After three years, the music on the Gurten gets going again. The Thursday evening brings exactly the right choice to set a musical and socio-political accent after the silence.
Gentle soul, blues, hip-hop, rock – and everything in limbo: Arlo Parks on Thursday at the Gurten Festival.
The cooling water of the Aare is far away up here on the Gurten. You have to stretch to even spot the green-blue ribbon from the festival site. And yet the water is present. As longing. as a state. As a place of refuge.
Not only because the sun is still beating down mercilessly on Bern’s local mountain on this Thursday evening, but also because the music, which resounds at you from the marquee stage from 7 p.m., puts you in an underwater mode. Pieces of great suppleness and lightness, pieces that take their place, that strive for breadth, seem to float somehow.
pure emotion
It’s the grooves of the young Londoner Anaïs Marinho aka Arlo Parks. 21 years young, she won last year’s Mercury award for best album with her outstanding debut “Collapsed in Sunbeams” – and has now embarked on something of an endless world tour to bring her songs into the world. “I think I’ve been on the road since February,” she says, beaming despite knee pain, before the concert. “But I don’t know that exactly anymore.”
It’s like her music: she seems to have put herself in a state of limbo in which she is now drifting. Lots of things meet there: gentle soul, blues, hip-hop, rock. Just something not: clear formats, pop calculations. It really seems like someone is going by the feel of some of the chords here. These trigger memories, and songs are developed from them.
Songs whose themes are in stark contrast to the music. It’s almost always about loss, separation or mental problems. “Black Dog”, her biggest hit, is about leaden depression. “Just take your medicine and eat some food, I would do anything to get you out of your room,” it says there. Your texts are very concrete and pictorial, get straight to the point.
In “Portra 400” she sings about making rainbows out of something painful. And that’s where her self-empowerment lies: She takes the weight out of a lot, dances incessantly and despite her injured knee across the stage and moves almost as if she were Eddie Vedder and would conduct Pearl Jam through their greatest hits. The music in its live version almost sounds a bit too nice, too funky.
“The music I like is based on pure feeling,” she tries to outline her taste. “It’s about capturing an emotion – with all the mistakes, maybe chaotic, the main thing is authentic.” She means, for example, Radiohead, but also the hip-hop pieces by MF Doom or Erykah Badu’s neo-soul.
Megan Thee Stallion on the Gurten stage: she stands for physicality lived out to the last drop of sweat.
The diva is back
This plays just after Arlo Park’s performance on the main stage. The first visit to Switzerland in years picks up exactly where she left off on the podiums in Montreux: her performance is that of a diva. For a good half hour she lets her eight-piece band quote fragments from the last decades of American black music, lets her background singers sing and snap the grooves – without being present herself.
However, their big entrance then seems less majestic than before: the band is not well-rehearsed at the beginning, the sound mix is too erratic. What sovereignty wants to suggest initially sounds more like a product of chance. That may be because the band lacks practice: Badu hasn’t released any music since the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone. Your set consists exclusively of well-known items. Everything she does – slowly peeling off the most elaborate clothes, slowly pouring herself tea, taking artistic breaks, preaching empowerment and yes, even singing – she has already done better.
Nevertheless: Over time, her inner fire seems to be reignited, and the band and the sound engineer also find each other. Towards the end of her set she shows that her almost spiritual form of self-empowerment and her repertoire are timelessly effective with a rich, solid staging. She closes imploringly, with raised arms and a smile: “Believe in yourself from the start, believe in the magic in your heart,” she calls out in English to the Bernese audience, which is crowded in front of the main stage. It is to be hoped that the 51-year-old will soon be back in the current music scene.
«love your body»
At home there is 27-year-old Megan Jovon Ruth Pete aka Megan Thee Stallion. An amazing and bold choice for what is arguably the most important slot on Thursday nights between just before midnight and one in the morning. Megan, who, like Badu, comes from Texas, stands for physicality lived out to the last drop of sweat. Her bass-heavy, utterly unmistakable hip-hop tracks are about celebrating your own body, about sex, yes, sex above all, and about how she – and by extension women – find pleasure. Then, for about a minute, “Eat it!” becomes a brisk rhythm. chanted, and their dancers imitate how this is to be understood.
However, Megan is a master at transferring the pleasure that is given to her in the songs to other “hotties” – as she calls the women present. Many enthusiastically shouted their slogans, the invited fans shook unleashed – including Erykah Badu! – her buttocks on stage. Your form of liberation is by far the most effective and sovereign this evening. The message she massaged into the huge audience on the slope in front of her with a lot of power: “Love your body!” – «Love your body!» And do with it what you want without shame.
After about 45 minutes it becomes clear that a longer concert could hardly be contested with such a program. However, she was exactly the right choice to get the Gurten going again after three years and to set a musical and socio-political accent.