Saturday evening saw the third edition of the Planeta Terra Festival, which translates as the Planet Earth Festival. Rather than an eco-friendly gathering as the name might suggest, Planeta Terra is an indie rock festival that brings together international artists and Brazilian bands across two stages. This year, headliners included Primal Scream, Sonic Youth, and Iggy Pop on the main stage while the Ting Tings, Patrick Wolf, and Metronomy. In a year where many of São Paulo’s older longer-running festivals took a break on account of the crisis, Planeta Terra is one of the few that has managed to hold its ground, surprisingly so considering how young it is.
My evening began with a drizzly start. The festival had started at four in the afternoon and in typical Brazilian fashion, my girlfriend and I didn’t arrive there until about 10pm, which of course meant that we missed every Brazilian band on the lineup (since international acts always get priority) as well as Primal Scream. Ah well, at least we arrived in time for Sonic Youth. As the godfathers of alternative rock walked on stage, the heavens above began to open. Yet many received the rain with open arms after the scorching 35-degree heat of the afternoon. Complete with full-blown distortion, wailing guitars and spoken lyrics, Sonic Youth tore mercilessly through their set, with Thurston Moore very occasionally mumbling a few words. If their energy levels were perhaps not as high as they might’ve been a few years ago, one can forgive them due to the fact they played perfect renditions of their beloved alt rock anthems. I was hoping that they’d play ‘Teen Age Riot’ from their seminal album ‘Daydream Nation’, but alas it was not to be.
As their set closed, the rain finally came to a stop, and so we went to the other stage to see the insufferable Ting Tings (my girlfriend really likes them). The fact that they have such an absurdly stupid name unfortunately doesn’t people enough people off them here in Brazil; on the contrary, they’re actually very popular here. As their set starts, lead singer Katie White comes on holding a piece of a paper with some Portuguese written down and reads it to the crowd, spouting words to the effect of “Hello São Paulo, my Portuguese is shit. Let’s dance!”. Riveting stuff. With only an album under their belt so far, they play it almost in its entirety, missing out slower songs such as ‘Traffic Light’ (I have had to hear the album many times at my girlfriend’s house, wouldn’t you know?). Truth be told, some of the songs weren’t terrible pop songs, if just felt like rehashed formulas. Essentially, it wasn’t as torturous as I thought it would be. Their encore, on the other hand, truly was. Drummer Jules De Martino returned to the stage to a small programmed synthesizer which at the touch of a key, played different songs. Starting with a few opening bars of ‘Walk this Way’, he quickly “mixed” into ‘Rapper’s Delight’ followed by the Ghostbusters’ Theme before moving to his drums. One girl in front of me turned to her friend and said she didn’t know he was a DJ as well. Soon after, White came back on and they launched into ‘Shut Up and Let Me Go’ and ending with their hit ‘That’s Not My Name’. I really can’t think of another artist who has successfully managed to write two more grating songs than those. But they are met with massive applause and leave the stage confident that they have conquered Brazil too now. The thought alone makes me shudder.
Going to a festival with your girlfriend is always a diplomatic operation, even more so when your tastes differ quite so much. Watching the Ting Tings meant we missed Iggy Pop. This is now the second time I’ve missed him at a festival, last time I was in a queue for an hour waiting to collect my ticket since the specific ticket company’s tickets only arrived after the festival was well underway. As we rushed back, we did catch a chorus of ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Lust for Life’. I suppose that’s better than nothing. At least I was sure I wasn’t going to miss the act I was intent on seeing, French electronic artist Etienne de Crecy. Like many of France’s musical exponents of late, Monsieur de Crecy plays electro, sort of an all-encompassing genre nowadays but something along the lines of driving basses, distorted synthesizers, and some harmonic chords thrown in to the mix as well. All this was accompanied by a pretty spectacular light show which involved lines being projected onto a nine-square cube structure with de Crecy in the middle square.
If it wasn’t quite Daft Punk’s Alive show from 2007, it was still thoroughly impressive. As the video above shows, the changes in the music reflected in the light projection were well-chosen; it was a minimalistic concept where the smallest of changes produced large effects and which fitted very well with the flow of de Crecy’s electronica. The only shame was that it started raining again during his show, and since he was the last artist on the main stage, many had decided to forego the performance and head home instead.
It was a fun few hours and it ended spectacularly, but I’m still not convinced that Brazil is the place for music festivals. Unlike in Europe where festivals celebrate a diversity of acts and stages, each one offering something different to the punters, Brazil keeps the scope very limited. It seems that the organisers are more interested in making a profit than putting on a show, and the UK is proof that the more successful festivals are those where the music comes first. Last year, TIM Festival here in São Paulo decided to take the opposite route and took its already paltry number of acts and spread them out across several days whilst charging obscene prices for tickets. It’s not surprising to see that this year, they are “taking a break”. By the looks of it, there’s still some time before Brazil finds its Bestival, let alone its Glastonbury.
