No Bounds festival review – pristine rhythms, punky noise and visceral electronic thrills
Rare is the music festival that kicks off with an audiovisual polemic against reproduction pieced together from blurry clips of Japanese pornography – but then not every music festival is bold enough to book Terre Thaemlitz as its opening act. The Kawasaki-based DJ is always good for an unorthodox viewpoint, and by the end of this thrillingly provocative presentation a room full of twentysomething ravers find themselves unexpectedly committed to the destruction of the nuclear family.
Thaemlitz’s disturbing, thought-provoking show adds a brief political frisson to a festival that’s otherwise all about the sheer thrill of electronic sound. Sheffield’s legacy as a crucible of electronic innovation seems to hold little sway over this first edition of No Bounds, which draws its lineup from around the world – though local computer-music elder Mark Fell is given a hero’s welcome, a testament to this crowd’s appetite for challenging rhythms.
Crowd-challenging … No Bounds festival. Photograph: Alex Morgan
Trafalgar Warehouse, an art space in the centre of the city, is the location for both Thaemlitz’s Deproduction and a gritty sound installation by Fell. It also plays host to the visceral sound art of Rashad Becker and Kara-Lis Coverdale, as well as the punky tech-noise of Bristol’s Giant Swan, who crush the room to a pulp with their improvised rave. Bringing a more meditative glow is Michigan producer Laurel Halo, who approaches songs from her latest album, Dust, as if she’s just emerged from an ashram, channelling the smoky mysticism of Alice Coltrane and Florian Fricke. Elsewhere, workshops on modular synthesisers and coding your own “algorave” – a brilliantly nerdy method of live performance based around music created from algorithms – mean there’s a strong interactive element to the weekend, too.
The nucleus of the action, however, is undoubtedly Hope Works, a club in the industrial north-east of the city. The lineup is relentlessly cutting-edge: DJ Lag demonstrates Durban’s menacing “gqom” sound, Batu brings broken, bass-heavy techno from Bristol, and Juliana Huxtable and Ikonika provide relief from relentless 4/4 with their hybrid club noise. Plus, on Saturday night, there’s a chance to appreciate the perpetual appeal of Detroit – a sister city to post-industrial, rave-friendly Sheffield – represented by DJ Stingray 313’s electro smackdown and the indefatigable Jeff Mills, who reconfirms the minimalist thrills of techno. Perhaps the toppling of social norms will have to wait until morning.