The final photographic piece for our coverage of this year's Le Guess Who?

The full album can be viewed on Flickr here.

Le Guess Who? 2014 initially finds us in the newly built-upon (& so massively expanded) Tivoli-Vredenburg venue, slap bang in the centre of the city and now housing nine performance spaces over 13 floors - surely the envy of any similar sized city (or indeed many larger ones) with pretensions of being a shining light of the live music scene.

German industrial heavyweights EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN are performing their new work Lament in the venue's Grote Zaal so that seems the ideal way to start off this year's event. Originally commissioned by the Belgian city of Diksmuide as part of its WWI commemoration events the live environment is undoubtedly the best way in which to experience such an involving and intense document of man's capacity for inhumanity and the portrayal of war as a beast that feeds on social ills and religious zeal. As a result plans to see other acts elsewhere in the venue are quickly shelved, such is the hold exerted by messrs Bargeld, Arbeit, Unruh, Moser and Hacke.

Taking to the stage amidst great adulation from the capacity crowd the quintet are initially suitably grim faced and soon hard at work pounding away on the many instruments they've constructed specifically for the performance of Lament. Boiler-like sculptures of metal are pushed over, dragged, whipped with chains, added to and subtracted from to create a noise that, as it builds to its climax, manages to achieve the aimed for disturbing effect of the sounds of bombardment and other horrendous aural images from the first European mechanised war.

The sight of a purple dildo being used to gain a particular sound from the guitar and Blixa Bargeld's good humoured, though enlightening, extrapolations on the origins of songs in the work (not to mention his farm yard animal impersonations during the rendition of 'Der Beginn Des Weltkrieges 1914 (Dargestellt Unter Zuhilfenahme Eines Tierstimmenimitators)') and latterly N. U. Unruh's Casey Jonesesque plastic hat and the sight of 3 grown men squirting high pressure air through a number of plastic drainpipes to great musical effect all instil elements of lightheartedness into the performance without in anyway diminishing the weight of the subject matter.

There's no greater example of how seriously the band have approached the work than to see them pounding out 'Der 1. Weltkrieg' on the first use of those previously mentioned drainpipes. Lasting, as it does, over 13 minutes it's a furious workout for the upper body whilst also being a fascinating take on musically representing the main 1914 - 1918 period of the war. 'Let's Do It A Dada' from the 2007 album Alles Weider Offen gets a look-in during the first encore and the group prove once again that they're as up to date (if not ahead of the pack) as ever by having recordings of the show available to buy at the merch stall within minutes of the stage being vacated. A band at the peak of their powers and a performance worthy of the cost of the weekend's ticket alone.

Friday night sees us head to start on the outer fringe of the festival's circuit at the Moira venue, where Ryley Walker's doing his thing. Whether he's under the weather or otherwise phased by something the tracks from debut album All Kinds Of You just don't feel as effective live as on record. A broken string and the need to replace it, rather than swap for another guitar, after only a couple of numbers doesn't help matters and the misunderstood joke he makes to the sound engineer about putting on some trip hop leave a mildly embarrassing air in the room as we head off to Ekko for Dracula Legs.

Aware of the band only through their Too Pure single 'Heartburn Destination / Cold Licks' from earlier this year they were for the most part an unknown quantity. They rocked out pretty hard though & the venue's coal black interior was a good setting for their energetic mix of Seventies rock and Lungfishesque vocal digressions. The crowd was as dense upon leaving as it was when we arrived so clearly they were doing something right in terms of keeping folk from wandering off in search of a new thrill.

From Ekko it was a ten minute walk back to the (still amazing) Tivoli-Vredenburg for another bit of box ticking in terms of seeing an older and venerable performer, in the shape of Dr. John & The Nite Trippers. The slate was blank in terms of expectations so to say we were disappointed by the part of the show we witnessed would not be strictly true. Given the great man's need of two sticks to enable him to walk out to the piano and a total lack of chat with the crowd he's clearly not in the best shape of his life, but the pedestrian pace of the songs we took in (including a very mediocre 'St. James Infirmary') failed to raise our pulse rates. Things maybe improved after we left and the bulk of the crowd seemed to be getting what they wanted but Iceage were on in the Pandora hall so excitement was now sought there.

And thankfully it was found. Whilst having doubts myself about new album Plowing Into The Fields Of Love the intensity of previous works Iceage and You're Nothing was fully on display as Elias Rønnenfelt flung himself about the stage above the seething crowd. Sardines have more space in a tin than the sea of bodies we were viewing from the balcony appeared to have yet, like all of the rooms in the venue we were to experience over the course of the weekend, discomfort seemed to have been successfully designed out of the structure and ease of movement for those leaving at any point during a performance appeared to be a more straightforward process than the packed mass of bodies would have had you believe. Having regained some of the adrenalin rush of the night before we called it a night at this point.