Kitchen Motors Collective at Cargo. 27 November 2006.
What the blurb says… “Deliciously hypnotic music from Reykjavik - Kitchen Motors is a Reykjavik-based artists’ collective with a reputation for cross-art chemistry and surreal charm. With members drawn from across the musical spectrum, Kitchen Motors is a creative playground, where exciting new ensembles appear by happy accident and dense and magical films entwine with thrilling new sounds.”
Bet there is a subplot here. Ah yes. The Múm subplot. Múm are, for me, the most influential and important band of the last ten years; pioneers of a new form of music combining electronica, folk, pop and contemporary classical; not just plinky plonking the elements together but fusing them at great temperature to produce a new hybrid music. Traces of the radiation emitted by this fusion can be found all over the poposphere, from Goldfrapp to Tunng to Cibelle :::::
by the way look out in 2007 for its cross fertilisation with the New York freaky folk scene – Cibelle on the bill with CocoRosie at David Byrne’s “Welcome to Dreamland” all star freaky gig – Bjork working with Anthony (without his Johnsons) – CocoRosie currently recording their new album on a boat somewhere near the Arctic – oh yes :::::
But Múm are dead; long live Múm. There was a big clue on their My Space site – “it is difficult to know who we are any more.” I feared the worst when vocalist and founder member Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (under the name Kría Brekkan (which apparently means “to tern the slope”)) appeared on the bill with dullard psyc-rockers Animal Collective at the Astoria earlier this year. She appeared very fragile and almost not there. See for yourself at http://www.underexposed.org.uk/kriabrekkan/kria1.htm . Hear for yourself at http://www.rosmedia.se/kria.html. Then I found out that she’d only gone and married one of the Animals (Avey “Yoko” Tare) and moved to New York, and the official announcement of her departure from Múm came earlier this week, together with a sad letter which you can find here: http://www.fat-cat.co.uk/mum.pdf.
But Múm are not dead. First there is a vintage Peel Session recorded in 2002 being released in a few weeks. And the founding foundling boys, being Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason, have formed a new line up and recorded a new album out early 2007. And Múm have always been something of a collective, with, from what I can gather, something of a symbiotic relationship with the Kitchen Motors collective. So anyway the subplot was that this was a chance to check out some of their new members, in particular Hildur Gudnadottir (cello and vocals) and Ólöf Arnalds (violin / viola / guitar / vocals) - actually I remember Ólöf playing with Múm at the infamous “game of two halves” double header with Cat Power at the Barbican last year.
Yeah yeah yeah that’s all very well and good, but isn’t this meant to be a gig review.
So first up was Hildur Gudnadottir with just a cello and laptop for company. After some heavyweight drones she was joined by the rest of the Skuli Sverrisson group including Ólöf Arnalds. Musically this was the post-Reich end of the contemporary classical spectrum; repeated patterns and distortions with a few touches of electronica misting in from the sea, and the ladies on vocals and guess what – both Hildur and Ólöf sing kind of like Kristín Anna: breathy girly swirly lovely.
Next up was Kira Kira and her box of electonix (more later).
Finally the Johann K Johannsson group with dreamy soundtrack stylee contemporary classical with touches of electronica in the beats and sounds.
1. Coolness of crowd: 8/10 – an odd mix of grungy students, North Europeans in layers of wool in different shades of taupe, some Japanese, some punks, some Shoreditch Twats, some classical fans in retro Geography teacher costume.
2. Bob quotient: - 8/10 – high, though tended to be of the fuzzy cut sort rather than the clean lines I prefer.
3. Annoyment factor: - 8/10 – excellent decorum, probably the all time best for a club venue. Anyone talking was poked and shushed from all sides. Get this, I didn’t even have to give anyone a hard stare! I was amongst kindred spirits. The only real sonic interference came from people knocking over beer bottles.
4. Sound quality: - 10/10 – crystal clear; especially impressive in the Kria Kria session.
5. Comfort: 5/10 – many chose to sit on the concrete floor, but it’s dirty and no good for someone with tight glutes. So I stood, and as the gig lasted for some two and a quarter hours without break, I was in some discomfort by the end.
6. Sexytime: 6/10 – maybe affected by my discomforture.
7. Percussion / sound effect function: 30/10. Both the Skuli Sverrisson and Johann Johannsson groups employed sampled beats and effects and mild electronica, but the highlight was the Kira Kira set. Wow. Double Wow. She had a wooden box the size of a cigar case with knobs on and stuff inside, gravel I think, which she tilted about. A tiny music box kind of thing spewing paper spotted with chads and a tiny little handle for winding the paper back in. A long stick covered in glitter with five or so little handles each linked to the most miniscule music box imaginable, and which she would also breathe into. Plus beats and samples triggered as if by thought alone. All were miked up to an unbelievable degree of clarity and power. When she opened up the wooden box and stirred the gravel with her hand, it was like the earth had titled on its axis.
Overall: 75/70 – a good time had by all, but the highlight for me was the Kira Kira set; the others sets were more in the vein of contemporary classical that is very much of the moment but which can tend a little bit towards the sort of thing you find on Classic FM TV.
Merchandise: No T’s, but an agonisingly huge selection of cds, about 15. One of the lovely Icelandic ladies from the collective helped me to buy 5 of them as well as filling me in on the Múm subplot.
Gruff Rhys? He wasn’t there. He should have been.
Visuals: Nice. Lots of grainy black and white footage, and some nice use of a glitter ball effect. Best visuals award go to Kira Kira who performed against a blue sky and clouds backdrop, wearing a nice white frock onto which was projected an image of a colourful flying kite (the kite had polygonic blocks of colour which reminded me of Vanessa da Silva’s blocky work on the latest Tunng album / tour). I found out later that the kite was one of fifty she had miked up and flown around a lighthouse in Iceland, as you do.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Thursday, November 16, 2006
thought for the day
spare a thought for melvyn prophet, age 49, from the west midlands, who i just saw on 'this morning'. mr prophet has not had an erection for 7 years. bet he didn't see that coming.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Perpetual Motion.
It’s just a matter of mathematics really.
There are only 24 hours in a day. That’s not going to change anytime soon. Each year, the public transport system struggles ooh just a little bit more to cope. The journeys take longer. Extrapolate - you will begin to spend more time in transit than you do at work or in bed. Soon you will be able to access your mobile ‘phone on the tube, and with that will come full wireless interconnectivity. So rather than travelling to your office, you will be travelling in your office. As we approach 2012, the tube will run 24 hours a day. The pharmaceutical companies will have perfected pills which reduce the need for sleep. Exacerbated by rising house prices, people will start to live on the tube: working, not sleeping, always travelling. A support culture will arise; tiller girls and boy walking up and down the carriages offering ice cream, beverages, smart “cereal” bars, paid for by chip and pin cards inserted in your index finger.
Portaloos will be installed on every platform. The loos will analyse your stool, and advise if for example you need more zinc or vitamin B12 in your diet. The results will be downloaded to the NHS database and shared with other governmental systems; your DNA compared with information on your ID profile; any illegal substances (steroids being the drug of choice for the professional classes by the turn of the decade) will be detected and the information passed on to police via the crime database.
For shopping, head on down to the Tesco Circle Line, a mini Metro on every platform, and a fully stocked supermarketsupertrain coming round every twenty minutes. Lack of sunlight and genetically modified supasoya ™ dinners will take their toll on your libido, but for those rare moments you will be able to pop down to an easyFUCK ™ capsule brothel located in one of the disused tunnels. All five genders catered for. Virgin Active Trains will offer gyms although most users will go just for the showers.
This isn’t about prophecy, it’s about calculating the results of the equations.
There are only 24 hours in a day. That’s not going to change anytime soon. Each year, the public transport system struggles ooh just a little bit more to cope. The journeys take longer. Extrapolate - you will begin to spend more time in transit than you do at work or in bed. Soon you will be able to access your mobile ‘phone on the tube, and with that will come full wireless interconnectivity. So rather than travelling to your office, you will be travelling in your office. As we approach 2012, the tube will run 24 hours a day. The pharmaceutical companies will have perfected pills which reduce the need for sleep. Exacerbated by rising house prices, people will start to live on the tube: working, not sleeping, always travelling. A support culture will arise; tiller girls and boy walking up and down the carriages offering ice cream, beverages, smart “cereal” bars, paid for by chip and pin cards inserted in your index finger.
Portaloos will be installed on every platform. The loos will analyse your stool, and advise if for example you need more zinc or vitamin B12 in your diet. The results will be downloaded to the NHS database and shared with other governmental systems; your DNA compared with information on your ID profile; any illegal substances (steroids being the drug of choice for the professional classes by the turn of the decade) will be detected and the information passed on to police via the crime database.
For shopping, head on down to the Tesco Circle Line, a mini Metro on every platform, and a fully stocked supermarketsupertrain coming round every twenty minutes. Lack of sunlight and genetically modified supasoya ™ dinners will take their toll on your libido, but for those rare moments you will be able to pop down to an easyFUCK ™ capsule brothel located in one of the disused tunnels. All five genders catered for. Virgin Active Trains will offer gyms although most users will go just for the showers.
This isn’t about prophecy, it’s about calculating the results of the equations.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
“Gig” Review – Antony and the Johnsons
Antony and the Johnsons perform Turning. Barbican 5/11/06.
Another “"gig"”? Well sort of. Part performance, part art happening. Antony sings his melancholy ballards of love death and gender confusion whilst on the side of the stage is a revolving platform onto which step a succession of thirteen New York “beauties” who are filmed and the images projected on to a giant backscreen where they are mixed live by Charles Atlas.
The Charles Atlas? Yes indeed. The. A man who has cast a long shadow over my artistic world, from the moment I first saw his nineteen eightyfourish (the year, not the Orwellian nightmare) film “Hail the New Puritans” which featured Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, and various other London nightlife bohemians and culminated in strange goings on at the legendary Taboo nightclub. As a young boy this seemed to be where I aspired to be, even though it was no place for a straight, chubby, Jewish boy with a high forehead and a wardrobe of polyester M&S flairs. Atlas has continued to design the lighting for Michael Clark; and it has always been one of the highlights of any Clark show. Austere, with much use of lighting coming from the side of the stage, it provides a particular atmosphere and ambience, very clean and magical. In Clark’s “mmm”, which I saw last week and haven’t had time to blog, there was some interesting use of blocks of more pastel shades. Anyway Atlas is primarily known for his video art rather than lighting per se, and this was the first time I had seen him in action, so to speak.
So tell me about the lovely ladies. Hmmm. Well I am pretty sure that four of them really were women. And I’m pretty sure that five of them were born men. Thereafter, everything is not so very illuminated. As to the degree of transgender transformation I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess, but they probably ranged from straightforward drag queen all the way to post-op. Des Lynam would have been in his element.
So, “Turning”. Yes that’s what it was called. Revolution not evolution. A reference to the rotating platform, but also I thought to the process of feminisation, of turning into a woman. Also of turning as in on the turn, and as in the ageing process, as the big screen brutally revealed every skin blemish, wrinkle, divot, crevice, crater, eruption; the beauties came in all ages and sizes. And the turning of live flesh to screen projection; so often the projected face looked completely different from the real.
Perhaps it should be said that Antony sings like an angel.
1. Coolness of crowd: 10/10. Yes very. All sorts, as you might imagine. And yes there were some people getting in a pickle about which toilets they should be going into, although I suspect this was less a question of gender politics than the size of the queue.
2. Bob quotient: 8/10. Very high. All colours and shapes. Very bobby indeed.
3. Annoyment factor: 10/10. You could hear a pin drop, though Antony does tend to have that effect on people (when he performed at (and won) the 2005 Mercury Music Prize, he silenced a room full of boozed and coked up music executives)
4. Sound quality: 9/10. As always at the Barbican, top notch.
5. Comfort: 7/10. I had a slight bobble in my seat. Also I foolishly had drunk 1 litre of water before going in, and as soon as Antony started singing, the urge was growing. Remember that Shakespeare quote from the last review.
6. Sexytime: 7/10, but I would have to be very very drunk, and not find out until its too late, and then think what the hell, expand your horizons, if it’s good enough for Des Lynam and Alan Partridge…
7. Percussion / sound effect function: 6/10. Well it all sounded lovely, and for once there was no need for extra augmentation (should that be orgmentation?).
Overall: 57/70. Yet another extraordinary and unique event culminates in a rapturous standing ovation.
Merchandise: Two t shirts with ambiguous designs, A glossy brochure. CDs. All top notch stuff.
Gruff Rhys?: He wasn’t there. As you will have gathered, I was bursting for Gruff from the moment of the first note.
Visuals: - yeah well, amazing; haven’t you been paying attention?
Another “"gig"”? Well sort of. Part performance, part art happening. Antony sings his melancholy ballards of love death and gender confusion whilst on the side of the stage is a revolving platform onto which step a succession of thirteen New York “beauties” who are filmed and the images projected on to a giant backscreen where they are mixed live by Charles Atlas.
The Charles Atlas? Yes indeed. The. A man who has cast a long shadow over my artistic world, from the moment I first saw his nineteen eightyfourish (the year, not the Orwellian nightmare) film “Hail the New Puritans” which featured Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, and various other London nightlife bohemians and culminated in strange goings on at the legendary Taboo nightclub. As a young boy this seemed to be where I aspired to be, even though it was no place for a straight, chubby, Jewish boy with a high forehead and a wardrobe of polyester M&S flairs. Atlas has continued to design the lighting for Michael Clark; and it has always been one of the highlights of any Clark show. Austere, with much use of lighting coming from the side of the stage, it provides a particular atmosphere and ambience, very clean and magical. In Clark’s “mmm”, which I saw last week and haven’t had time to blog, there was some interesting use of blocks of more pastel shades. Anyway Atlas is primarily known for his video art rather than lighting per se, and this was the first time I had seen him in action, so to speak.
So tell me about the lovely ladies. Hmmm. Well I am pretty sure that four of them really were women. And I’m pretty sure that five of them were born men. Thereafter, everything is not so very illuminated. As to the degree of transgender transformation I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess, but they probably ranged from straightforward drag queen all the way to post-op. Des Lynam would have been in his element.
So, “Turning”. Yes that’s what it was called. Revolution not evolution. A reference to the rotating platform, but also I thought to the process of feminisation, of turning into a woman. Also of turning as in on the turn, and as in the ageing process, as the big screen brutally revealed every skin blemish, wrinkle, divot, crevice, crater, eruption; the beauties came in all ages and sizes. And the turning of live flesh to screen projection; so often the projected face looked completely different from the real.
Perhaps it should be said that Antony sings like an angel.
1. Coolness of crowd: 10/10. Yes very. All sorts, as you might imagine. And yes there were some people getting in a pickle about which toilets they should be going into, although I suspect this was less a question of gender politics than the size of the queue.
2. Bob quotient: 8/10. Very high. All colours and shapes. Very bobby indeed.
3. Annoyment factor: 10/10. You could hear a pin drop, though Antony does tend to have that effect on people (when he performed at (and won) the 2005 Mercury Music Prize, he silenced a room full of boozed and coked up music executives)
4. Sound quality: 9/10. As always at the Barbican, top notch.
5. Comfort: 7/10. I had a slight bobble in my seat. Also I foolishly had drunk 1 litre of water before going in, and as soon as Antony started singing, the urge was growing. Remember that Shakespeare quote from the last review.
6. Sexytime: 7/10, but I would have to be very very drunk, and not find out until its too late, and then think what the hell, expand your horizons, if it’s good enough for Des Lynam and Alan Partridge…
7. Percussion / sound effect function: 6/10. Well it all sounded lovely, and for once there was no need for extra augmentation (should that be orgmentation?).
Overall: 57/70. Yet another extraordinary and unique event culminates in a rapturous standing ovation.
Merchandise: Two t shirts with ambiguous designs, A glossy brochure. CDs. All top notch stuff.
Gruff Rhys?: He wasn’t there. As you will have gathered, I was bursting for Gruff from the moment of the first note.
Visuals: - yeah well, amazing; haven’t you been paying attention?
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
"Gig" Review: The Photophonic Experiment
The Photophonic Experiment – An Evening of Electro-Spectral Musical Phenomena. Featuring Pram. Blissbody and Project Dark. QEH 31/10/06
““Gig”” in inverted commas? Yeah well I’m not sure if this was a gig, or more of a sound art performance, or even an experiment (as they described it, due to the unpredictability of the “various electrical apparatus” being used.)
What? Yes well the thing here was the conversion of electricity and light into sound. The stage looked like the den of a mad boffin – think Dr Frankenstein. There were all sorts of glass tubes and vessels and bizarre instruments which produced crackling sizzling sparks. It was kind of like Halloween and Guy Fawkes night wrapped into one. There was even a touch of Chanukah when they used those spinning tops which light up as they spin, in combination with a device called a photo-synth which transformed the colours into sound.
To be honest, when I saw the stage, dimly lit, with a menacing thud of deep throbs of sound circulating in the theatre, I was a little scared. I was in the front row. Some of these devices carry 10,000 vaults. They are unpredictable. Some bass frequencies can be so powerful as to loosen the bowels. Did I say I was in the front row? Knowing what I by then knew, I was even more scared by the time of the second half.
Did Shakespeare having anything to say about this sort of thing? Funny you should ask. “Some men there are … when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose, cannot contain their urine” Merchant of Venice Act IV Scene I.
1. Coolness of crowd: 10/10 – well yes probably the oddest assortment of people I have ever seen gathered under one roof. My particular favourite was a guy who looked like he was in a fetish movie directed by LS Lowry. Stick thin, black coat, a small black formal hat on his head, huge ring with bauble through his septum. He carried a black cane, and a small medicine bag, about 6 inches deep, 14 inches wide. I can only imagine the bag contained instruments of the most deviant sexual torture imaginable. I am quite sure he has a basement styled like a mental hospital clinic, all white floors and walls, where nurses in white pvc uniforms inject large quantities of water into his testicles until they are blown up like watermelons.
2. Bob quotient: 8/10 – high. Although as you will see, a bob is no guarantee of good behaviour.
3. Annoyment factor: 3/10 – disastrous. The two bobbed women behind me talked loudly throughout the second half, and yes one was wearing and shaking bangles, and even at one point took out her keys and started rattling them about. Fucking unbelievable. I tried a polite plea for them to be quiet, but I think this only made them more determined. Someone a few seats along loudly shushed them towards the end and I think this had more effect. Did I say anything to them at the end? I couldn’t call myself a mate of Dickie Silverfish if I hadn’t. I said to the glum looking woman behind me “it’s a pity you had to talk so loudly. You really spoiled it for me”. She didn’t react except to look a little bit more glum.
However a couple of factors saved it from being a complete white-out. Firstly the sonic assault from the stage was really powerful. I don’t mean loud, although in part it was. There was a purity and intensity to the sine waves which gave the whole thing a synaesthetic feel – these were sound waves you felt rather than heard. Big bass rumbles that shook your ribs. Throbbing pitches that made your arms tingle. And a screeching finale that left me barely able to walk for a good five minutes. Secondly, although the sounds would coalesce into something approximate to tunes at various stages, this was hardly beautiful music. The softer moments were more like a sorbet intercourse, refreshing the aural palette before the next onslaught.
What I resented about the people behind me was that their yabbering served as an artificial and irritating interface between me and the sound performance, preventing full emersion, and anchoring my brain to the physical surroundings, so that it couldn’t go awandering too far. Mind you, this might just have prevented my brain from wandering off so far that it got lost and couldn’t find its way home again.
4. Sound quality: 9/10 – superb. I was particularly impressed by the quality of the sampled sounds. The virtual drummer sounded so authentic, and so precisely placed in the mix, that I searched the stage to try and see where he was hiding. Live sampling and processing of a trombone was also astonishing, the live and the sampled were indistinguishable, producing a very weird ear/mind disconnect (cos like the movements of the trombonist and the sound produced were out of sync – keep up!)
5. Comfort: 6/10 - nice comfy seats, good view, couple of marks deducted to reflect the fact that some of the sounds had the effect of making me feel quite uncomfortable.
6. Sexytime: - 7/10 – yes, but in only in the most perverted sense.
7. Percussion / sound effect function: - 25/10. Where to begin? They had a Theremin – that’s a bonus 10 marks straightaway. And other similar instruments played by waving fingers over the instrument. A vast array of knobs, gadgets, things to twiddle, boxes with flickering green lines like hospital monitors. Then there were the home built electric light instruments: a Jacobs Ladder, an Aquaphon, a Spark-o-phone, and the Jar of Charge. Plus the photo-synths mentioned earlier. Strange objects being played by tv remote controls; things being plucked or bowed; things bursting into flames as they were played.
Overall: 68/70 – a strange difficult and certainly unique night out. Probably won’t be appearing at the Arts Depot anytime soon.
Optional categories:
Merchandise: - nice free brochure, some cds from one of the performers, nowt to get too excited about.
Gruff Rhys?: - He wasn’t there.
Visuals: - yeah well the whole thing was visually extreme anyway, but they also had a screen which showed close ups of the instruments or very weird retro Victorian style horror films. Also two large white half-globes either side of the stage, like the device from the Prisoner, which glowed or showed films distorted in the curves. And a great moment when they faked an explosion – loud flash and bang, lots of smoke, everything gone black. The women behind me nearly wet themselves. Shame they didn’t.
““Gig”” in inverted commas? Yeah well I’m not sure if this was a gig, or more of a sound art performance, or even an experiment (as they described it, due to the unpredictability of the “various electrical apparatus” being used.)
What? Yes well the thing here was the conversion of electricity and light into sound. The stage looked like the den of a mad boffin – think Dr Frankenstein. There were all sorts of glass tubes and vessels and bizarre instruments which produced crackling sizzling sparks. It was kind of like Halloween and Guy Fawkes night wrapped into one. There was even a touch of Chanukah when they used those spinning tops which light up as they spin, in combination with a device called a photo-synth which transformed the colours into sound.
To be honest, when I saw the stage, dimly lit, with a menacing thud of deep throbs of sound circulating in the theatre, I was a little scared. I was in the front row. Some of these devices carry 10,000 vaults. They are unpredictable. Some bass frequencies can be so powerful as to loosen the bowels. Did I say I was in the front row? Knowing what I by then knew, I was even more scared by the time of the second half.
Did Shakespeare having anything to say about this sort of thing? Funny you should ask. “Some men there are … when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose, cannot contain their urine” Merchant of Venice Act IV Scene I.
1. Coolness of crowd: 10/10 – well yes probably the oddest assortment of people I have ever seen gathered under one roof. My particular favourite was a guy who looked like he was in a fetish movie directed by LS Lowry. Stick thin, black coat, a small black formal hat on his head, huge ring with bauble through his septum. He carried a black cane, and a small medicine bag, about 6 inches deep, 14 inches wide. I can only imagine the bag contained instruments of the most deviant sexual torture imaginable. I am quite sure he has a basement styled like a mental hospital clinic, all white floors and walls, where nurses in white pvc uniforms inject large quantities of water into his testicles until they are blown up like watermelons.
2. Bob quotient: 8/10 – high. Although as you will see, a bob is no guarantee of good behaviour.
3. Annoyment factor: 3/10 – disastrous. The two bobbed women behind me talked loudly throughout the second half, and yes one was wearing and shaking bangles, and even at one point took out her keys and started rattling them about. Fucking unbelievable. I tried a polite plea for them to be quiet, but I think this only made them more determined. Someone a few seats along loudly shushed them towards the end and I think this had more effect. Did I say anything to them at the end? I couldn’t call myself a mate of Dickie Silverfish if I hadn’t. I said to the glum looking woman behind me “it’s a pity you had to talk so loudly. You really spoiled it for me”. She didn’t react except to look a little bit more glum.
However a couple of factors saved it from being a complete white-out. Firstly the sonic assault from the stage was really powerful. I don’t mean loud, although in part it was. There was a purity and intensity to the sine waves which gave the whole thing a synaesthetic feel – these were sound waves you felt rather than heard. Big bass rumbles that shook your ribs. Throbbing pitches that made your arms tingle. And a screeching finale that left me barely able to walk for a good five minutes. Secondly, although the sounds would coalesce into something approximate to tunes at various stages, this was hardly beautiful music. The softer moments were more like a sorbet intercourse, refreshing the aural palette before the next onslaught.
What I resented about the people behind me was that their yabbering served as an artificial and irritating interface between me and the sound performance, preventing full emersion, and anchoring my brain to the physical surroundings, so that it couldn’t go awandering too far. Mind you, this might just have prevented my brain from wandering off so far that it got lost and couldn’t find its way home again.
4. Sound quality: 9/10 – superb. I was particularly impressed by the quality of the sampled sounds. The virtual drummer sounded so authentic, and so precisely placed in the mix, that I searched the stage to try and see where he was hiding. Live sampling and processing of a trombone was also astonishing, the live and the sampled were indistinguishable, producing a very weird ear/mind disconnect (cos like the movements of the trombonist and the sound produced were out of sync – keep up!)
5. Comfort: 6/10 - nice comfy seats, good view, couple of marks deducted to reflect the fact that some of the sounds had the effect of making me feel quite uncomfortable.
6. Sexytime: - 7/10 – yes, but in only in the most perverted sense.
7. Percussion / sound effect function: - 25/10. Where to begin? They had a Theremin – that’s a bonus 10 marks straightaway. And other similar instruments played by waving fingers over the instrument. A vast array of knobs, gadgets, things to twiddle, boxes with flickering green lines like hospital monitors. Then there were the home built electric light instruments: a Jacobs Ladder, an Aquaphon, a Spark-o-phone, and the Jar of Charge. Plus the photo-synths mentioned earlier. Strange objects being played by tv remote controls; things being plucked or bowed; things bursting into flames as they were played.
Overall: 68/70 – a strange difficult and certainly unique night out. Probably won’t be appearing at the Arts Depot anytime soon.
Optional categories:
Merchandise: - nice free brochure, some cds from one of the performers, nowt to get too excited about.
Gruff Rhys?: - He wasn’t there.
Visuals: - yeah well the whole thing was visually extreme anyway, but they also had a screen which showed close ups of the instruments or very weird retro Victorian style horror films. Also two large white half-globes either side of the stage, like the device from the Prisoner, which glowed or showed films distorted in the curves. And a great moment when they faked an explosion – loud flash and bang, lots of smoke, everything gone black. The women behind me nearly wet themselves. Shame they didn’t.
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