Fckn Bstrds at ADM Festival in Amsterdam
The Fckn Bstrds had played at our venue, the Loch in Enschede a few months before I met them again at ADM Festival in October (https://admfestival.nl/).
It felt as though the organisation and technical support were abandonning the band as they made sure to have them play last and without a sound engineer; as if they’d been expecting an act of terror and had wanted to have the chance to flee from it. As it turned out, the performance measured up to these expectations.
At the Loch, the act consisted of three performers who had used their synthesizers to make Harsh Noise and produced a mess with props of plastic trash they had brought and implemented in their show. They ripped up pillows and scattered the filling, threw packaging waste around and generally distributed trash in the space. Most of the visitors in Enschede watched the chaotic spectacle with fascination and disblief but didn’t really get involved themselves.
Here in Amsterdam the atmosphere was completely different. The audience which had been attentive and observant though rather passive during previous performances had suddenly taken to dancing wildly. Soon this turned into moshing and throwing the band’s props into the crowd. Far from a conventional show where the performers are in focus of the audience, here, the band had almost completely stepped into the background of focus and rather accompanied the madness going on around them with harsh, uncomfortable, disturbing noises that matched the ongoing scene perfectly.
Imagine this: A group of seven individuals dressed up in colourful fluffy though extremely trashy costumes plays their nightmarish sounding instruments on one side of the area giving space to about 100 individuals. The space was filled. Now and then, one of the performers dressed up in all sorts of packaging waste would leave their instrument, enter the crowd and throw some random object around: pieces of bubble wrap, expanded foam or plastic sheets which the crowd would pick up and continue throwing around. As an, initially, rather passive member of the audience I was continuously busy with removing pieces of trash from my face which were circulating above the crowd. At some point, the enthusiasm for violent interaction caught on and I found myself moshing, throwing trash around, dancing and thoroughly enjoying the chaos. Seemingly mindlessly people pushed each other, ran into oneanother - gave their physical energy way and moved expressively and violently.
As you might imagine, it’s easy to feel disadvantaged in such a situation being a rather petite human and it requires courage to engage. The experience of moshing at punk concerts in London in my early twenties had taught me though that within this kind of chaos and violent madness people look out for each other. If I fall to the ground I can be sure that I’ll be immediately picked by the next best person - instantaneous solidarity.
I started playing with this element of applied solidarity and went beyond the pure physical interaction of chaotically pushing and pulling to establishing subtle, more intimate connections with a few individuals around me. This felt like creating awareness for each other’s agency, eg. by leaning heavily against someone standing next to me who was busily pushing others violently and kept unconsciously leaning back against me until they noticed the action. Small things. For me, moshing is not about anger, it’s about direct physical contact.
I’m not sure how long this scene continued, maybe for an hour, maybe longer. While I was entangling myself more and more in the scene, thoughts about crowd control and ‘letting off steam’ crept into my mind. If all the energy which was being released during this performance would be channelled into something the crowd could actually achieve great things. Or, were we actually producing ‘something’? Did the chaos we produced count as ‘something’? Why did I have thoughts about being ‘productive’ instead of valuing the undetermined and loose?
There is an apparent answer: I was raised to believe in norms of personal fulfilment through productivity within a society subjugated by Capitalist ideals. It felt weirdly good to put all my energy into something which actually was ‘nothing’. It felt like breaking a routine of ordered thought patterns. Instead of doing things with a reason in mind as I usually do this was the ultimate experience of submitting to chaos. This was applied nihilism and I loved it.