by Stephen Clover

Case in point: "Dunedin is really the only place left where you can still get away with this" remarked a friend a few minutes after the opening act, Rory Storm and the Invaders, had begun their performance at Arc Café on the Thursday night. I chuckled. She was right; I hadn't realised that they had even begun. In true local style there was no obvious commencement, no introduction, no stage presence even; a huddle of shadowy figures - one in some sort of comedic apparatus/headwear - were crouched behind the monitor speakers at the front of the stage, their backs to the audience, and Lines of Flight, 2006 shuffled, creaked and droned its way into some kind of being.

Shortly after this exchange was the actual moment when I realised that - as noted above - I had consigned myself to twenty-five or so hours crawling around in near-blackout conditions, attempting to execute drunken 15-second exposures on bastard musicians who seemed wilfully determined to foil my every attempt to document their exploits. I considered turning in my press-pass and sending a note of resignation to Brad Rose from one of Arc's convenient free internet terminals. I considered faking an injury to buy some time and wind the clock down. I considered getting another beer. Instead I stumbled uncertainly through the crowd to the edge of the stage, crouching in what was more-or-less to become my "spot" for the rest of the weekend.

It was shortly again after this point when I discovered that my plans to capture the essence of Lines of Flight - the exciting collision of free music and experimental film - were going to be a fucken waste of time. Ever tried shooting films - "moving pictures" - on long exposure? Yeah, thought so. Can't be done. So you're just going to have to use your imaginations and rely on my utterly-subjective descriptions and anecdotes and mixed metaphors and the weird jumble of light and colour that influence the accompanying photographs to conjure some kind of mental impression of how everything really went down.

Rory Storm and the Invaders played their improv-clatter-drone for another thirty minutes or so, all the while bathed in early MS Windows screensaver-like bouncing geometry, until - in what was possibly not a pre-arranged signal to stop - Rory stopped, knelt up in the air like a huge shambling meerkat, and waited for his Invaders to follow suit. Matt Middleton's Crude project followed with a prolonged blast of white noise and distressed-VCF sweeps over which he improvised ecstatic saxophone and homemade-shenai squall as well as retardo-banging about on the most broke-ass-yet-vaguely-functioning Juno 106 you or I will ever see. And as I had expected, he inflicted the first bout of serious hearing damage of the weekend and I actually had to leave the room near the end of his set because something in my head was resonating in a manner making me feel ill. "I. am. a. recording. artist" he intoned upon conclusion in a monotone weighted with the exact right mixture of ironic deadpan and autism. Shyly (we've never met before and I'm generally in awe of the guy) I later proffered my enthusiasm for his show and recalled my inability to stop thinking of Tarkovsky's "Solaris" and Jean-Michel Jarré during. "You fucking got it" he exclaimed, "that's exactly what I was trying to do. Science fiction and Oxygene"; so then we enthusiastically geeked awhile about the malevolent alien presence in "Solaris" which was never shown but symbolised continually as a swirl of nebulous, ominous cloud.

I never got to see Dave Black; the pressing requirement to quell nerves re. The Stumps' impending performance put paid to that. I had been quietly terrified that we would be hated. In a line-up, in a festival, in a town - in a nationwide scene mostly full of thoughtful electronics and gentle free-improv, how were we really going to come across with our enthusiastic and barely-competent amalgam of doom-metal, noise-drone, and histrionic progressive rock? I mean fuck: we were pretty much going to be the Grateful Dead of the weekend. And the closer to it got to show-time, the worse I got. But The Stumps have recently discovered the delights of rock venues - a PA system in the order of thousands of watts. A mixing desk. A professional behind said desk. Etc. Mentally I fell back on the confidence that the day's earlier sound-check with the legendary and legendarily-proficient Forbes on the mix - with his crazy hair and gorgeously near-maniacal beam of a smile - had imbued. Physically I fell back on a Strong Ale and three shots of Jaegermeister. I think we did ok.

Pretty ok, I reckon - it was a total blast playing, people seemed to really dig it, and Joe Musgrove & Lloyd Barrett's film was just beautiful - but the stress and nerves and the long day of traveling and so on left me in mental tatters and my plans to terrorize the karaoke bars of Dunedin shelved for another eve. Sadly - for those venues, principally - as it turned out the plans were never actually unshelved again. The night - at Clayton CJA Noone and his wife Kate's place - was not concluded, however, for when I got up in the dark to piss I stepped in a fresh pile of steaming yellow-brown feculence recently deposited in the middle of the floor by their adorable tabby kitten Smudge - who had up to that point being sleeping on my head. I guess I can only count my blessings. It wasn't until the next morning when I discovered that ol' Smudge had also got up in the middle of the night to piss - in my fucking suitcase.

Spent the next day in the sun and a euphoric, hung-over haze going over the last night's fun in my mind. Went book shopping. Went clothes shopping. Watched performance art.. or was it one of Dunedin's norious student hazing stunts? Drank beers and coffees and turned up to the next night's proceedings - now relocated in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery - almost precisely on time and with a six-pack of Cooper's finest stout, and a flask of rye whisky.

Greg Malcolm opened with one of his famous and typically-mesmerising and atypically-dextrous - for any human - three guitar workouts. One was in his lap and played with his hands, and two were on the floor, played with his feet. Dear god, make sure you see this man play at least once in your life; it's a thing of amazing beauty. He was accompanied visually by Jenny Ward's mirror-screen live video feed of his performance which - speaking of amazing beauty - often and somewhat disturbingly resembled a giant comedy vulva giving birth to giant comedy sausage-babies. This was about as distracting as it sounds, so thankfully Eve Gordon's visuals for Sam Hamilton's set following were much more restrained - actual loops and fragments of celluloid were manipulated in real time with a 16mm film-projector, providing a ghostly lightshow below which Sam played his guitar - at times with another 16mm film-machine - and electronics and conjured up a beautiful gently-humming ramshackle drone.

Michael Morley brought out a laptop and a bunch of vintage analogue synthesisers for the evening, lay on the floor beside them, and treated us to a lovely classic-Krautrock-style epic blur of buzzes drones swoops and chirps - as I crawled all over the floor, several inches from his face, snapping away. Billed as Gate but overheard claiming that his performance was actually under the moniker Fuck Chairs, his performance was ironically closest in sound to "The Pavillion Of Fools", his 1995 album as just plain old Michael Morley. His film, entitled "Bridge", was a single-shot handicam marathon depicting (I believe) the Brooklyn Bridge in all its nocturnal glory. Since I would defy anyone to hold a single shot for about an hour - a not overly-generous estimate of the duration of his lengthy set - I'm betting it was a loop. Also a loop, but more of a flickering blur which resembled at times the metaphysical tribulations of a giant moth, Campbell Kneale's film was probably one of the best at the festival; so was his performance as Birchville Cat Motel. He put on his drone-metal hat for the evening, and bayed mournfully into a small microphone. Somehow this affecting howl was morphed into a pulsing, pounding, shimmering metallic behemoth which had us pretty much rooted to our seats and applauding rapturously when it was over.

By this stage it was entirely necessary to decamp to the Crown, possibly one of the worst bars in the world - and in so being, probably one of the best - to watch Sweaty Betty, a notorious lesbian agit-punk outfit featuring the daughter of one of Dunedin's most enduringly legendary musos. It was somewhat unsettling to see Dad there clinging to the bar and not really managing to prevent himself nodding off and collapsing, but some of Sweaty Betty's younger and less lucid supporters were just as messy. Takeaway food was then required and as luck would have it, Rattray Street's takeaway-that-never-closes is literally across the road and so I escorted one Stump and one Cat Motel directly there. One Special Otago Burger (don't ask) and a round of spacies later and the others having retired, I found myself on my own, wandering around George Street pestering the stumble-drunks to tell me where I could get a martini. For laffs. By 3am said laffs were scarce so I took myself back to the valleys and bed.