★★★★☆
Field Day, which launched in 2007, returned to its one-day format this year after briefly expanding into a weekend event. Yet it was still overstuffed with musical riches and impressive innovations, notably the majestic Barn arena, a vaulted canvas hangar the size of Westminster Abbey.
Arty electronica accompanied by high-end visuals was a recurring motif across the mix-tape musical menu. The Los Angeles-based Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith was an early highlight, her layered collages of disembodied voices and ambient reveries accompanied with sublime psychedelic imagery. Likewise the manicured, dub-heavy sound paintings of Forest Swords, the alias of the Liverpudlian producer Matthew Barnes. Yet in the eye-blitzing stakes no one could beat the mind-bending performance by the avant-jazz beatsmith Flying Lotus, aka Steven Ellison, from Los Angeles, who spent most of his set behind an opaque video screen that seethed with rapid-fire cinematic surrealism.
More traditional rock thrills came courtesy of HMLTD, the latest skinny-hipped, neo-glam dandies to take their cues from David Bowie’s flamboyant cockatoo-haired, gender-fluid playbook. These arty-party Londoners may not yet have many memorable songs, but they have an electrifying frontman in Henry Spychalski, who preened and flounced and hurled himself into the crowd. Fame awaits them, if only because they clearly want it so badly. The Scottish post-rock storytellers Arab Strap also provided a bracing breath of foul air as the singer Aidan Moffat unleashed sweary tirades against Brexit between enticingly grimy ballads of boozy regret and sexual failure.
Although Field Day is less driven by big-name headliners than some festivals, this year’s star billing was undeniably the cult artist Aphex Twin, aka Richard James. Ramming the cavernous Barn arena for his first UK show in five years, James played a sense-swamping two-hour spectacular of acid squelch and headbanging beats accompanied by blazing lasers and multi-screen real-time visuals. Half avant-pop superstar and half punk provocateur, the Banksy of experimental techno left London’s most utopian festival in a state of dazed euphoria.