rowf! rowf! rowf! 5

Rowf! Rowf! Rowf! was a whole lot better this year than last. It didn't quite have the shock and flash of 2007 but there was plenty there to keep me alive. As usual I couldn't name you half the bands I saw even having had a quick flick through Last FM and MySpace. Highlights were the first few acts on Saturday (except that I missed Beach Fuzz) who made some pretty harsh noise, including a combination of Smear Campaign/Nackt Insekten. Later on Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides were excellent as you'd expect. But because I was knackered I bailed early and missed Blood Stereo - fucking fucking cock bollox shit. Sunday was a bit more chilled with some quieter and folkier acts. Again arrived late and missed the openers, but then didn't move for the rest of the day. Hey, I'm not as sociable as I want to be, and neither friends or family were able to make it down. But I managed to talk to a couple of people - though only after they talked to me. A couple of cool surprises late on Sunday, a woman with a guitar who I thought was going to be folky but played a really scuffed and corroded blues, her voice almost scraped out of the frame. Her set was way too short. And to finish Blues Control looked initially like they might be kind of ho-hum but after about half a minute they drove you into a trance. I had to shut my eyes to get the full effect, but then it felt like I might fall over. And maybe I should have done - I might still be falling and who knows where I could go.

In the downtime I managed to scrawl off some notes for a new poem, wrote September's sound poetry CD-R (I have a lot of field and sound source recording to get done), and finished reading Sean Bonney's Document. Which means I've completed both that and companion volume Baudelaire in English. Excellent, I might write about them later.

Bottom line, if you like harsh guitar noise or harsh electronics or abstract sounds - be they jazzy, electronic or from unconventional sources, if you like people doing things close to sound poetry, if you like anything that's unaccountably neglected by the mainstream then Rowf! Rowf! Rowf! is a good place to come. To be honest I'm still not that taken with Islington Mill as a venue, but they seem to have got to grips with it better this year.