Boutique festival full of exploration and sensation

Why don’t we let a poet introduce you to Body & Soul? “This is real live dreaming,” announces Vicky Curtis, performing under the name Ragin Spice, in a spoken word précis to the boutique music festival full of exploration and sensation.

Now in its fifth year in Westmeath's rambling Ballinlough Castle grounds, and expanding to accommodate 8,500 revellers, the festival proves that there is more than poetic licence in that description. Come as you are, or put on a mask, a flower garland, or an animal-costume onesie and enter a lucid, midsummer dream, played out across captivating enclaves and among imaginative sculptural surprises.

Under the corona of the Body and Soul main stage, a wooden dome that erupts into flags like a sunburst, a bass-led song surges, thumps and resolves in a thunder of ringing guitars and skittering beats. “That’s a song about being brilliant at everything,” says Tom Vek, the London musician who has long been promiscuous with his styles. It’s an endearing feint, of course, but he’s certainly struck an appropriately positive tone. And, after Darkside’s tantric pretensions the previous night (gratification endlessly delayed), Vek restores some fun to the mainstage.

Not everyone can charm a multitude with the razor-edged wit and effortless command of John Grant. It also helps that Grant and his band can respond to a crowd, build a rapport, and prove that the prickly and intelligent GMF and Glacier (with guest appearance from Villager's Conor O'Brien) were mass ballads all along.

Sun sets

As the sun sets on the year’s longest day, Gary Numan is ready to usher in its shortest night. By cunning arrangement with the sound technicians, perhaps, Numan’s band seem to have diverted every decibel of the world’s supply in amplification to his influential industrial synth rock. At one point, presumably from shock, the PA even breaks down. It provides a break just long enough to let you appreciate that Numan and his music are eerily ageless: the pierce and crunch of

Cars

and the seam-ripping

Sacrifice

sound as fresh as they ever did.

After the tectonic-shifting opener, Utopia, whose dreamy drifts, cinematic vistas and operatic aria still sound startling 14 years later, Alison Goldfrapp must persuade us that last year's downtrodden album Tales of Us is a worthy successor. Yet no one seems more relieved when they finish their new material than Goldfrapp. "I'm freezing," she informs us. But look at the power surge she adopts for Lovely Head, Train and Strict Machine, each delivered in quick succession to uproarious response. It may take a while, but Goldfrapp can still raise the temperature.

If the uniquely soulful electronicist Jon Hopkins was the revelation of last year's festival, hot on the heel of his sublime release, Immunity, the jam-packed Midnight Circus big top for his set this year suggests word has since travelled far and wide. In performance, Hopkins uses four Kaoss pads, tactile and engagingly imperfect controllers, to manipulate and colour the elements of his compositions. Already uncommonly textured as techno goes, it means he can let a solitary piano punch cleanly through Breathe This Air, then scuzz up the bass for visceral effect. The immense excitement of We Disappear or Open Eye Signal is derived from the performance's rough edges: a divine suite, tantalisingly close to chaos.