isles, an album The Guardian called “the ultimate living-room rave” – but as we already know, this living-room friendly vibe will evolve to a live experience, an experience we are definitely here for. 

The album title, Isles,  is a culmination of different musical genres on the record, reflective of their geographical roots: “it’s quite apparent [from the styles on the album] that half of our life has been spent in Ireland and half of our life is spent in London,” pointed out McBriar, “And it was just like a reflection of the two islands,” Andy chimed in. Ireland brings forth influences like techno, trance, melodic, “quite in-your-face, quite aggressive music,”  while London “ is much deeper, much more influenced by all over the world. It’s like Jungle, the Garage, the Deep House, Jazz.” explained Matt. Once the album was completed “we reflected on the music we’d written and kind of understood that ‘Isles’ was a kind of a good way of summing up”. 

In some ways, this album is an ode to world music, something the duo are quite famous for sampling and mixing. This ability was “definitely born out of just me and Matt sitting in record stores all day,” said Andy. “We used to go in in the morning and spend like six hours actually sorting the records and getting paid in records we wanted.” A lot of their combined influences also come from old heavy hip hop, collected along with Japanese drumming recordings, Turkish pop, and “the Bulgarian choir stuff”. “We’ve actually made a website, bicepmusic.com/samples,” added Matt,  “and in that we actually discuss everything about all the samples used in the album. So definitely check it out.” 

For Isles Matt and Adam created 150 demos, which scaled down to 20 produced tracks which were cut down to a 10-track album. This time “for us, it was really important, especially having toured live for two or three years and not have a chance to write music, to just be super open and free and broad and kind of allow eventually that album to kind of come together naturally,” explained Matt. When it comes to track titles, however, the duo do think through the options – “we want the names to be ambiguous”. Andy points out that each track has its own meaning for them, “it’s quite amazing to even see it in different languages, certain tracks translate and people interpret them in their own way”. In the duo’s opinion, track titles can be restrictive and they don’t like to tell people the meaning “because I think it’s much more fun for people to imagine their own” sums up Matt. While some song titles, like “Atlas” and “Apricot,” are quite instructive the goal is to always keep things open and ambiguous: “It’s like there’s a balance,” jumped in Andy, “It’s really hard because if a track doesn’t suit the name, it kills us”. Quite a few weeks went into deciding on the track titles but the pressure of the album release date, expressed by the management, lead them to make choices we see on the record today.

Bicep released their wildly acclaimed self-titled debut album in 2017 after getting signed by Ninja Tune. The album’s lead single “Glue” became a touchpoint for electronic music that year and was later named “Track of the Year” by DJ Mag. The album release was followed by a wildly successful tour with features on stages like Primavera, Coachella, Glastonbury, and a 3-night run of shows at Printworks in London. The new album may seem calmer, but let’s not forget it was finished in social isolation and has a growing life of its own that we are yet to see. Having released Isles this year the duo have big plans (and hopes) for 2021 including headline dates across the UK, EU, and the US.

As we all wait for life-after-Corona to take stage Matt and Adam are focusing on their hopes and goals: “When you have hopes and goals, it’s a lot easier to cope” shares Matt, “I think at the beginning when it didn’t seem like there was any end, it was quite hard to have positivity. I feel like now with the vaccine, it’s looking a bit better.”

Photo credit: Dan Medhurs [top images], Vien Tran Van [below]

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