LUNCHMEAT FESTIVAL: WHERE EVERY ARTIST IS THE HEADLINER

words by GIULIA MARIA SCROCCHI

There are festivals you attend, and festivals you inhabit. Or better yet, festivals where you learn something. Not only about music, but about yourself. About the person you will be after having inhabited it. Lunchmeat, Prague's annual celebration of audio-visual experimentation, firmly belongs to the second category. From the moment you step inside, you can feel a clear shift: the air is different, heavier, more charged. This is not a place where you check your phone between sets, let alone during performances.

all images courtesy of LUNCHMEAT

Someone will tell you Lunchmeat has a “no-headliner attitude”. But the truth is every artist is the headliner at Lunchmeat. Every performance carries that weight, that sense of something unrepeatable. And the festival's production makes sure of it: the sound, the light, the spatial design all conspire to give each artist the conditions to fully land. Case in point, Saturday's opening set at 20:00 was The Bug. The Concert Hall was almost at full capacity. Is that what we imagine an opening slot to be? Don't think so.

Because if there's one other thing that will stay with you about this Czech festival, it's its community. At first glance, it might seem like a festival for the truly “obsessed” and that's also absolutely true. To fully appreciate Lunchmeat, you need trained ears, ready for discovery as much as for challenge. But once you've passed that first filter, what you'll find is a crowd of extraordinarily cool people – all those who love art, design, media art, and music – creating a new and unique community in the process.

Bapari opened Thursday with something we weren't quite prepared for. The emotions here were grounded in hazy shoegaze influences that flow into a trip-hop, underpinned by a velvety voice and a rock twist on the guitar. Their live performance really draws you into an intimate world, until, all of a sudden those basslines make you feel the melancholy. 

Yawning Portal was the emotional counterpoint. Dreamy, IDM-ish, ambient and trancey; “endless make-out music” as my friends said. Basically, the ideal soundtrack for the perfect kiss. Building on – or perhaps against it – was the concept of Woesum. Snow, roads, and the passage of time. Not exactly gloomy, but emotionally heavyhearted and deep in a way that's hard to articulate. Something close to early OPN in its register: that bittersweet euphoria, the feeling of living through something beautiful while already sensing it slipping away.

KMRU’s distinctive concrete-yet-abstract sound, dialogue perfectly with the kinetic audiovisual installation conceived by Nick Verstand and a fragrance specially created by Mareike Bode. Their interaction transformed the Concert Hall into something halfway between a cave and a vast, high-ceilinged space, bathing the entire room in the ‘heure bleue’ color.
Organic drone and dark ambient served just as a reminder what electronic music can do when it stops trying to move your feet and starts trying to move your brain.

Buena Tarde followed with metallic snares and both dubstep and industrial influences, dub and bass as constant physical glue. And here's the thing about Lunchmeat's crowd: no one dances only to a straight kick. The room moves when the music breaks, fragments. It's a crowd actively looking for the “other”.

Friday was wild in a different way. Nexus’ live brought hardcore rap to the stage, laying all their influences such as punk, industrial, dancehall, and noise on the booth. The vibe was more of a rage concert than an electronic music show, and we were so caught up in it. umru, PC Music-affiliated, transported us somewhere between 2010 and 2300, edits of anything and everything, from early 2000s pop hits to your favourite avant-pop track of recent years. Earning himself the title of one of the festival’s best DJ sets.

Although it may be difficult to pick out the best performance on Friday, PLF AV live delivered the most fascinating reinterpretation of post-punk we've ever heard: three people sounding like an entire orchestra, the genre translated into something absolutely contemporary. Almost a new genre, were it not for Elvin Brandhi 's voice, which was absolutely overwhelming and completely true to the form.

PAN artist Nunguja closed the night with a roll-up of tracks produced by titans between avant-garde experimental music, post-club and the Latin-bass music that most pulls you onto the floor.

Saturday brought The Bug with his Kevin Richard Martin alias alongside & Charlie Hope to present Sub Zero AV live. Cinematic, dense… very dense. It was almost as if you thought you could touch the music. Drone and experimental music that vibrated through your internal organs, a rotating 360-degree laser on a mirror. We stood very still and felt a lot. Then came the world premiere of Isama Zing & DJ GÄP’s live performance, where technology performed without human hands, giving voice to the hardware itself. Eight fog machines, four strobe lights, and twelve moving heads became co-authors. Zora Jones and Safety Trance were undoubtedly the stars of Saturday’s Concert Hall, each in their own fascinatingly different way. Jones’s voice, at once tender and forceful, bore the marks of pain, endurance and transformation, giving way to Safety Trance’s heady convergence of techno, hardcore, Latin bass and trance, which pushed the Concert Hall into a state of collective frenzy.

In the Club Stage, Kosu Nes & Urok AV live and Voronhil & Kuthi Jin answered the question of where electronic music could go. One through feverish sound design, the other by dragging theatre onto the dancefloor. Tratratrax’s Lechuga Zafiro & Bitter Babe closed it all. Zafiro, was an absolute monster at the decks. We stayed longer than planned and felt no guilt about it.

And then Sunday. Then Autechre. It's practically impossible to explain or recount what we heard, and not saw, as the 90-minute performance took place in complete darkness. Something fascinating about that darkness happening at Lunchmeat, the audio-visual festival par excellence. A contradiction, yes. And in that contradiction we found infinite beauty.

The writer had seen them in 2016 and thought she was prepared. She was very wrong. Ninety minutes of pure IDM, played by the very people who coined the genre. Throughout the entire performance we kept asking ourselves how they managed to sound so still futuristic. They reinvented, rewound, remanipulated a sound they themselves invented. And at a moment when electronic music is increasingly losing its sci-fi connotation, that robot on the cover of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (Warp, 1992) felt more real than ever. Like the present. The real one, ours.

Outside the NGP afterwards, a surreal silence. Everyone stood in whispers, aware of having witnessed a piece of electronic music history being written and rewritten by its own authors. What Lunchmeat does better than almost anywhere else is its refusal of an easy categorisation. What you hear here is never just one thing. It's always the influence of something, the consequence of something else. The festival holds that complexity without flattening it, which is rarer than it should be.

We left Prague slightly different. Somehow grown. Which, we suspect, was always the point.