Recording: Clairmont The Second

Artist: Clairmont The Second

Song: Wicked

Recorded at The Garrison (Wavelength Music Festival 16 – Night 3), February 14, 2016.

Clairmont The Second - Wicked

Wavelength's sixteenth anniversary festival was a little less adventurous than last year's sesquidecade spectacular. For the first time in recent memory, the festival settled into one home base for three nights (along with one daytime excursion off-site) and the programming eschewed retrospective turns for a future-focused weekend, daring audiences to invest in the musical here-and-now. The Sunday-night pre-holiday show is usually the most Wavelength-y of nights, but this time out it felt a bit like the hangover from the preceding Saturday night party. A little less energy and it felt as if the festival eased to a gentle halt rather than finishing with a flash — but there were still some musical gems on the way there. On the whole, another successful festival, and kudos are due to the Wavelength crew for their savvy curation and the efforts made at building a more gender-balanced, diverse festival.

Clairmont is bringing a different sort of physicality to his set than when I first saw him eighteen months ago — less the lanky school kid and now prowling the stage with a more intense vigour, although his rhymes are still punctuated by the same sly grin as he peppers the crowd with lyrics. The content of the set is also shifting, with some old favourites now spread around brand new stuff from his forthcoming third album, as well as some picks from his recent mixtape that saw him jackin' for beats.