The ultimate mixtape

All Tomorrow’s Parties doc offers a visceral vision of the festival

Since its debut in the year 2000 All Tomorrow’s Parties has set itself apart from the throngs of larger and more corporate music festivals by allowing a different guest curator to personally cherry-pick each year’s lineup. Whether it’s Autechre the Mars Volta Vincent Gallo or Matt Groening it always seems to end up with a mix of left-leaning legends unexpected obscurities and one-off collaborations. Now with the festival nearing the end of its first decade Warp Films (an offshoot of the eminent electronic label) has made ATP the subject of a documentary.

“The idea came about in the early days of Warp Films’ existence and it seemed a good fit — ATP and Warp have a similar independent artist-driven ethos” says producer Luke Morris. “I asked Jonathan Caouette who had made Tarnation a year or so earlier to come on-board and we developed this idea of creating a collage that would try to represent the spirit of the festival. Thurston Moore called ATP the ultimate mixtape and we wanted to convey that idea on film.”

Taking the concept of the Beastie Boys’ fan-filmed concert flick Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! several hundred steps further the documentary was painstaking pieced together from the found and contributed footage of over 200 fans musicians and filmmakers (both amateur and professional). As Morris explains the aim was to compile a visceral vision of the last nine years’ events in the U.K. U.S. and Australia.

“Unlike outdoor festivals like Reading and Glastonbury where fans camp out in tents the fans at ATP would bring camcorders and cameras with them because they have chalets to lock them in” he says. “We wanted to take advantage of this as we thought it was the best way to represent the festival’s collective spirit. It also made sense economically because we started the project off with no money.”

“We posted adverts online put calls out through the ATP mailing list and trawled YouTube looking for footage captured by fans on mobiles Super 8 HD and DV” Morris continues. “We ended up with about 600 hours of footage with submissions and contributions from over 200 people. Although we only used footage from less than half of them we still credited everyone on the end of the film. These are the All Tomorrow’s People.”

With such wide-ranging lineups to pick and choose live footage from (last year’s Mike Patton/Melvins-curated event for example featured everyone from Neil Hamburger to Squarepusher to Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) Morris says the biggest challenge was attempting to cram as many of the festival’s countless highlights as they could into only 85 minutes of screen time.

“We wanted to represent its spirit rather than making a chronological narrative which was the best way to use the footage we had” he explains. “In terms of the bands we wanted to represent the sense of discovery you have at ATP where you see amazing artists you don’t know play alongside legends like The Stooges or Sonic Youth. Sometimes though we wanted to include an artist we didn’t have enough good footage of them… or the performance wasn’t their best.”

Interestingly All Tomorrow’s Parties is also quite different from the typical concert film in that it presents a surprisingly small amount of straight-ahead live footage or full-song performances. While there are plenty of performance clips these are equally interspersed with the many other facets of the festival experience.

“For us the fans and the sense of community with the musicians living alongside the audience members are as important as the bands” says Morris. “People go to see music but there’s a special atmosphere offstage as well that we wanted to try to capture. Through making the film I learned what sets ATP apart is the unique setting the community of fans and musicians and the sense of discovery but mainly the fact that it’s run by people who care about music and the audience’s experience more than making money.”