We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Remember summer camp? Remember how fun that was? Now imagine going back to camp as an adult, but instead of making shoddy arts and crafts, you get to watch a few dozen mind-blowing musical performances. That’s what All Tomorrow’s Parties is– a series of festivals often thrown at off-season summer camps in the British countryside, featuring some of the best musical talents in the world.

Just peruse Wikipedia’s list of lineups from the many events bearing the ATP moniker– it’s a veritable who’s who of rad artists in the 2000s, frequently featuring now-beloved bands before they’ve broken. Instead of safely selecting big name musicians though a committee of concert promoters, All Tomorrow’s Parties will invite artists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Thurston Moore, and Sleater-Kinney to curate their festivals. The result is an air of playful excitement that is impossible to replicate, at a festival with authentic enthusiasm for the artists it’s promoting.

Jonathan Caouette, the filmmaker who breathed new life into the documentary medium with 2003’s Tarnation, is behind All Tomorrow’s Parties, a documentary about the concerts that was just released on DVD. Using his razor-sharp editing skills, Caouette incorporates footage shot by fans, promoters, and the musicians themselves into a patchwork of pure experience that’s as exhilarating as it is intimate. Check out the trailer below:

Update: The awesomely prolific Lance Bangs writes in:

Just saw your write up, I shot for that film, that’s my young passport photo on the bottom of the cover! I assumed they were just going to use those in some credits section, didn’t know they were going to design such a cool cover out of them….

Isn’t he the spitting image of a young Paul McCartney? We love you, Lance!

Trying to describe artist/musician Keiji Haino is like trying to hear a dog whistle. It doesn’t work. Our equipment isn’t prepared to handle such a sensation. In lieu of description, check out the video above and the interview (conducted by Alan Cummings) here, plus the excerpt below.

Alan Cummings : I’d like to ask you a bit about your childhood first. What were you like as a child?

Keiji Haino : I was definitely different from everyone else. Looking back now it sort of seems to have been inevitable, but I was different from everyone else. My first memories are from around the time I went to kindergarten. It seems very symbolic now, but I remember that when all the other kids were playing in the sand pit, I’d be playing with building bricks. And when they were all playing with the building bricks, I’d be in the sand pit.