Shaking Things Up
By Sergey Chernov

Moscow Times, Russia
June 23 2006

Avant Music

The headliner of Avant Fest 2006 is Arab Strap, a Scottish band that
includes Malcolm Middleton (left) and Aidan Moffat (right).

Avant Fest 2006, to be held on Project Fabrika’s open-air stage
this Saturday and Sunday, was designed to fight Russia’s "musical
provincialism," according to founder Maxim Silva-Vega.

Now entering its third year, Avant brings a slice of cutting-edge music
from the West, with many acts performing in Moscow for the first time.

"We are orienting toward modern rock ‘n’ roll and modern pop music,
toward [Britain’s] Glastonbury festival," Silva-Vega said in a recent
telephone interview. "We want to be a festival like they have in
Europe, with relevant bands and a democratic atmosphere, where fans
can mix with the musicians."

This year’s Avant, which has a lineup of 26 bands, including six
international ones, will be headlined by the Scottish indie legends
Arab Strap. Hailing from Falkirk, Scotland, the unusual-sounding duo
of Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton will perform Saturday night
backed by a full rock band.

"It’s a five-piece band, it’s very rock, as opposed to the other
bands we’ve had," said Moffat by telephone from Dublin, Ireland,
where the band was performing last week.

According to Moffat, the band playing at Avant will be pretty much
the same as that used on "The Last Romance," Arab Strap’s last album,
described by critics as its "lightest" and "brightest" record to date.

"I think we wanted everything a bit more immediate," he said of the
album. "We wanted to catch people’s attention a bit quicker than
[on] our previous records. On the older records, you have to really
spend time with them and listen to them and give them your attention,
and I suppose the idea was that it was going to be quicker.

"You know, not commercial or anything like that, but just a little bit
more approachable and certainly more melodic and tuneful. And it does
have a happy ending as well. There aren’t many of our records that have
happy endings, but this one has a nice, big, bright, happy ending."

To achieve this new feel, Arab Strap — which has been around for 10
years and took its name from a sex-shop device — had to change its
modus operandi drastically.

"How we normally work is, you know, we just get together after a year
or two, and then we both have things we’ve been working on, and we just
bring it together," Moffat said. "We don’t really normally do demos and
things like that, but we did do it for our last album. It was the first
time we really had the songs written before we went to the studio."

With Scotland in the limelight again thanks to the success of the
Glasgow-based Franz Ferdinand, Moffat said that his homeland tends
to draw everyone’s attention once in a while.

"It always comes round every five or six years, the spotlight on
Scotland again," he said.

Apart from Arab Strap, Avant Fest will feature Oceansize, a loud
five-piece progressive rock group from Manchester. Also from Manchester
comes BigFinn, whose style ranges from folk to electronic.

BigFinn features brothers Colin and Norman McLeod, who run the Moolah
Rouge studios in Manchester and came to Russia earlier this year as
the additional musicians to I Am Kloot.

Other international acts include Why?, a band based in Oakland,
California, that blends indie rock and hip-hop; the French "new
chanson" artist Dominique A; the melancholic indie-pop band Refree,
from Barcelona, Spain; and the experimental, instrumental trio Plokk,
from Hamburg, Germany.

The Russian bands taking part in the festival are either established
club acts — such as the woman-fronted Deti Picasso, which plays
guitar alt-rock with a touch of Armenian folk, and the post-rock
outfit Silence Kit — or up-and-coming acts such as 2H Company,
the hip-hop crew from the suburbs of St. Petersburg.

Avant Fest 2006 runs Sat. and Sun. starting at 4 p.m. both days
at Project Fabrika, located at 18 Perevedenovsky Pereulok. Metro
Baumanskaya, Elektrozavodskaya. Tel. 265-3935. For a complete schedule
of concerts, see