Syd Arthur + Boot Lagoon, OSMC

I'd really been looking forward to this one, got back from Devon just in time for it. Le Rigg (who did the Furthur stage lightshow at LOTF this summer, specialising in old analogue techniques, but collaborating with a VJ, to great effect) were doing the projections.

The Boot Lagoon support was a surprise, didn't realise they were playing until I arrived. Their set felt like being dragged on a whirlwind tour through a mansion, each room having been designed by MC Escher (just when you were starting to make sense of one, you got dragged into another). They'd fused a lot of their material together in the spirit of Soft Machine performances...very lively, very confident. Pete the guitarist is playing better and better each gig — some of the jam sections featured a surprisingly Santana-like guitar sound.

Le Rigg (who were actually projecting onto a side wall, this being filmed, VJ-remixed, and projected digitally behind the stage) stepped things up a notch when Syd Arthur started their set (they kicked off with that Trilok Gurtu instumental, the title of which still eludes me). The set was quite similar in content to the recent ones I've witnessed: most of the forthcoming album plus three newer pieces (including the extraordinary "Truth Seeker"). No time for an encore, so they just squeezed an even newer piece (a work in progress, a very promising kind of Afro-Crimson fusion) into the last few available minutes. I may have blogged this before, but in a time when any media-hyped opportunist singing over a vacuous pop track calls themself an "artist", Syd Arthur are a rare example of a young band truly worthy of being described as "artists".


the first live performance of "Truth Seeker" &mdash LOTF 2010
I'd been grappling with the philosophy of Henri Bergson that morning (and in the preceding weeks) and in the particular passage I'd been reading, he uses the experience of hearing music as a way of illustrating a certain point about time and consciousness. Somehow, SA's music, which seemed to be "birthing itself in every moment" experienced in a full psychedelic immersive audio-visual environment, seemed to cause certain things I'd read to click into place in my mind. Having hurried home, I feverishly dictated a jumble of partially-formed, Bergson-inspired philosophical notions into a voice recorder, to be sorted out later (some of this, concerning the relationship between number — one of Bergson's major topics — and 'physical reality', is going to make it into the third volume of my current trilogy).