I was thinking all weekend at All Tomorrow’s Parties about how I could explain how fun and unique the festival is. I’ve actually been thinking about it for a few years and the best I came up with was: if I could only go to one festival a year it would be ATP. There is nothing else like it out there and this year proved to be even better than the first two in the Catskill Mountains of New York.
We were running a few projects up there this year. Of course we brought up over a thousand Ben & Jerry’s ice creams to give away from our push cart but we were also doing a lot of Smurfin’ and rounding up some great bands to play songs for us, including Dungen, Black Angels and Apse. On top of all that we partied and rocked harder than I can remember to bands like Iggy and the Stooges, Sleep, Breeders, Sonic Youth, Explosions in the Sky and dozens more.
You might be wondering what kind of Smurfin’ was going on so I’ll explain what we were up to. When I was a kid I collected Smurfs. They sat in storage for almost 20 years and I always wanted to do something cool and fun with them. We shipped out a couple dozen around the country to friends and artists then shipped everything else to ATP. Each Smurf was painted and reconstructed to become something new, wacky, and different. Unfortunately I didn’t get as many pics of the smurfs as I would have liked because we were so busy running a charity auction for 826.
This year’s festival was co-curated by ATP and Jim Jarmusch. Jim was in attendance last year helping out with the Critereon Collection movie room and this year he picked all the bands on Sunday. We caught up with him for an interview to pick his brain about how rad it is to curate ATP and some bits about Roberto Beninni’s famous “I a-scream-a you-a scream-a we all-a-scream-a for ice cream-a” chant in Down by Law.
Most of the bands we were hoping to catch up with at ATP were playing Sunday. Dungen joined us at the playground for a couple songs. They might have been the number one band I wanted to get at ATP and they sounded better than I could have imagined. Next up Apse stopped by our (just-a-little-bit dirty) room for a song then we headed to the rooftop to hear a new track from Black Angels who’s much-anticipated new album is coming up September 14th.
I’ve been hung over all day and had to drive 6 hours into and out of New York City but nothing has swayed my love of ATP and how much fun was had. Seriously…. everybody who loves live music and wants to party like they never have before should find their way to ATP around the world.
