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<\/p>\nThis year\u2019s Festival de Frue left a lasting impression on me, one that lingers even now that a month has passed since the event. Heading home after the two-day festival, I realized that what this event had always been trying to show us\u2014or what the organizers themselves had wanted to bring about\u2014had, in its fifth year, finally been accomplished.<\/p>\n
The inaugural Festival de Frue, held back in 2017, featured a show by the Master Musicians of Joujouka. The acoustic concert, performed without a speaker system in a tent that recreated the local festival in the village of Jajouka, had an intensity that propelled it to the top of most attendees\u2019 \u201cBest concerts ever\u201d lists.<\/p>\n
Frue, who until then had been organizing an array of unique events at clubs and live houses in Tokyo, started Festival de Frue as a fully-fledged open-air festival. At the time, some thought that the Joujouka show at the first festival had seen Frue play their best hand right off the top, but that move now seems to me to have been the ideal choice, given Frue\u2019s aims to expand the festival as a vehicle for their ambitions.<\/p>\n
Festival de Frue is, in every facet, different from a regular music festival. Each artist appearing on either of the two stages is given at least an hour of performance time, but some shows go on for more than two hours. That approach to timetable management represents a polar opposite of most other festivals in Japan, where several stages are set up and performance times are kept short to allow for the booking of as many performers as possible. It also seems that the role of the headliner at Festival de Frue is not so much to attract crowds, but first and foremost to embody the ongoing modus of the festival.<\/p>\n
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In conceptual terms, Festival de Frue, the organizers of which eschew all conventional marketing techniques, simply aims to provide \u201ca soul-stirring musical experience.\u201d While festival culture has become increasingly sophisticated and diversified over the years, Festival de Frue has dared to keep things simple with its music-first approach. As a result, the event has attracted a loyal and trusting fanbase. I suspect that the organizers and fans of Festival de Frue share a sense of dissatisfaction and distrust in the process through which festivals, while becoming increasingly sophisticated, tend to erase the opportunity for the essence of musical experience\u2014truly great performances that are beyond comprehension\u2014and the spectacle created by such performances.<\/p>\n
Festival de Frue has always taken such an approach, and this year the entire two-day event felt like a single live performance. Accordingly, the concentration of the performers and audience was maintained throughout, and there was a sense that the intense moments in which music dominates time gradually increased.<\/p>\n
The lineup comprised a cross-section of folk, ambient, rock, hip hop, contemporary Okinawan music, improvisation, leftfield electronic music, and more\u2014a mixture you only get at Festival de Frue. All the live performances and DJ sets were truly amazing, but the headliners, Pino Palladino and Blake Mills featuring Sam Gendel & Abe Rounds, who indeed occupied the peak slot, were the best of the best.<\/p>\n
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Pino Palladino<\/p>\n
Festival organizer Shogo Yamaguchi later wrote the following post looking back on the event, which I thought said it all. I had to laugh at his detached wording, as if he were talking about something he had no hand in, but I guess that just goes to show the extent to which the headliners\u2019 performance was in sync with the character of Festival
\nde Frue.<\/p>\n
As Pino and Blake were playing, I turned around from the floor and saw how there were so many people not only on the floor but in the seats too, listening intently to the, well, pretty plain music. Wow, that\u2019s awesome…I was a little impressed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n