One could argue that Mofo’s 2017 headliners at the Mona festival of music and art are boring choices because they’re sacred cows of 90s alternative metal. The 90s ended nearly two decades ago: it’s devastating but true. Both Tool’s Maynard James Keenan and Faith No More’s Mike Patton have fanbases so dedicated they’ll follow any artistic whim these performers have, no matter how remote the destination. Surely they should go sell out some other festival instead?
Except this weekend, neither performed as part of the groups that brought them fame, and in the case of Patton, he was not even the star attraction. That status was reserved for Anthony Pateras, a Melbourne-born electro-acoustic artist responsible for the direction of Tētēma. The group released its 2014 debut album, Geocidal, and was in Hobart for its world premiere performance. Pateras was the reason Mike Patton was here, and he was a good reason.
Some people weren’t willing to accept this at first. Earlier in the day, I had heard a group of Patton fans bemoan the fact that it wasn’t one of his better known vehicles playing that night. But they came anyway because it was Mike Patton: a vocalist capable of transitioning from a muscular roar to an angelic soprano without missing a beat, or taking a breath. Few mainstream artists can drag their fans through regions as foreign as Patton has, and continue to get away with it. When he laughed during Tētēma’s set, seemingly at nothing – probably at the fact that the performance was working, against the odds – everyone in the audience laughed too. They didn’t know what was funny – they laughed because Mike Patton laughed.
Tētēma played its experimental electro-acoustic material as a four-piece, with Australian percussionist Will Guthrie and violinist Erkki Veltheim. Melbourne trumpeter Scott Tinkler later joined the ensemble. The set comprised material from Pateras and Patton’s Geocidal, which they worked on from opposite sides of the world, with minimal face-to-face collaboration. Despite that, the strange and elliptical music was immaculately precise on the night – perhaps too precise – despite the group having scant time for rehearsal.
Pateras is highly regarded within the experimental field he inhabits, with releases on Editions Mego and John Zorn’s Tzadik label, among others. But without Patton’s involvement – and notwithstanding Mofo’s propensity for taking risks – it’s virtually impossible for the likes of Pateras to get this kind of main stage festival gig elsewhere in Australia. And it’s a shame, because while Patton’s six octave vocals are crucial to the project, the show didn’t belong to him. It belonged to the mood Tētēma is capable of evoking.
It’s music you could reflexively describe as “dark”, but there was a severity so belaboured that it actually sounded cartoonish, amusing. Noise, hardcore punk and drone were potent ingredients, but cultish horror scores and Boredoms-esque tantrums laced the set too. According to its release notes, Tētēma’s record explores “the murder of place” and asks: “Do borders even matter anymore?”
I’m not sure they answered that question, though. Tētēma makes complicated and prickly music, employing tape loops, electric violin, analogue synths and more, but it never feels far enough removed from experimental rock to provoke this line of questioning in a live environment. Perhaps that’s due to Guthrie: when the group bared its teeth – as it often does – his percussion sliced through with such great force that it felt like a rock show, even though, strictly, it wasn’t.
And yet, on a lush green lawn, couched between mountains on the Derwent river, hundreds of adults and plenty of children (especially the children) were thoroughly engaged in this weird music, which pummelled and tranquillised in equal measure. During the evening hours of an Australian music festival, people are usually singing along to whatever Triple J has playlisted. On Saturday night, people played bit parts in a weird antipodean version of The Wicker Man instead. Tētēma didn’t enrapture with anthems or token festival rock gestures, they enraptured with mood, with surprises, and with evocations rarely felt by audiences not inclined to spend their Friday and Saturday evenings in stuffy basement, warehouse or gallery venues.
If anything, Tētēma was too professional. Patton’s involvement gifts credibility to this project in the eyes of many, but it sometimes lends a workmanlike air to music that could probably do with some rougher edges, with some more spontaneity. If this group had the opportunity to perform together more often, maybe some headroom could emerge. But as a listener previously ambivalent towards Tētēma’s sole recorded artefact, this performance was exciting and enlivening, simply because it had an audience to provoke. Music this perplexing doesn’t often get that opportunity in Australia, especially if it’s created by one of us.
