Where do I begin?

I'll try The Night Before.

Mindful that I had Sŵn to attend and be busy at, I promised myself that I would not drink on Friday night at Telfords. It wasn't the promise of a raging alcoholic -- these days I only drink on Friday nights. Maybe it is that habitual aspect to "my drinking" that meant it was impossible for me to refuse the pints of Guinness that were lined up on the shelf in the DJ booth like scrumptious black apples of Eve.

The Loving Cup played and were good, if a little over-long. There is great musicianship at the heart of their Stonesy-take on Americana, but I can't connect emotionally with what they're doing. It impresses me, but it doesn't move me. However I am very very glad that they're getting the attention that their hard work and ability so richly deserves [Radio 2 sessions etc.]. Not for me, but definitely for a significant audience of others.

My tunes went down well too, I think.

I'm looking forward to this coming Friday already, so it must have left happy memories somewhere in my cortex, if that is what cortexes are for.

If I hadn't sluiced a hundred pints of Guinness through my brain over Friday and Saturday night, I might have been able to recall some specifics.

I got home at 4-ish.

I had promised myself I would get in by 2:30, but promises to myself are broken easily. I had had fun but I wish I had got in earlier so that I had the time to trim my face before the train later that morning.

Big panic getting to the train. I was late late late. I forgot my house keys, my Sŵn t-shirt, my headphones, but I did manage, at least and at last, to crawl on a train to Cardiff, and so the journey to Sŵn began in earnest.

Jack Sharp was on the train talking with enough volume to challenge your average in-house rig.

It was good to see Jack. He was travelling down from Anglesey for the gig, which is brilliant commitment. And he wasn't the only one. Just across from us there was a girl from Bangor on her way to see Klaus Kinski.

She won't have been disappointed.

Cardiff was a boggle of people and lights and sound when we got off the train. Sleep deprivation and adrenaline create unsettling psychedelic experiences from even the most banal activities. Walking up to Clwb from the train station with Jack was like Apocalypse Now gaudy with Christmas decorations from Land of the Neon Giants.

The amount of people on the streets, spilling out of shops and pubs like the cream leaking out the last mouthful of a custard slice was bewildering. We passed some Sŵn shows already in full swing. But such is the size of Cardiff, and such are the amount of pubs and clubs, that an event of the size and magnitude of Sŵn is 'only' a morsel of what is happening in Cardiff on a weekend night in Chester.

Everything was running to time in Clwb when we got there. The in-house engineers were brilliant, unflustered and organised. I have never been involved in a gig, ever, where there wasn't panic. Dim panic at Sŵn, though. Well, certainly not at our night!

The Stilletoes were soundchecking. They sounded grrrrreeat so I went to the hotel [Angel], dumped my bag, changed my t-shirt for one with fooking long arms on it [big mistake later -- I started overheating as soon as things got busy], left my CD's in my room, had to go back to the room after getting confused by the Angel's lift system, and eventually got back to Clwb in time to interview Klaus Kinski and Stilletoes.

Being in a band is like being in a closed gang where you form your own language and use in jokes as verbal hexes to protect you from the outside world. I've yet to meet a band who are as adept at terra-forming as Klaus Kinski.

Except, in their case, you could call it 'terror forming'. [cue bad dum pah! on the cabaret drum kit]

Their world is like some hyper surreal Tim-Burton-films-Eraserhead-with-Spike-Milligan-starring version of the world that I am familiar with. But it is that that makes them so compelling. I imagine that you become adept at shaping the world around you into whatever weird forms are most entertaining when you grow up in Llanfairfechan. That's not to be disrespectful of Llanfairfechan. Elemental landscapes, violent skies and air as cool and clean as surgical tables provide no diversions, comfort or entertainment when you're young. Jack Sharp said as much on the train about Anglesey. It's beautiful, but it just becomes a beautiful and taunting background to the battles against boredom that young provincial lives are destined to fight.

The Stilletoes' take on the world is Day Glo-different. Maybe Criccieth, or wherever it is that Efa and Iago are from, is inherently more upbeat. Maybe geography has nothing to do with it. Efa is a major force of unalloyed charisma, imaginative power, confidence and fearlessness. If Efa was a drug, we'd all be happier and feel younger, but -- as she isn't -- we'll have to make do with the music. Which will do fine for now.

Do not patronise the Stilletoes. Immediately after their set, a bloke outside was telling me how he'd hated them, "they can't play or keep in time, or anything", he said, risking a poke in his funless eyeball.

They can play.

They can keep in time.

That the set is allowed to spin wildly away from such elitist conservatism is perhaps what is at the heart of their appeal. They as a band understand, implicitly, that plodding through songs and making sure your fingers are like little soldiers following orders all the time is dull dull dull compared to what happens if you just UNLEASH.

By the end of their set the Stilletoes were as tight and in tune as any other poncey, chinstrokey motherfucker who graced a Sŵn stage over the weekend. But the Stilletoes had also given us boundless enthusiasm, irreverence and a feeling that they make the world a better and a brighter place. And no learned-by-rote scale or arch instrumentation can compete with that.

They were a triumph.

That Ann and Helen Peppermint Patti also thought so was a source of great joy to me. It was ace to meet them. They exude that same enthusiasm as Efa. It pours out of their eyes and their voices like a healing stream of light.

At this point, I had already given up trying to DJ. The CDJ's were the wrong way round for my piggy brain and had taken a violent dislike to my CD-R's, taking over a minute to cue a song. So, I left it to Soundhog and Huw Williams. They played ace songs that made people come up to the DJ booth and say things like, "I never thought I'd hear Pere Ubu in a bloody nightclub!".

They did us proud and I think they enjoyed it. The challenge of Clwb Ifor Bach for DJ's at Sŵn is that the moment a band finished downstairs, a band would start upstairs. So people naturally gravitated towards the live music.

I saw a song and a half of a majorly brilliant Joy Formidable. They were so good that people were still gushing about them HOURS later. I wish I had had the time to catch more, but I ha..ogram to interview and Klaus Kinski to watch.

Klaus Kinski sound like the kind of nightmare you don't want to wake up from. It's an intimidating, but listenable, storm of noise, power and surreal poetry from their singer and provocateur, James.

In amongst The Storm there are great musical minds at work. It's not all black. There are fascinating eddies of warped guitar and bass shifting beneath the violent surface.

Drummer, Edwin [astonishingly, standing in as drummer] is the crank shaft around which it all turns. He looked like a character out of a Dr Seuss book, elevated hair defying the rest of his head like a school static experiment. He drove the songs forward like bayonets through our ears.

James looked like a man in the midst of a terrifying breakdown.

He spent half the gig on the floor, writhing, sex battling a pillar, wrestling with his girlfriend, Nomi. It was a performance that definitely polarised opinions. I thought they were awesome, in the original, non-hyperbolic sense of the word. I heard opinions that agreed with mine, and a good few that didn't.

Some thought them contrived.

I didn't detect a whiff of that.

Some thought they -- particularly James -- weren't confrontational / intimidating enough! Again, I don't agree, but how refreshing it is to stick a band on that polarise opinions like that.

I wouldn't dare intimate that they should go even further with their performances. I get the sense that painful depths are journeyed to make a music this intense. Much as I was blown away by the performance, I hope that the process they go through in writing and performing their music is cathartic and positive for them. I would hate to think that I was, in some way, exploiting someone else's pain... that's art, for you, though, isn't it? Intellectual rape.

By the time KK has finished, I was fraying at the edges, I hadn't eaten, hadn't had enough sleep to call it sleep, and I had an overwhelming sense of not being anywhere near clever, young, or pretty enough to be involved with Sŵn. Tiredness brings with it a deterioration in my self confidence, see. We all feel like that, though, don't we? I shall stop harping on.

I love Ectogram. I do. The whole point of my contribution to Sŵn was to 1) bring some bands down from North Wales [not as a crusade: Sŵn did a bloody good job of supporting the North, too: Gallops, Joy Formidable, Camera (who cancelled, I think) etc.], 2) to stick on bands that are unpredictable, original and challenge general preconceptions as to what music 'is'; or, more accurately, what *is* music.

There is no doubt, in my mind, that Ectogram *is* music.

It's a little like hearing music from an alien culture for the first time: Javanese drummers, or Japanese violins, where the sounds and scale are that alien they don't make sense, initially. You can feel your brain having to find new gears to slip into to appreciate what you're hearing.

Then it clicks.

The music takes form and, all of a sudden, you're hearing remarkable tones and harmonies that exist beyond the palette of normal music. It's like discovering new colours you hadn't known existed. It's a music that makes you wonder why we are, generally, drawn to such a small part of the spectrum; why we've been content, in Western society, to enjoy music fashioned from 12 notes when there are an infinite amount of others in between.

Another hackneyed visual comparison would be to TV's or computer displays: we're very happy with our high res screens that display tens of millions of colours and we wouldn't dream of going back permanently to 16 colour displays, or black and white (as satisfying as black and white can be).

Don't get me wrong, here: Ectogram aren't espousers of a completely new and radical sonic philosophy. I know that. But they do make music that is stimulating, provocative, frequently very beautiful, occasionally eerie and almost unlistenable. They make music that would make the X-Factor judges shit their pants, and I can think of no higher compliment than that! [Not the most pleasant image, though, I grant you.]

They are still rooted in some of the conventions of rock music: Maeyc's phenomenal, motorik drumming, electric guitars through amps and FX pedals; but they do sound like they aspire to stretching the possibilities of those conventions, which makes for a thrilling and challenging listen.

I'm so so grateful to Huw and John for the opportunity [I could write the same amount of words again eulogising just how ace I think Sŵn is], and to all of the bands for playing, and to Clwb Ifor Bach's incredibly efficient and hard-working staff, and to Ed Richmond for sorting out the recording for us, and to those incredible engineers in the BBC van who could have recorded anything that was thrown at them and made it sound ace, and to Soundhog and Huw and a hundred others, at least.

I tumbled out of Clwb after Cats in Paris because I was taking up valuable floorspace that could have been better appreciated by the Vinyl Vendetta's incredible following [a queue stretching all the way up Womanby Street].

Huw and I went for a curry and some beer and I was happy tired and sad that it was all over.

I would love to come back next year and do something completely different.

I'm thinking of something with vocal harmonies. Back to the top of the page...