You’ve probably read AMP’s review of Faster Than Sound in the current issue of Plan B - or, indeed, here on her blog - but I wanted to pop up a few short YouTube clips that hopefully give a slightly different glimpse of the event. Taking place at Bentwaters, a Cold War airbase notorious for a rash of UFO sightings, Faster Than Sound is a unique sort of festival: a mix of experimental electronic music, modern classical sounds, and digital art, all taking place in the sort of desolate whereabouts that suggests nuclear holocaust is just around the corner.

The site is free-roaming, meaning you could just flop down in the geodesic dome and listen to the music, or roam off to stare through distant chain-link fences at strange silos, explore long-derelict huts, or comb the further reaches for all manner of sound experiments like this, the 360 degree speaker circle, where acts including Sonic Arts Network and Haswell and Hecker played sets.

Perhaps the weirdest experience of the day was the forest walk, a path along the perimeter of the site you walk wearing headphones. Tune them into the correct frequency and you hear the crackly radio broadcast of a military pilot following an unidentifed flying object above Bentwaters back in the Eighties. The spooky thing being, I’d heard it before; it’s the same broadcast sampled on the first drum’n'bass record I ever bought, Photek’s 1995 single ‘UFO/Rings Around Saturn’. I spent the whole walk waiting for the drums to kick in.

There were bands, too - here’s a kinda wobbly excerpt from D.A.T Politics’ set.

Posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007by Louis Pattison