Venn: 2004 - 2008

After five intense and invigorating years, the team behind Venn, Bristol’s early summer celebration of musical overlap, have decided to part the circles and call it Venn End Time.

This year’s Venn, which took place from the 5-8th June and featured over 60 acts from typically far-flung spheres of sound, was the last. It sold out, featured amazing sights and sounds and created a heady, inspiring atmosphere that only Venn could conjure. This years 4 dayer even basked in some lush harbourside sun. The gods and the devils have backed us down the line.

The reasons behind this amicable decision are many and of a personal, artistic and family-orientated kind - one thing this is not is a case of ‘another one bites the dust’. Venn happily and willingly ends itself in its prime, having achieved its goal of providing a sprawling DIY canvas for modern music in its wildest, most vivid colours: like putting Afrobeat king Tony Allen next to young rhythm buck Chris Corsano, Bristol post-punk talisman Mark Stewart next to his unlikely new buddy Devendra Banhart backstage at an old church, and the Tag Team concept all the way back in 2004, which laid the blueprint for musical Venn with live samplesmiths hacking up acapella choirs, and local heroes such as Kid Carpet, SJ Esau, Men Diamler and Bucky – the likes of whom really were Venn’s lifeblood – collapsing into each others sets over a series of five-minute collaborations that were utterly, wondrously of their time. Venn was never a careerist festival: it was more about taking it in, ripping it up and being in the moment. And that moment is now over.

Venn has some history, though. Instances to will be remembered include the Radio Venn FM studio in the loins of The Cube; Justice Yeldham giving himself a free noise facial to a rock hero’s reception last year, and the similarly bloody Yellow Swans acoustic set; putting Pinch alongside Scion in 2006 and joining the dubstep/techno dots early; Maher Shalal Hash Baz attempting to play 100 songs in 45 minutes in ‘07; Fungus Moth’s anarchic approach; Janek Schaefer sitting in the middle of the Croft and playing weird before DJ Quest in 2004; Paavoharju dancing to Lawrence playing Scott Walker at 3am in Clockwork, after Cobra Killer had disapproved of the venue’s unique feng shui and done a runner; five minute bursts of peace and quiet being broadcast across Bristol once every three hours in 2006; the RLF (née Bass Clef) big band revving up the top floor of Lakota; Crescent playing hushed and hymnal at St Georges, and then, this year, Phil Minton conducting a hundred untrained Bristol voices in the triumphant ‘Century FC’ project.

It’s fittingly Venn that, just as our chaotic little celebration came into being in 2003 through what we felt was necessity (Bristol didn’t have a fest like this…nor, we felt, did the UK), it ends on a high…without necessarily needing to.

In fact Venn will be survived by ‘Century FC’, which will be performed again (with a new set of voices) at the 2009 Instal Festival in Glasgow. Meanwhile, www.vennfestival.com will serve as an archive for five years of musical rallying, line-crossing, entertainment trespass, inspiring collaborations overlapping into lasting friendships, furrowing a brow that was neither high nor low but felt like our very own, diving in, making no sense and loving it. It’s been integral to our lives: back to dream-time. One is too many, a hundred not enough..five seems spot-on.

www.vennfestival.com