What we wrote at the time

Music Lovers’ Field Companion is a festival that we hope refuses to accept the status quo. It’s a celebration of music that is compellingly different and differently compelling to your everyday, run of the mill music festival; a 3-day survey taking in all manner of disparate musical activity, which at its core shares an honest and basic artistic kinship; one of exploration and of the expression of personally discovered musical truths. Those truths can reheard by the adventurous not as screams, or the timbral sigh of bowed metal, or a gruff holler incanted through a sax, but as melodious and exhilarating affirmation, reasons to be alive, things that express something personal, something to share in. And we sort of hope and figure that you might be that adventurous type, that you might fancy sharing in some of those gruff hollers. Oh, and here’s a short disclaimer: we’re well aware that these kinds of claims are made all the time by people marketing music festivals, or for that matter trying to sell you records/ sofas/ city living apartments; that this or that thing is unique, that these things right here are exclusive, you’ll-never-see-the-like-again!  How can so many things be so exclusive?  But we’ve honestly tried here to put together a festival that contains surprises, both for people already familiar with experimental music, and for a wider, curious audience.  It fords as many underground currents in music as possible, so that it’s broad and challenging to loads of people.  Kan Mikami doesn’t normally play on bills with Radu Malfatti, and you won’t see Polwechsel on the same line up as Ascension most nights of the week either.  We’ve worked at the programme so that it’s as diverse as possible, so that there are no cop-outs, no concessions, just incredible musicians, so that each performance is as unlike the last as it is from the kind of music most music festivals would present you with. And in that, although it’s maybe not unique, we do hope it’s rewarding.

MLFC 07 was reveiwed by Nick Cain for the Wire here, and by Scott McKeating for Rock a Rolla here