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The Great Escape 2016, day 3, part 2

This evening had tons of clashes, but I made my first difficult choice by opting for Jambinai at the university's Sallis Benney Theatre, an excellent decision. Jambinai are a Korean band that fuse traditional instruments with rock. They were fierce and extremely talented and also just really absorbing to watch. One long song had me almost in tears; I bought both their CDs (the second one hadn't yet been officially released, woohoo!) and discovered that this particularly moving song is called "커넥션 (Connection)," and I would urge you to put it on, loud, so you can hear all the nuances, and just sit back and close your eyes and let it wash over you. It's that one repeated melody bit whose poignancy really got me.

After a bit of a break, I returned to Patterns Upstairs to see Cosovel, a Polish woman with intriguing electro pop (her bio on the festival page says that the lyrics are based on translations of poems by modernist poet Srecko Kosovel). She was so bubbly and charming, and sweetly excited to be there, which made her set even more enjoyable. For visual interest, abstract patterns projected behind her during her performance cast her, and her backing musicians, into stripey or jaggedy shadows. I didn't often see people dancing at the smaller venues, especially if they weren't dimmed like traditional gig venues, but they were dancing so enthusiastically at the front that the guy next to me, filming on his iPad mini, had to relocate lest he capture nothing but bouncing fans.

I had other plans for the lineup that evening, but was suddenly knackered and... kind of ready for the festival to be done and dreading it being over at the same time. I didn't want to go back to my Airbnb room at 22:00; that just seemed like a defeated ending. I checked the timetable for the Unitarian Church, because I thought a gig that was sort of halfway between Patterns (on the seafront) and my room (by the station) would be a gentle way to start winding down.

Seeing dance music duo Mieux there sounded like a good idea. And a gig where I could sit seemed like an even better idea.

And it was! The two Austrian guys were kind of adorably nerdy/normcore, and told all of us sitting there that this was their first seated concert, and we should feel free to get up and dance. Most of us stayed slumped in our seats, nodding our heads or chair dancing as we had energy or lack of inhibition for, but there were about 20 people (in varying states of inebriation) at the back dancing wildly. Halfway through the set, two guys who'd been among the more frenetic of the chair dancers got up to dance for real with the crew at the back, and then for the very last song, one of the dancers led everyone up front. You could see Mieux were tickled by this tribute; it was all a thousand kinds of adorable.

So... that was my festival. The next morning I got up early and had a quick walk down the beach one last time, especially because the sun was shining (on Saturday it rained on and off, sometimes heavily, for pretty much the whole day). It was mostly quiet: day-trippers hadn't arrived yet and most of the festivalgoers were either sleeping off a hangover or already getting their trains. I dipped my fingers in the water again and took a selfie and some photos of the beach, and listened again to the rattle of the sea as the tide sucked itself back through all those pebbles.

I was dubious that the Great Escape would feel in any way as exciting and lovely as by:larm; it just seemed so much bigger and potentially more stressful, and in a way it was -- in the weeks before, I got pretty frantic with my spreadsheet and trying to note down whose songs I'd clicked 'like' on the festival playlist, and just despairing. But in the end, it was all right: there was no way I could see all those 400 bands, and I didn't want to, and that was okay.

Also, the ocean, THE OCEAN! I grew up very near the beach and spent a lot of time there growing up, and I miss it in London.

This was my second bit of holiday this year involving gigs (the first being by:larm), and so far it's worked out really well, after years of me saying, huh, the Great Escape's got a good line-up, I should've sorted out going this time. I'll try to go next year, I think. Who's with me?

#tge16 #jambinai #cosovel #mieux