Through the Bathroom Window at ATP

Welcome to the news.
All Tomorrow's Parties at Minehead, Somerset, England is a music festival, in a cultural time-warp of a town in the southwest of the country. The fun is mostly in being gobsmacked by groups you hardly believed could exist, let alone thought could be any good. M83 provided shiny, propulsive Europop of a kind that is usually edited out of the strictly regulation rebellion. The drummer had a hygienic perspex screen separating him from the rest of the group. Chris says this is to prevent "spillage". Health dispensed constructions of very controlled and tightly cut noise, rhythmically dense and mutating. They had very little body fat. Liam Finn was an Antipodean guitar songwriter with properly psychedelic ideas about structure and instrumentation. His lady sidekick appeared extremely drunk but in command of events. Killing Joke were a dreadful spectacle of phoned-in performances, red golf visors, contract-fulfilling stances and barely manageable paranoid ideation. Soulless, with no redeeming features. Anti Pop Consortium were technical rappers, built by electro-committee. Devo made everybody laugh ("You have chosen to attend a Devo concert"), and balanced cleverness with cartoonishness perfectly.

"Under the influence of fright and terror"

Tonight's movie has been 'The Testament of Dr Mabuse'. The people are virtually puppet-like, and the more hollow they are, the more believable. The likeable police commissioner seems to belong in an entirely different film, as he is humane, irascible, an 'instinctive' copper. Mabuse's sheer drive, undiluted motive is far too powerful to permit anything as presumptuous as a personality among the criminal gang or the flunkies, turnkeys, petty officials and guards who populate the film. Mabuse's plotting is the plot. The fact of a relentless, undead destructive force is the engine and chassis of the film, and it's as compelling as hell.