Coalition,
Brighton, Fri 3rd May
Shortly
before the band came on, I observed the typical Death Grips fan to be
a youthful hipster, busily texting and tweeting while sporting ironic
facial hair. “These young people of today,” I thought to myself,
my mind imagining their idea of watching the gig would consist of
updating their live feeds while waxing lyrical of hardcore gigs of
old.
Scant
seconds after the band came on, a huge wave of arm-flinging energy
erupted across the crowd - which didn't seem to abate until well
after the whole thing was over.
Good
for you, young people of today.
If I
were so foolish as to reduce the live Death Grips experience to a
sound-bite explanation, it would be something like 'hip-hop and
drum-and-bass beats, cross-bred with full-on noise then set to attack
mode.' Though it's not at all the same type of music, they chiefly
reminded me of another band I saw in this very venue – Sunn
O))). There's the same single-minded dedication to taking
one frontier of music and pushing at it, never pausing even for such
a lunch-is-for-wimps moment as a gap between tracks. There's the same
deranged decibel level, music so loud your bones almost shake along
to it.
Except
Death Grips' accessory of choice isn't dry ice but strobes – fired
at us pretty much incessantly, and perfectly matching the abrasive,
rapid-fire beats. The performing duo are backlit to the point I'm not
even sure they actually existed in three dimensions, the singer a
perpetual motion machine of aloft arms and jutting elbows.
Live
they're considerably less sample-centric than on record. Tracks are
stripped right back to their elements, much the way robbers do with
shotguns. But there's also a deranged kind of invention to it; things
will become almost psychotically metronomic, only for some curve ball
to be thrown in. Much
like Fucked Up they throw such a dizzying punch live you
can't imagine it working on record. Yet when you try them on record
you find they're richly rewarding.
Things
climax with a good few minutes of squalling white noise. Then the
first thing my punch-bagged ears pick up on stepping outside is a
security guard talking to another. “They had more rabbit than
Sainsbury's.” Which they did.
Like
so many styles of music before it, hip-hop went mainstream many moons
ago. Rappers present a puffed-up parody of black street life for a
mostly white audience, while name-dropping
brand names for product placement cash. But at it's
inception it was about taking music forward by
taking it apart, reassembling it then giving it a
kick out of the lab door. (In methods not so different from Krautrock
outfits such as Faust.) And it's alternative acts like Death Grips,
far from being some wayward offshoot, that are keeping that spirit
alive.
In
what seems an increasingly common step for hip-hop acts, the 'CD
stall' held no actual CDs – just T-shirts and hoodies. (Like
Fugazi in reverse.) Their first release,
'Ex-Military', put up on torrent sites, opened
with a Charlie Manson quote calling the music biz “a bigger jail
than I just got out of.” (On a track appropriately titled
'Beware'.) I didn't believe the promoters' claim
that this had become the most legally downloaded piece of music, and
yet it seems it's so. After signing to Epic and being told
their next release wouldn't appear for over a year, they promptly
torrented that as well. (They are, to no great surprise, no longer
signed to Epic.)
The
first one being free and all that, you could do worse than check it out. This is
the opening track with that Manson intro...
COLOUR
OUT OF SPACE WARM-UP
West
Hill Hall, Brighton, Sat 4th May
These
warm-ups/ fund raisers for the (hopefully still forthcoming) Colour Out of Space
festival seem to be becoming stalwarts of the local scene.
(Though the bohos were too cool and laid back to plug the night even
on their own website!)
As
usual, things were pretty unusual. Tuluum Shimmering played a
succession of folk and ethnic instruments, laying each upon the
others like some totem pole of sound. It probably rests upon a formal
feature of folk instruments, that their open tunings are closer to
drones than modern instruments. Which means each new layer could grab
at your attention, as if bursting into the room like a surprise
witness, only to quickly flatten down into the shimmering sea of
sound as soon as it was usurped. It was like you perptually felt
yourself at the pinnacle of something, only for the totem pole to
grow another step higher.
Getting
carried away as usual by this virtuous combination, I started to
conceive the piece's internal harmony as evoking the ongoing folk
tradition – growing like coral, building upon itself. Of course us
commie types should eschew such notions of smooth historical
continuity, and I should probably have introduced an element of
rupture and struggle by invading the stage. Luckily there wasn't one,
so I could just sit back and enjoy it. I also loved the way that,
after such a mesmerising set, they immediately stuck Slayer on the
PA. That's the way to do it...
Another
of the edited highlights was Avarus
(pictured, but from another occasion), a Finnish free psychedelic outfit with a floating line-up
involving ex-members of Pylon. Despite those geographic origins to me they most resembled a latter-day
Krautrock act, improvising inventively around a metronomic groove
like the spirit of Ash Ra Tempel still lies over us. True they took a
little while to really hit their stride, and alas they were
restricted to a fairly short set. (The venue is in what's known as a
“residential area” so curfews are firm.) They showed every sign
they could have kept going all night, something I'd very much like to
see. Check some out (albeit from another time, another place)...
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