Mutations is the self-styled sequel to
Wire's Drill festival from this time last year, put on by
co-curators One Inch Badge and promising “a creative mass of genre hybrids and
expression, delivering some of the most inspiring, creative and
interesting music the world has to offer”.
Of all the acts, the festival was
chiefly sold to me by Om - a band I've long been
keen to see live. If their name alone isn't enough to suggest their
trance-out sound, imagine Pink Floyd's 'Set The Controls For
the Heart of the Sun' - there's the same relentlessly
steady pace, the same sense of measured expansiveness. Or, as they
sprang from the rhythm section of doom band Sleep, imagine doom
without... well, without the doominess. Ever wondered what doom would
sound like with just the transcendence, with none of the oblivion?
Wonder no more.
Perhaps the most significant thing
about Om is the way they can actually play so little yet conjure up
such a vast sense of space – like each instrument is a flickering
flame in a huge cavern. If the bass is the bedrock of their sound,
its chief accompaniment is not the drums but the recited vocals.
(Assisted no doubt by bassist and founder member Al Cisneros also
being the vocalist.) Amil Amos' drums, liberated from their usual
back-up role, throw almost dub-like rolls around the Cisneros that
open up the sound.
The third member, Robert Lowe, has the
commendable restraint to contribute either tambourine or nothing at
all for long periods. At times he takes to a keyboard, a teeny-tiny
thing still capable of providing a rich organ sound. At others he
contributes vocals which could only be compared to choirs of angels.
(Quite possibly from some choir-of-angels effect. But whatever the
effect is, its effective.) Sometimes I'd watch him waiting, waiting.
Then sing a couple of phrases and sit back again. The calm restraint
was enticing in and of itself.
And rather than building the set up to
a finale they have the quiet confidence to instead slow it down.
Tracks extend in length and get simpler, for one extended section
only bass and vocals. Though they're more hypnotically regular than
drone, they perfectly epitomise something I said of drone music some time ago:
“While drone is sometimes
dismissed as bliss-out and escapist, it doesn’t have to refer out
to anything else in the universe because it already encompasses the
universe. It doesn’t merely encompass the sound of the big and the
small, it denies the distinction between those sounds. 'As above, so
below' is an important concept in drone. Blake’s conception of
'infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour' is just
up drone’s street.”
Before the set, we were talking about
how much of a Marmite band they were – how liable to induce a
polarised reaction. For me, its not too strong a word to describe
them as magnificent. Then at the end I looked round after an hour of
being mesmerised, to find half the room had decamped to venues
elsewhere. Each to their own...
Next up on my must-see list was Josh T
Pearson. His career to date
consists of shrinking from a trio to a solo player, then recently
expanding back up to a duo. And in the process sounding the least
expansive yet. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
His first band, Lift to Experience, a
trio of Texans who played Texan-sized music - psychedelia multiplied
by post-rock turned up to eleven. Released in 2001, their one album
almost fits with Godspeed's ambiguous apocalypse. Except in their case it was never
clear whether the Biblical imagery was the only thing which captured
their mighty, expansive sound or vice versa. Whichever, they were
best summed up by the lyric “And I can hardly wait to hear that
great trumpet sound/ Pouring down out across the land”.
His next record didn't appear until a
decade later, a solo album of what Wikipedia calls “epic acoustic
ballads”. Songs seemed sung with the weary reflection of someone
much older, surrounded by regret and discarded beer cans. This time
the defining lyric was 'Woman, When I've Raised Hell'.
The brooding quality of wisdom reached too late. As if Lennon had
jumped from 'Sgt. Pepper' to 'Plastic Ono
Band' with nothing in-between.
The Church venue makes for the perfect
setting for such songs. Pearson has a five-finger strum technique
which sounds as much classical as country, combined with an ability
to make his own voice sound like a choir.This can create a huge
range, both sonically and dynamically, with things rising to a
crescendo then falling to a mumble. It hardly seems possible to be
coming from one man and his guitar.
Then midway through he introduces his
new performing partner Calvin LeBaron and the tongue-in-cheek name
the Two Witnesses. They sing actual old-time Pentecostal hymns, or
new songs in the style of them. (Plus a cover of the Velvets'
'Jesus', never a bad thing.) Reflecting this
cleaner, new direct new music he has a cleaner appearance – now
shorn of beard and with a white-hat cowboy look. In their unadorned
simplicity, those hymns must be about about the hardest of styles to
emulate. There's nothing really to them apart from their
effectiveness, they just remind you what a great songbook the hymn
book really is. But, against the odds, Pearson comes through. Only
the final number, playing up the gay element of singing about “his
love”, was pastichy.
From the sublime to the ridiculous...
only you know, the good kind of ridiculous...
Anecdotally, I got the impression most
people's must-see was Lightning Bolt. And they may
well have been higher up my list had I not seen them before. They
comprise noise-guitar and still-more-noisy drums. If there was such a
music genre as 'dayglo cartoony noise', that would be Lightning Bolt.
Himself a cartoonist, drummer Brian Chippendale almost takes on the
persona of a cartoon character onstage – masked and using a
distortion mike throughout, even when speaking to the audience. Much
like the great Melt-Banana, amid the sonic onslaught is not just
melodies but catchy bubblegum pop tunes.
The surrealist George Bataille once
claimed...honest, this is going somewhere... once claimed that the
drive to make art was rooted into the infantile instinct to despoil
pristine surfaces. That's why the child doesn't stop colouring when
they get to the edge of the piece of paper. Similarly, Lightning Bolt
seem to stem from the child's love of making noise. Rather than the
nihilism so associated with the genre there's something joyous and
uplifting about the whole thing, even as its rough and abrasive.
Certainly, you can rely on a Lightning Bolt set to put a great grin
on your face.
Metz had the
unenviable task of following Lightning Bolt and pulled it off, but having blogged about them before I wouldn't have much to add.
The Ice Maiden vocals of Chelsea
Wolfe may be as much a cliché as her too-much-mascara
all-black Goth look... in fact they may well be the same cliché. But
her music is as inventive as her image isn't. I was even reminded at
times of Swans, the same punch-packing sonic savagery and willingness
to go into sections of atonal noise. While at others I was reminded
of the wall-of-sound of Phil Spector. Perhaps the problem with the
studied dressing-up of Goth is, contrary to Lightning Bolt, its
cartoony without knowing it. While Chelsea Wolfe's set truly did take
shamanic flight for shores unknown. Hopefully she'll be back in
Brighton soon...
Blanck Mass is the
solo project of Benjamin John Power, one half of the inimitable Fuck
Buttons. And the solo set ranked alongside the double act. Perhaps
sounding similar to the parent project, but then sounding like Fuck
Buttons is hardly a downside. There's the sudden drops you'd expect
from dance music. But as often Power would overlay one section above
another, sometimes then pulling it away to re-expose the beat
beneath, like dance music's answer to 'Sister Ray'.
Ultimately, I can only repeat what I said after seeing Fuck Buttons: “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.”
Dan Friel mixed
throbbing discordant electronica with rinky-dink Casio tunes. Not
alternating between them or juxtaposing them, but melding them
together. It was a musical chimera, like the body of a tiger given
the head of a purring house-cat. All provided by what looked like the
most boffinish piece of home-made kit, leads and wires bedecked with
fairy lights. The sheer impossibility of it dazzled your ears.
Despite the dodgy name, Montreal's
Ought are a force to be reckoned with –
propulsive post-punk with perhaps a dash of the Strokes. In a similar
trick to the Fall of Flipper, the ever-insistent music is overlain by
a singer sneering with arch disdain. It's like wanting to diss the
whole world at once, with a band was the best way of blagging a
public address system. It's the type of punk which isn't angry at its
audience – just disappointed.
To combine dream pop with shoegaze
guitar might seem an obvious idea. But perhaps doing it requires
quite different skill sets – the melodic sense and self-discipline
of songwriting versus the tight band dynamics that allow a bunch of
people to take off together without getting lost. My Bloody
Valentine, for example, might have often sounded like their tracks
had pop songs inside them. But they stayed inside, like the gooey
centre of a chocolate.
Widowspeak, however,
seem capable of combining both. Singer Molly Hamilton would stand
front of stage, intoning breathless sugary vocals, a little Stina
Nordenstam only less little-girl and affected. Only for the band to
then huddle together to create intricately interlaced guitar lines.
It was like being read a bedtime story, then having your dreams take
flight. Genuinely ethereal.
Arcimago started out
with an intriguing question – what if Goblin had been an
electronica act? )And ironically the performer was Italian, Ugo
Negroni.) After all, doesn't electronica sound non-human yet
possessive? Alas, as it went along it swapped strange electronica for
more regular beats. Nice while it lasted...
Nature Channel
served up some spiky garage rock fit to put hairs on your chest, then
announced they'd not be gigging for the next six months. As soon as
you come across a band... Wild Cat Strike (that's
them above) provided Americana so languid steel guitar came in. Which
they'd then splice with outbreaks of wall-of-sound guitar. While
Saintsenaca popped over from Ohio for some of your
actual from-America Americana. Some other stuff too. And of course I
couldn't see everything.
Generally the festival seemed
well-planned, acts starting on time and venue sizes working coping
with the punters without leaving latecomers stuck outside. (If any of
that did happen, I didn't see it.) And it was great to be rushing
between venues when the rest of town was going mad for the Black
Friday consumerfest, despite the fact it wasn't even Friday. There
was, however, a strange swapping over between what would be the most
intuitive Saturday and Sunday nights. While Saturday night finished
up with everyone in a church in Hove listening to acoustic music,
Sunday culminated with the double bombardment of Metz and Lightning
Bolt. Followed by a club night going on till one. (Which by that
point I was feeling too middle-aged to attend.)
Which was compounded by Christopher
Owens' Saturday set not being headliner material at all. It's not so
much that I didn't take to it, though I threw in the towel after two
numbers. It's that most people didn't even stay as long as me, upping
and leaving as soon as Josh T Pearson finished. All this most likely
stemmed from the festival being planned slightly too late, when all
the regular venues already had their Saturday nights booked out. But
it would be worth considering should One Inch Badge decide on a
follow-up...
The inevitable vidclips, a few from the
festival itself but mostly from thenabouts. You'll figure it out...
Coming soon! More
gig-going adventures...
No comments:
Post a Comment