FUCK
BUTTONS
Concorde
2, Brighton, Mon 16th Sept
Reader,
be reassured that I don't just post things late here, but in fact
manage to be habitually late for everything except work and planes.
For example, I am forever finding out about bands just as they split
up, or hearing of gigs or exhibitions after they're over. And when
I'm not too late? Then I'm too early.
When
I first saw Fuck Buttons, in the small Audio venue almost exactly
four years before, I liked them without loving them. At that time,
their sound still felt formative. If they warranted writing home
about, it was by postcard more than letter.
But
a duo comprising an Aphex Twin and a Mogwai fan – that was only
ever going to turn out well, wasn't it? And so our story turns out
happily, and I do get to go to the ball. They're never as audaciously
Dadaistic as Aphex Twin nor as rocky as Mogwai, which results in a
fine blend.
If
you were going to try to take them apart, many of their tracks do
share the common denominators of electronic dance. There's the two
lanes; the fast lane where the beats flurry by, and the other
lane. Often slower in tempo it's probably better named the weird
lane, when the unexpected turns on and off from hidden slip roads.
All too often in this type of music the lanes feel adjacent rather
than related. The 'art' stuff is just decoration, sprinkled over a
somewhat stodgy cake baked from a standard four/four recipe. But in
Fuck Buttons' case they really do result in a
creative juxtaposition, like the proverbial encounter between the
sewing machine and the umbrella.
Responding
to their Glasgow gig in the Guardian, Graeme Virtue noted on how their tracks
“sound as if [they] could go on forever, but the repetition is
hypnotic rather than numbing, with subtle variations and
manipulations in each loop that border on the subliminal.”
While
reviewing their most recent release in the same august organ, Alexis Petridis commented their “default emotional setting was
somewhere between the kind of breakdown that causes clubbers to throw
their hands in the air and the kind of breakdown that ends with you
being strapped to a gurney.... [They] evoke a weird apocalyptic
euphoria.” And aquote on their Wikipedia page pointed out "rarely
have two men sounded so much like the end of the world."
Not
bad descriptions, but I wonder if they don't set the duo's scope too
small. The effect is more one of busting out of human scale, not
hand-waving at the end times so much as taking a taste of
timelessness. They sound reminiscent of those fast-forward sections
in time travel movies, where the centuries fly by faster than your
eyes can cope. Shouldn't the place of music be to epitomise its
times? The accelerating pace of change, the headlong rush into the
future, the feeling that you cannot help but be swept along, that you
won't so much be left behind as left bewildered... whether intended
or not, it's all here.
And
yet the joyous paradox is that at the same time it couldn't be more
immediate. Those who insist music only works live when it comes with
'proper' instruments... all I can say is, come check out these guys.
Screens match abstract patterns with silhouettes of the guys as they
perform, hunched over their keyboards, sometimes screaming into
mikes. For a band who can go some way out there and fear no abrasion
of the ears, it's intriguing how they can also set a crowd a-dancing.
...which
I would guess is where their name comes from. A collision term
between one of our most emotive words and one of our most automated
and mechanical. Two lanes in strange accord, somehow working as it
happens.
Right
tour, but not Brighton...
UNIKO
(Featuring
Kimmo Pohjonen, Samuli Kosminen and the Kronos Quartet)
Barbican
Centre, London, Wed 18th Sept
If the
prospect of a Finnish avant-garde accordianist doesn't set your heart
aflutter, perhaps you should check it works at all. Previously I'd
only seen Kimmo Pohjonen once, in a solo show more than a decade ago.
Afterwards, the audience were enthusiastically discussing it not with
reference to other composers or musicians but animal sounds.
“Elephants,” I remember someone insisting, “there were
definitely elephants in there.”
This
time he's fronting a single composition co-authored by sampler and
electronics artist Samuli Kosminen, commissioned and here performed
by the Kronos Quartet. “The idea,” he recounts in the programme,
“was to 'electrify' the sound of the string quartet and explore the
possibilities of manipulating it electronically, expanding the
scope.”
Kosminen's
contribution is sometimes to loop back the string players to
themselves, sometimes to treat them and at others provide electronic
beats. But with the wide range supplied by the 'live' players, you
soon gave up on guessing who was producing what and just went with
it.
Rather
than springing up outside the history of music, it's appeal lay in
the way it worked almost as its summation. Awarding it a full row of
stars in the Guardian, Robin Denslow described it as “a
constantly shifting kaleidoscope of avant-garde electronica, global
folk styles and classical influences.” All of which it managed
without ever sounding like pastiche or post-modernism. Melodies could
sound achingly beautiful, more out-there sections audacious yet
somehow natural. The effect was utterly mesmerising.
And
after all, that Modernist insistence on a total break with the past –
how well did those bold claims really come off? This was more like an
accumulation of music history, stretching back through the eras and
across through the genres, like fresh new branches sprouting and
fruiting from the crest of a tree.
“The
aim was to try and reach a new level of emotional content,”
Pochjonen continued, “to take the listener, as well as ourselves,
on an adventure.”
It
certainly did.
Nothing
YouTubed from the Barbican, but you can see the whole thing on-line,
starting below. (Though, somewhat frustratingly, the clip parts don't
match the section breaks.)
.JPG)
