With a sackful of prominent artists from the musical underground the yearly All Tomorrow's Parties event is certainly one of the festival highlights. ATP 3.0 sums up this year's line-up at the UK branch in the shape of a double-LP/-CD package.

Each year the All Tomorrow's Parties organizers ask outstanding artists to line up bands and solo musicians to play their festival. There's three regional ATP events a year, two of them in the US of A, and one at the Camber Sands seaside resort, situated in the South East of England, a few miles east of Hastings.

This year Autechre have been chosen to curate the European ATP, and they've actually done a very good job. They have invited guests like A Guy Called Gerald, Hafler Trio, Jim O'Rourke, The Magic Band, Zoviet France, Coil, The Fall, and, well, themselves.

In the end, more than 50 acts have been playing at Camber Sands this year, and to represent the whole line-up, this compilation would easily have filled five discs. As ATP 3.0 comes in a double CD-/LP-package, somebody has obviously done a (hopefully wise) selection. The stylistic bandwidth of the compilation stretches from Hip Hop and Detroit Techno to Experimental, with a clear focus on electronic sounds.

Personally, I would have preferred a track by Coil to Public Enemy's "Gotta Give The Peeps What They Need", and I most certainly wouldn't have missed Earth's "Dissolution III", a pretty daft piece of brutally distorted guitar noise.

Then again, there's a lot of highlights: "Mag (ae Remix)" by Autechre-offshoot Gescom for example, which reminded me of a trip through South American swamps, complete with poison frogs in the background. Push Button Objects' ethereal "ATP Track" (sic!) is brilliant too, as is Jim O'Rourke's masterly performance "Call Up On Your Sisters" - and this is just the cream of disc number 1.

Disjecta's psychedelic "Tiny Elements", Autechre's own contribution (classy and complex, as always), Pita's eerie "Atipfin" and Hecker's mindwarping "Stocha Acid" struck me most on disc number 2.

Lest I forget: most of the tracks on ATP 3.0 have never been released before, so there's some collector's value in the bargain. A high-class compilation whatsoever.

(rh 06/MMIII)

Label: ATP
 
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