If Cardiff Psych & Noise Fest were a person, they’d be weird. They’d smell funny, and wear dirty jeans over broken trainers. They’d dance out of tune with the music in odd jerky motions, and when they finished their drinks they’d instantly spin on their heel and barge past you on the way to the bar for another brown ale (the weirdo’s drink).
Psych & Noise is the most precious little secret in the Cardiff music calendar. It doesn’t have any appeal for art students, trendy ravers or wiry indie folk; it’s a line-up honed for edgy, dirty people with a slightly glazed look behind the eyes, who got into this unnatural kind of music years ago and realised too late that they could never go back. It’s all strange, loud, angry and toys with the boundaries of social acceptability. For a long weekend in Cardiff once a year, the crazies have their place.
This year felt even more low-key than ever. Cardiff Psych & Noise used to take place along the entire length of Womanby Street; now it takes place entirely within Moon and across two floors of Clwb Ifor Bach, condensing all the action across one slither of the street. Angry, punished guitars shrieking out of the open doors in the early afternoon and causing passers-by to jump and stumble as they walk through.
Dedicated sorts could have turned up as early as Thursday evening for some noise, but the day festivities properly took-over on Saturday. Spünday kicked things off with a fat dose of American-style hardcore punk blasted through about a million pedals (pedals are the noisemaker’s bread and butter) laced with crunchy vocal samples and spidery guitar leads. Heronnoreh slotted cleanly into the ‘psych and noise’ descriptive search tag, mixing live drums with waves of moody moog synths; and then in the ultimate ‘noise’ genre statement, pulling out the ol’ saxophone for some topline wailing.
Whenever I personally think of noise bands, it’s always American names of old like Scratch Acid and The Jesus Lizard that pop to mind; wailing agonised vocals over pounding sludgy bass and screeching guitars that really helped define what the ‘noise’ style meant. Why Patterns seemed like a straight-up callback to that era, and this was where the Psych & Noise Fest vibe really came flooding back for the first time.
Made Of Teeth wouldn’t have been out of place at Fuel next door, and killed it with their Valleys-style thrash. Psych Fest’s edge goes perfectly with metal, and many of the acts definitely describe their music that way when their parents ask. TVAM were fantastic, bringing the biggest shoegaze synth beats and mixing them up with a bit of Boards Of Canada and Public Service Broadcasting for a powerful, cerebral set that stood apart from many of the acts that weekend style-wise.
From Clwb, we re-entered Moon to find Evil Blizzard just warming up. This Preston band would be my intro to Psych & Noise Fest for anyone wondering what the hell the festival was all about: great music, great crowd, a lot of noise, and grotesque Freddy Krueger-esque latex masks.
Day drinking had taken its toll, and with the next day came an absolute weapon of a hangover that nearly took us out of commission. Luckily Dactyl Terra were there to soften the blow. No strangers to the venues of Cardiff, Dactyl Terra blended old-school psychedelia riffage with vibrant surf-rock energy, and gently nudged our life-ending affliction down into a hazy trip.
London-based noisemakers Lunch Money Life potentially stole the show for me: a total zoo of raucous electronic jazz-like tracks with a major noise-punk energy that completely re-energised us and left us scouring the merch tables for their EP. Meanwhile, contrary to their cutesy name, Tangerinecat are a moody gothic pop outfit with a penchant for ominous pulsing synths, spectral hex-like vocals, and wild hurdy-gurdy solos that broke up the overt aggression of the festival really nicely.
A few of the acts at Psych Fest definitely blur lines with straight-up performance art, either through melodrama or spoken word etc. MXLX was one of those sorts. Crazy looping vocals over frenetic drums and blasts of analog energy turned the dusk set of Moon into a madhouse, climatically rising to a crushing wall of silence with the bloke physically on his knees- all for the deafening racket to blast straight back in again, taking out 14 pairs of eardrums and the windows of a Honda Jazz parked two streets away.
I’ll leave it with Haress, because sitting on the floor of Clwb in a stupor, watching slouch-shouldered as two guitarists and a drummer played winding, folky, duelling parts that must have been at least part-improvisation, felt like the perfect epilogue to what had been a perfect weekend of strange and wonderful sounds.
Cardiff Psych & Noise Fest, The Moon / Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Sat 25 + Sun 26 June
words JASON MACHLAB photos PETER EVANS / @petetakespictures
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