Mojo - The Music Magazine

Kieron Tyler scours Rennes' 31st Transmusicales Festival, hails The Phantom Band and finds a group called Wankin' Noodles.

IN ITS 31ST YEAR, Brittany's Transmusicales Festival isn't settling comfortably into middle age. French electro whizz Mr Oizo plays after Irish dancepoppers The Japanese Pop Stars. Jamaican techno-ragga diva Terry Lynn sets the scene for Sweden's elegiac Fever Ray. Venues range from city-centre halls to massive out-of-town sheds. There are no discernible headliners - this is about one man's vision of the cutting edge and the up-and-coming, and it becomes clear his choice of two Scottish acts was acute. Jean-Louis Broussard has been behind the Rennes festival throughout and asked how he characterises this year's ambience, the chipper, grey-haired fiftysomething says, "It was more electronic last year, this year less. Everybody is doing their best, it's a feeling of liberty, energy and love."

That might be the case on a showery afternoon, but at 3am at the Parc Expo - a 15-minute bus ride from the city brings you to a rank of characterless aircraft hangers that starkly contrast with the stunning medieval and 18th-century centre of Rennes - it's hard to detect much love as you're being biffed into by careening drunks who then collapse like wet paper bags. Taken with the non-Transmusicales city-centre multi-venue Bars En Trans festival, the four days is a head-spinning, stress-inducing musical smorgasbord. Zen detachment and regular visits to the champagne bar are essential for survival.

French music is what Bars En Trans is all about. Unfortunately that can mean French bands trying not to be French. Music Is Not Fun are a Lyon quartet with Union Jack logos and a Blur fetish that inflames them to write songs like Essex Girls. At the 1929 bar, Bordeaux outfit Kid Bombardos actually are The Strokes. The hotly-tipped Gaspard Royant is a lightly-bearded Parisian singer-songwriter playing Spanish-themed bar La Place. His '70s-styled Dylanisms are well crafted, but December 2009 doesn't seem like the starting point for a pub rock revival. Back at 1929, Laetitia Shériff's reflectiveness - just her, a guitar and her fractured melodies - is an attractive counterpoint to those aping the styles of others.

Many of Transmusicales' French acts are dance-slanted. Mr Oizo's big beat turns 3000 kids crazy in an aircraft hanger. Push Up! are a Gorillaz/funk hybrid, but the magnificently-named Wankin' Noodles turn out to be a Hives knock-off. The French outfit attracting most attention are Gablé. At city-centre hall La Cité, they're a cousin of Tunng. Some acoustic strumming starts a song, beats creep in, there's a blast of white noise and then it ends. Few songs stretch to over a minute-and-a-half. Two elderly ladies join them to sing, and a choir of twenty hold acoustic guitars aloft. One songs declares "your lips make a round like a chicken asshole." Patience runs out when the singer dons an Elvis mask. While the 800-capacity venue was packed for Gablé, the act which follows attracts an audience of 60. American songwriter Cass McCombs conjures an atmosphere akin to the darkened rooms of the third Velvets' album. Gablé being the hit suggests the Transmusicales' audience isn't looking for reflection.

South African quartet Blk Jks were the most eagerly anticipated band on the Saturday night at the Parc Expo. Their debut album After Robots is thrilling, a fully-formed maelstrom of tumbling melody, rock dynamics and subtle local musical texture. Live though, they perplexed. Nothing cohered. Their opening shot was five minutes of tuneless guitar wash and crashing drums. Parts of a song snuck through and then it was back to noodling and Billy Cobham drums. An improvised six-string electric bass solo was topped by some off-the-cuff scat singing. The drummer thought the set had ended, walked off to find his path blocked stage left by the rest of the band. After a minute's conference, they talked him back behind the kit for another aimless jam. A crashing disappointment.

At least the memory of the previous night's Parc Expo set by Fever Ray lingered. Knife lady Karin Dreijer Andersson's mesmerising show was darkly seductive, yet cold. Andersson was invisible within a large sacklike thing, the band members were similarly shrouded and the stage was in a half light cast through orange lampshades that alternated with blue pin-prick lights. A flat laser cast a roof over the audience. The music was stately, with a slow rhythmic clang close to Games Without Frontiers' Peter Gabriel or Ryuichi Sakamoto. Andersson's intonation called siren-like, beckoning towards an arctic waste. This left an indelible imprint.

Two less ethereal Scottish acts were impressive. The Phantom Band, playing the Parc Expo, left their recent Checkmate Savage album standing. Their krautrock/post-folk fusion shone, especially when their twin Telecasters sparred like Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. Forty minutes previously, 2000 French people had never heard The Phantom Band. Yet by the end of their set, singer Rick Anthony had won them with a warmth as engaging as Elbow man Guy Garvey's. London-based newcomers Django Django excelled at La Cité. Their taut songs are vaguely post-punk - bits of Talking Heads or The Monochrome Set bubble up - but the mix of insistent rhythms, stabbing keyboards and scrubby guitar is unique. Once in your head, songs like recent single Storm apply for a green card.

After their show, frontman Jimmy Dixon confessed he'd found the Transmusicales experience different to the norm. "Everyone is unbelievably friendly," he said. "The soundman apologised when he wanted to get us on stage: 'Sorry, excuse me...' It was like playing a school assembly hall, only there was no headmaster telling us what to do."

Later, at Parc Expo, Dixon added that "Transmusicales never ends. The people at the aircraft hangers seem removed from their normal life - they don't seem to know how they got here. It's like they've lost their baggage."

That's the suspension of external reality which defines Transmusicales.

By Kieron Tyler

Phantom Band pictured by Nicolas Joubard