Festival Review – NTS One Day with Theo Parrish, Dry Cleaning, JPEGMAFIA & more… London Burgess Park, 27/05/23

Affirming eclecticism for an entirely new crowd

It’s not common to encounter a festival run by what is widely thought to be a grassroots radio station at its core. So in order to provide a proper rundown and review of last weekend’s NTS One Day Festival, we’ll need to recall the origin myth of the eponymous digital airwave-benders. 

What is it about NTS Radio that has allowed them to balloon so quickly into commandeering an entire section of Burgess Park, South London, for their own musical preserve? NTS was forged from the social fallout of the Plastic People club night, mixed in with a bit of associative clout with Boiler Room, and a small pot of funding. It prides itself on its community focus, but has also let many an established mega-artist through its floodgates, providing a tension between community groundedness and commercial intrigue. Now for aspiring DJs, NTS Radio slots are now coveted status symbols. Even so much as a mention in an NTS mix could be enough to edge a host closer to reaching a certain perceived pinnacle of cool. 

That very same sense of cool was felt on Saturday during the still-hot-on-the-plate festival, where we stood side-by-side with our favourite artists and radio hosts. Yes, at NTS, we could pick them out from the crowd. Though they were there, thoughts of backstage areas hardly crossed our minds – it was probably the most equalizing festival we’d ever been to, where artists routinely hung “with the rabble”. Comparisons could have easily been made to Gala or Wide Awake, but this would have been a shallow comparison, because everything from the artists’ stage presence, to the punters’ fits, reflected NTS’ focus on an especially sophisticated and diverse crowd. This wasn’t an event catering specifically to the stiff-upper-lipped London band scene nor to the city’s jazzy house coolios. One Day upheld NTS’ innate eclecticism, attracting an audience which – while not indescribable – felt like an entirely new species. 

The music was a beautiful feat of curation (its impresarios were the NTS residents). Most artists were not regulars on the UK festival circuit, which was refreshing. Behind the veneer of cool were a brainy, calculated set of lineup choices, reflecting the station’s foundational love for music-geeky crate-digging. Cruel Santino’s glitchy alté stylings rang true as ever, complemented by the two VFX-laden big screens on either side, but that wasn’t before a strong live nu-jazz footing set the tone for the day, in the form of hybrid virtuosi Nala Sinephro and Mansur Brown. Grouper’s fresh band project Helen made their UK debut, conveying their hooverphonic shoegaze sound in a whirl of sonic sludge. Then, fellow purveyors of cool Dry Cleaning similarly hid behind sunshaded sonic plods as they moved through their most recent album Stumpwork and other bits.

On the DJs front, It was impossible to miss Theo Parrish, who played for a whopping seven hours for what had been called a “sunset” mix, though sunset actually happened over an hour after his closing. Parrish had apparently pulled out of the festival at first – a drama caused by apparent “issues regarding capacity clarity” – but here he was indeed present, seeming to have gotten over the hump. He played a whirlwind of slow-burning house heaters as well as faster and even industrial-seeming techno upticks, many of which came across as risky choices for a sunny day, though the fans’ happy confusion showed they appreciated the choices. NTS’ proximity to Parrish is one of their biggest boons, with the Detroit legend’s selections happily confounding the crowd in the same way that the radio station does, and this was more than felt in the extensive clamouring around his booth. Crystallmess and Malibu appeared either side of him, laying down their signature ambient dream-worlds and hybrid future narcotics to contrast to Parrish’s harder-edged day-dances. 

Finally, the festival’s effective headliner JPEGMAFIA stole both the sun and the show, blowing his predecessors out of the park – sorry, Zack Fox – with plenty of recaps of his most recent album SCARING THE HOES, with a peak sound experience and an incredible command of live autotune to boot. And that’s not to mention an unlikely Carly Rae Jepsen cover. 

There was the lingering feeling that NTS had… grown. Not in just maturity, but in terms of economic growth, where much business-mindedness was felt. Of course, a fan would have to be living under a rock to not know Adidas are NTS’ most prominent sponsor. But it was hard to shake the feeling that few people there cared about their shoulder-rubs with sometimes-fast fashion line. The inner purist in this writer has always felt a sense of conflict at the sight of the corporate world co-opting brilliant ventures that have to fight for their souls as passion projects. For all of One Day’s incredible feats, one couldn’t help but see its giant prismatic NTS flags, expensive food stalls, hardline security, (outside) police presence, and fortified day-fest walls, and wonder if these were baby-steps towards a hopefully not inevitable “festival brandification” of NTS. 

That being said, recent drives to “keep NTS free” (by launching a membership scheme over ads) reflect this tension, and show NTS are in some sense just doing what they need to do stay as cool as they are. In a way, One Day was a microcosm of this tense cold war against stiflement, with the energy of its headline acts defiant, vouching for difference in a country where conformist ideas of “what one should expect from a festival” has crystallized. For that, we say bravo to NTS for saturday, which made a subtle warzone out of its passion for curating music unassumingly.

Jude Iago James