You can listen to many sets from the 2011 All Tomorrow's Parties festival right here, with more to come.

When the setting matters as much as the music, it creates a temporary community. For the organizers of the All Tomorrow's Parties music festival, the place is paramount. When they announced that they were moving from last year's quirky Kutcher's Country Club in the Catskills to three venues off the Asbury Park, N.J., boardwalk, some expressed concern that some of that community would be lost. And it was, if only a little.

The festival's focus wasn't at the Berkeley Hotel, where most of the artists and attendees stayed, but at the beautifully restored Paramount Theatre and Convention Hall. In its heyday, the Paramount was more prestigious than any Atlantic City casino, as well as home to events like the Miss America pageant. As one who remembers most of the Bradley Beach boardwalk shuttered and boarded up — I lived in the Asbury Park area briefly at age 7 and have many relatives there — it did my heart good to see bands like Portishead and Swans breathe life into these once-flourishing and now quite active venues. Asbury Park is finally making its way back, little by little.

ATP revels in times both new and renewed. Just around the corner at a functioning bowling alley, a rowdy crowd smashed up against the stage at Asbury Lanes for Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and gave the weekend the kickstart it needed. The '80s arty-but-not-smarty rock band looked absolutely bowled over (sorry) by the response, especially given that it hasn't released anything in 10 years. It was at a vintage bowling alley where a small community actually seemed to form, mostly around cheep beer, bowling and late-night DJs. And, perhaps more to ATP's spirit, Asbury Lanes hosted more experimental sounds like the pedal-worshipping Thought Forms and Oneida's performance of The Ocropolis III — which, over its eight-hour (!) improvisation, included guest musicians from Portishead, Boredoms, Yo La Tengo and Guardian Alien.

Chuck D joins Portishead, and the problem with Jeff Mangum, after the jump.

Did you ever see a band so good that it made it near impossible to listen to anything else? Portishead did that to me last night. Honestly, I thought they were brilliant. Beth Gibbons' voice has aged so beautifully — it's so alluring with these rich electronic textures and soulful and sultry guitar playing. I laughed when I saw a tweet that read, "To the guy that tried to crowd surf at Portishead: Wrong concert dude." But that "dude" was onto something. Who'd have thought Beth Gibbons would stage dive at the end of the band's set? More than a few hearts stopped when she surfed the crowd and ran along the barricades shaking the hands of gleeful fans.

Here are some photos from Saturday by Gisel Florez.

When Portishead was over, I headed to Asbury Lanes, the bowling alley that was staging the London electronic trio Factory Floor. The line for this small (maybe a few hundred people tops) was easily 150 people deep when by the time I left. (Keep in mind that the two big venues were done for the night and this little place was the only place hosting live music.) I'll just say for those that didn't get in, you didn't miss much.

To be fair, I'd just seen that magnificent Portishead show. I also had a day of good music: The Pop Group was skanky, angular, dubby and uplifting; Swans was a wall of powerful noise and sonic bliss; Silver-Qluster (Silver Apples' Simeon with Hans-Joachim Roedelius) was a bit of "old school" electronica — more gentle and, by today's standards, nearly quaint. I loved it. But Factory Floor was a turn-on-the-sequencer-and-crank-it-loud kind of act. Its appeal is in the monotony, and the added textures of real drummer and spare singer and bassist didn't add anything of consequence. To be fair, it is really hard to play drums against a sequencer and having seen some startling drummers (Battles had played earlier), they have a long way to go before it'll get interesting.

And a quick aside, I've noticed a trend of multiple drummers in bands a lot lately: Oneida had two for parts of its epic, eight-hour improvisation, Swans had two, Portishead has two, Foot Village had four, and Battles only had one, but, oh what a monster drummer. And earlier this week, I saw Radiohead with two drummers. Just a thought.

Overheard At ATP

After Oneida performed their eight-hour improvisation, The Ocropolis III:

"I can't wait to listen to the recordings."

"MORE!"

The door crew outside the venue:

"If it only had a beat to it, I mean — that, that's not even music."

"They call them f——— festivals, but people don't seem so festive."

That last one may seem true. There is a bit of mope on the face of it, but people are having the time of their lives — great music, dark and funny people, fabulous venue. I thought I'd miss the Catskills, but the Paramount Theatre and the Berkeley Hotel are classy places with soul. This so works. The last day is about to begin.

Honestly, where else could you bowl and watch a band — or watch a band while others bowl?

And not just any band, but the legendary Thinking Fellers Union Local 282?

Cults played beforehand at Asbury Lanes, and it was the best show I've seen from the band.

We will post many of the shows from ATP online this coming week, and Lars Gotrich (@totalvibration) and I (@allsongs)will highlight moments on next week's All Songs Considered, but here are a few moments worth sharing while they're still fresh.

Totally overheard at Thinking Fellers show: "This is the only band I've seen where I got on the stage after the show and kissed the floor." The love for this band was astonishing. Most people hadn't seen the group in 15 years, and were mouthing every lyric to every song.

ATP is the best camp you never went to. This year it's in Asbury Park, N.J., centered around the historic Paramount Theatre, Convention Hall and Berkeley Hotel on the boardwalk, which overlooks the Atlantic Ocean. The artists and the fans all stay at the same hotel, taking the same elevators and sharing conversation. The wall between fans and fame is mostly stripped away, as is corporate sponsorship. In terms of vibe, it is simply is the best music festival there is.

At the Paramount, a glorious historic theater, Jeff Magnum played. The reclusive Neutral Milk Hotel frontman is not so reclusive recently. It's safe to say that many in the crowd are hoping he has something new in the works, but everyone there was more than willing to relive the older song songs, strummed so simply and sung so strongly last night. One highlight was a new cover of Daniel Johnston's "True Love Will Find You in the End." Out of respect for his wishes, there will be no photos or audio of Mangum posted here. (But Google hard enough...)

There are a number of shows that I saw last night that we won't be posting in the coming week, including Mangum, Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Shellac. Shellac's Steve Albini wrote us a lengthy, thoughtful explanation about the value of the live experience. We respect it and understand it. In the age of instant uploads and gratification by proxy, I'm not so sure Albini or any artist can keep their finger in that digital dike forever. But you might take Albini's advice and start making your plans for ATP 2012, and the postcards you'll write your friends with the words, "Greetings from Asbury Park."

The organizers behind All Tomorrow's Parties have a knack for finding charmingly dilapidated venues for their music festival, from a grand resort that time forgot to a seaside boardwalk in the midst of revitalization. Moving from Kutcher's Country Club in Monticello, N.Y., the festival will be spread over three venues in Asbury Park, N.J., this weekend. The suddenly active yet still reclusive Jeff Mangum is on tap to perform twice, as are Saturday's curators in Portishead.

Right now, Bob Boilen and I are at ATP to record a number of sets — though, sadly, we were unable to obtain permission for the aforementioned headliners. The performances will be archived on the site this coming Monday, Oct. 3, but in the meantime, we'll be tweeting (Bob Boilen as @allsongs and myself as @totalvibration) and putting up photos on our Flickr page all weekend.

Here are some of the artists we'll record, with more to be announced:

Cults
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
Battles
Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog
Factory Floor
Reggie Watts
Colin Stetson
Anika
Earth
The Horrors

You can find the full schedule and set times at ATP's website. (Note: Mogwai has canceled its Sunday performance.) By the way, if you're at the festival this weekend, the organizers have told us that the preferred Twitter hashtag is #ATPIBYM.

You can also listen to a selection of music from all of the artists attending the festival. These are studio records. Concert records from many artists will start going online the first week of October.

Walking into Kutsher's Country Club — the Monticello, N.Y., site of the All Tomorrow's Parties Music Festival — was like stepping into the decayed memory of bygone decades. A dated typeface stretched into a neon sign, minimalist furniture lined the hallways and filled the lobbies, paint was peeling from every corner of the hotel and there was a certain musty air that only comes from years of neglect and generations of guests. And with no V.I.P. passes or roped-off areas, musicians, comedians, fans and Sunday's curator, director Jim Jarmusch, all co-mingled in the puzzling layout of Kutsher's. This surreal setting set the atmosphere for a completely unique concert-going experience.

While sipping a tasty beverage by the lake or catching a movie in the Criterion Cinema provided respite for our ears, we were certainly at ATP for the music. With stuttered schedules, it was possible to get a taste of everything at the two stages, but the draw of the Stardust Room (the main stage) always felt like an event. Tiered in levels like something out of a classic '50s movie, if you wanted to stand in the back, you could still see Iggy Pop spastically dance like no 63-year-old man should during The Stooges' performance of Raw Power. And then there was the best sound system I've ever heard. When Sleep performed Holy Mountain for ATP's "Don't Look Back" series on Friday night, the chunka-chunka riffs of "The Druid" never sounded so deliriously thick. And the hypnotic, one-riff epic "Dopesmoker" was minimalist metal bliss pulsing from the speakers, a transcendental sound rattling the ribcage of every slow-motion fist-pumper.

Hear Bob Boilen's ATP recap, plus a live recording from Iggy and the Stooges, after the jump.