- Taico Club occupies a special place within Japan's musical calendar. Traditionally the first big-name fixture of the summer each year, it signals the start of the domestic festival season, and does so with assured poise. The festival has earned its good reputation for a number of reasons, but two stand out. The first is its length: lasting just under 24 hours (the music kicks off at 2 PM on the Saturday and runs through the night, wrapping up around lunchtime the following day), Taico Club offers a manageable and affordable alternative to three-day-plus events like Fuji Rock and Labyrinth. Located at the Kodama-No-Mori campsite in the Kiso Mountains, the festival is conveniently accessible by car or train, only a few hours journey from Tokyo. One could feasibly turn up with little more than a rain jacket, nap for a couple of hours under a tree and head back home, although you'd never guess it from the hordes of experienced campers showing up with enough equipment and provisions to last a week.
The second reason for Taico Club's success is the consistency of its lineups—a dependable, if perhaps predictable approach that is mirrored by many of Japan's other music festivals. Annual fixtures such as veteran selector Moodman and British cratedigger Nick The Record, who holds down the afterhours slot at one of the festival's two main stages, are joined by a rotating cast of Japanese artists and some of techno's bigger international names. This year's repeat visitors included Warp signee Clark, whose textured, analogue-heavy live set was compelling without sounding much like his recent recorded material, Ableton co-developer Robert Henke as Monolake (now without any visual component to his performances and somewhat lacking any real spark as a result), and IDM pioneers Autechre.
The Manchester duo were one of the festival's most eagerly awaited acts. Their melodramatic opening—plunging the entire stage and its surrounding premises into darkness (save only for the on-site portaloos, to the relief of anyone who happened to be inside at that moment)—only heightened the sense of anticipation, combating the cold mountain rain that had begun to lash down. Their actual set, though, did little to build on that initial momentum. The clarity and quality of the soundsystem did justice to Autechre's performance, which leant heavily towards the sound-design end of the spectrum, but it lacked the power and weight to compensate for the challenging way in which the music ebbed and flowed without any obvious arc. When the lights came back on at the end, the dance floor looked notably patchy.
Indeed, the sizeable dance floor never really threatened to fill up at any point, as half of the festival's attendees were up the hill at Taico Club's other stage. Home to festival favourites like Osakan jazz act Ego-Wrappin', J-Pop-influenced trio Clammbon and techno stalwart Takkyu Ishino, these acts harnessed their years of festival experience to create a far more lively atmosphere than the po-faced four-four presented by Marcel Dettmann and Svreca down below. Even the international acts seemed to fare better up in the greener, more chilled-out second stage. Robert Glasper, whose early evening set impressed with its diverse instrumentation, spanned jazz, electronica and R&B and culminated in something far more than the sum of its parts.
But that's not to say that all of the electronic acts on the main stage were a let-down. 4AD's Sohn reminded the audience that not all live sets have to consist of just a laptop and an iPad, flying out dozens of keyboards and a full backstage crew so as to replicate the multi-layered synth and vocal intricacy that made his debut album Tremors such a hit. Meanwhile, Nosaj Thing, fresh from having his tour gear stolen in Texas, showed just how much you can do with a laptop and an iPad, pushing audiovisual technology to its limit in a stunning collaboration with Japanese visual pioneer Daito Manabe. The L.A. beatmaker and his crew had apparently been on-site installing the visual component for a full week, and the work paid off. With ten cameras and three Xbox kinects strategically placed around the stage, Manabe was able to track and broadcast Nosaj Thing's performance from every conceivable perspective, flowing seamlessly between angles while throwing in digital effects on the fly, to create a truly multimedia, multi-sensory experience.
There was plenty to see in the gaps between the two larger stages. RBMA showcased some of Japan's most exciting underground talent, including ambient beatsmith Yosi Horikawa, Osaka-based electronic musician Ryo Murakami and Diskotopia founder A Taut Line. There was even space for legendary experimental act Boredoms, who occupied their own individual stage-of-sorts. (They just had five drummers this time, rather than the 91 percussionists that were present when they played Freedommune a couple of years ago.) All in all, there was almost too much going on, an overly generous lineup that threw up more timetable clashes than any three-day festival is ever likely to. This was both Taico Club's biggest strength and its biggest weakness.