Driving in to Asheville, North Carolina, the succession of ammo and live bait stores abruptly give way to stores full of dreamcatchers and crystals instead. Like Austin, Texas or Olympia, Washington, Asheville is an outpost of crunchy in an otherwise un-granola-ed state. Also like Austin, home to SXSW, Asheville is becoming famous for its cultural event Moogfest.
This is where Dr Robert (“Bob”) Moog invented the Moog synthesiser in 1967, and his influence is hard to overstate. His creation effectively facilitated electronic music and it is not hyperbole to say that pop music sounds the way it does because of him. Moog still has its factory here, where just 17 workers make the machines by hand, honouring the geeky idealism of their eccentric progenitor.
Most festivals engender a kind of aggressive rabidity, a “how much fun can I have” mentality, but Moogfest, now in its tenth year, seems remarkably lacking in that fun-glutton mindset. Perhaps that’s because its five days are as much a technology conference as a music festival, and the earnest curiosity of people who get up for a 10am synth-building workshop adds a nice balance to the party monster contingent.
Occasionally over the week, the two came together. Dan Deacon’s Thursday night show was, as always, as much a mass playgroup for adults as a musical performance. His turbo-blurted electronica is fun, but his ability to orchestrate an enormous crowd in dance games is revelatory.
More subtle was another Thursday set from Warp signing Clark, which served as a reminder that bass-dropping EDM can be truly beautiful. The patrons of the tiny theatre that he played all abandoned their upholstered seats to greet the sounds and visuals on their feet.
The Flying Lotus show, which took place on Wednesday, was at capacity long before it began, with a line that stretched blocks, and those who made it in were right to feel smug. He professed to “not knowing what the fuck I’m going to do tonight” and there followed an improvised and explosive set (in both senses: he proudly blew out a speaker).
That came after an appealing, if workmanlike, show from the Pet Shop Boys, who were perhaps resigned to accepting that the biggest draws were Kraftwerk who played three performances over the course of two nights. They seemed the most Moog-ish of all the festival’s headliners, not so much for being the archetypal synth pioneers, but rather for their kitsch geekery. Their 3D show, which has played in both London and New York, is glorious not for its spectacle, but for its lack of it. Four middle-aged German men dressed in bodysuits, positioned behind four perfectly spaced stands, made the measured and precise movements of surgeons. The only time, in fact, that any of them make any contact with the audience was when Ralf Hutter raised his head to sing.
Their music remains indelible, endlessly sampled and profoundly influential. These are songs about modernity, or rather, the now-outdated vision of modernity, and in heralding a future that has now passed, they have a quaint retrograde feel, compounded by the backdrops of 70s autobahns and Amstrad computers.
But ze robots have a sense of humour too: the visual highlight was the moment a retro-futurist spaceship moved into view, hovered above a map and then landed. Their chosen spot? The audience had already guessed the punchline, as a lo-res image of Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium materialised on the screen.
More remarkable than an alien landing was what happened to the historic venue on Saturday night. In gold leggings, a lime sweatshirt and black bucket hat, MIA swaggered on stage and kept swaggering for a too-short two hours, culminating in a female-only audience stage invasion for Bad Girls that swiftly became an ass-shaking contest.
She and her dancers acted as though they were claiming the stage as an act of bravado, swinging around sweat towels and erupting into movement as and when they felt like it. Sometimes they burst into synchronicity (the four of them capering back and forth the stage like cartoon thieves was a great moment) but everything else was freestyled. By the time she got to Paper Planes, MIA had managed something miraculous – she’d made this genteel venue feel like an illegal rave.
