ASBURY PARK, N.J. — All Tomorrow’s Parties, the music festival that wrapped up its annual local edition here on Sunday night, is built on avoidance. It’s a utopian operation; its organizers know the problems with most other music festivals and try to avoid them on principle.  It prizes performers and bands that do a lot of avoiding themselves: obscure or reclusive or misunderstood or intransigent or semi-extant, forerunners and satellites and outsiders, the post- and pre- and para-. This year’s examples included Jeff Mangum, the awkward singer-songwriter from the late-’90s band Neutral Milk Hotel; Portishead, the festival’s guest curators, from the late-’90s scene in Bristol, England, which has not played the East Coast in 12 years and still sounds stylishly spectral; the Pop Group, also from Bristol, needling and springy and spindly, inactive for 30 years; the brainy and discursive Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, from San Francisco, on hold since 2001; and Swans, the aggressive New York band from the ’80s and early ’90s that reactivated last year after a generation-long hiatus.  It sets them up with champion sound and, generally, a room that suits them. Because the festival doesn’t happen in the summer, it isn’t subject to the elements — sun, dust, campers — and doesn’t conveniently hook into the touring schedules of bands playing the festival circuit. It has no corporate sponsors. It takes place in frumpy, family-vacation places. There are no announcements before sets, even though its organizers, the couple Barry Hogan and Deborah Kee Higgins, could use those opportunities to plug the other festivals and concerts it puts on through the year around the world — England, Australia, Japan.  This year the New York-area edition took place here for the first time, using two big theaters and various smaller spaces nearby, creating a kind of campus by the ocean, with food vendors imported from the Brooklyn Flea. It’s well scaled: an average of 3,000 people on each of the festival’s three days, most of them purchasers of all-weekend passes, many staying in the Berkeley Hotel, where films and comedy sets complemented the music.  But of course there are no utopias. From 2008 to 2010, the event took place at Kutsher’s Country Club, secluded in the Catskills, and because there was no local community to protect, security felt invisible; thus, a peaceful and discreet lawlessness prevailed. In Asbury Park, an area where lawlessness has a different meaning, a serious police presence circulated through the area, though the audiences are some of the most studious and docile you will ever see. They know what they’ve come for; they mostly want to pay attention.  They also have to be told to stand up. On Saturday evening, after a battering and immaculately played opening instrumental, “No Words/No Thoughts,” Michael Gira, leader of Swans, barked at the seated crowd at the Paramount, a beautiful 1920s theater with raked seating. (In effect, he called them fat Americans.) They complied, quickly streaming down toward the stage.  With the Pop Group something similar happened. The audience, most of which had surely never seen a Pop Group show — they played a handful of dates in Europe last year after a three-decade break — gazed hungrily at Mark Stewart, the band’s tall, manic, vivid singer. He threw himself around, howling things like “We Are All Prostitutes,” a jabbing, five-alarm song from 1979: “Department stores are our new cathedrals/ Our cars are martyrs to the cause.” And then he nudged them, politely: “We’re not really a sit-down band, you know.” Blam: dancing in the aisles. Can you both study cultural history and participate in a re-enactment of it? If your favorite art trains you to be skeptical, can you credit a reunited, middle-age Pop Group or Swans? Can you allow yourself to dance to it?  Where there are long memories, there are long attention spans. Oneida, from Brooklyn, has played three all-day shows before, two of them at Tomorrow’s festivals. Its gig on Saturday took place at Asbury Lanes, a bowling alley and rock club a few blocks from the waterfront. It was eight hours long, full of improvising and repetition and kept changing course as other musicians joined in, some from the festival and some not, sometimes taking the lead and moving the music elsewhere.  Festivals need through lines, and Oneida’s occupation of the bowling alley created one, at least for a day. It wasn’t just clearer and stronger than the last Oneida marathon I saw; it was some of the best music I heard all weekend, a tense node of a comparatively slack festival. Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow of Portishead sat in for a while, on guitar and drums. So did Ches Smith and Shahzad Ismaily from Marc Ribot’s band Ceramic Dog, drumming in mesmerizing doubled grooves; the free-improvising singer Alex Drewchin and powerhouse drummer Greg Fox from Guardian Alien; Shinji Masuko, guitarist from the Japanese bands DMBQ and the Boredoms, making graceful, spacey shapes; James McNew of Yo La Tengo, playing bass for hours, keeping the bottom of the music strong and level.
At the All Tomorrowâs Parties musical festival, some long-lost bands reformed for a series of concerts in Asbury Park, N.J.