ACTION BEAT + GW SOK
Cafe Oto, London, Thurs 24th Aug
Cowley Club, Brighton, Fri 25th Aug
GW Sok, ex of the Ex, was last spotted as vocalist for hire with King Champion Sounds. While Action Beat are the self-styled “noise band from Bletchley”. The first town I ever signed on in, and my general impression of Bletchley was “as uneventful as Milton Keynes, but shoddier”. Milton Keynes was like a new coat of paint over nothing, while Bletchley lacked even that. Someone making something happen in Bletchley is deserving of respect.
Tom Waits once stated “have two people say the same thing and one of them is unnecessary”. Whereas Action Beat’s maxim would seem to be “why stop at two?” They sport three guitarists and three drummers. (Drummers actually reduced to two on the second night by the confines of the Cowley Club.) After seeing King Crimson with three drummers, I’m now wondering if they’re becoming a thing. Will they keep multiplying, like piercings did in the Nineties? Only time will tell. Anyway, in celebration of all this additionalising I went to see them on two successive nights.
And how do they use those numbers? To make a mighty racket! King Champion Sounds, with their brass frills, are quite melodic by comparison. No track had a verse/chorus structure, mostly going for intense/intenser, or punch/pull back/punch again. What it lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in ferocity, getting so white-hot listening to any individual instrument would be a virtual impossibility.
The drummers mostly gang up together, pounding out thumping beats in triplicate. And while the guitarists can do their own thing, like squalls in a storm, at times they’re appy to gang up too. For the encore in London, they grouped into a circle. There’s points where everyone effectively gangs up together, the bassist turned to lead the drummers like a conductor with amplification as all pile aboard. Even Sok’s guest star vocals become submerged in the overall maelstrom.
Though tracks take just enough twists and turns to stop the whole thing becoming fully monolithic. There’s the feeling that they’ll never stop, combined with the sense you’re never sure what they’ll be doing next. In fact it’s the longer numbers, containing the most changes, which seem the most effective. Shorter tracks can leave you with the feeling they stopped before really starting.
Thurston Moore one famously said that the spirit of punk now lived on in the noise scene. Combine Action Beat and GW Sok and you get a pretty good illustration of that.
Note even from the right tour, but gives your ears a good grounding…
MAKOTO-PIKA DUO
Green Door Store, Brighton, Fri 11th Aug
Tom Waits once stated “have two people say the same thing and one of them is unnecessary”. Whereas Action Beat’s maxim would seem to be “why stop at two?” They sport three guitarists and three drummers. (Drummers actually reduced to two on the second night by the confines of the Cowley Club.) After seeing King Crimson with three drummers, I’m now wondering if they’re becoming a thing. Will they keep multiplying, like piercings did in the Nineties? Only time will tell. Anyway, in celebration of all this additionalising I went to see them on two successive nights.
And how do they use those numbers? To make a mighty racket! King Champion Sounds, with their brass frills, are quite melodic by comparison. No track had a verse/chorus structure, mostly going for intense/intenser, or punch/pull back/punch again. What it lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in ferocity, getting so white-hot listening to any individual instrument would be a virtual impossibility.
The drummers mostly gang up together, pounding out thumping beats in triplicate. And while the guitarists can do their own thing, like squalls in a storm, at times they’re appy to gang up too. For the encore in London, they grouped into a circle. There’s points where everyone effectively gangs up together, the bassist turned to lead the drummers like a conductor with amplification as all pile aboard. Even Sok’s guest star vocals become submerged in the overall maelstrom.
Though tracks take just enough twists and turns to stop the whole thing becoming fully monolithic. There’s the feeling that they’ll never stop, combined with the sense you’re never sure what they’ll be doing next. In fact it’s the longer numbers, containing the most changes, which seem the most effective. Shorter tracks can leave you with the feeling they stopped before really starting.
Thurston Moore one famously said that the spirit of punk now lived on in the noise scene. Combine Action Beat and GW Sok and you get a pretty good illustration of that.
Note even from the right tour, but gives your ears a good grounding…
MAKOTO-PIKA DUO
Green Door Store, Brighton, Fri 11th Aug
This marks the second time I’ve got to see the team up of Kawabata Makoto, guitarist from psychedelic warlords Acid Mothers Temple, and Pikachu, drummer from noise rockers Afrirampo after their Sticky Mike’s appearance last year. And it was perhaps not quite as good as before. But it was on the other hand more mad.
Never has a drummer been less confined to sitting behind their kit than Pikachu. At one point she employed the stage monitors as impromptu percussion devices, before traversing the auditorium, drumsticks clattering along the floor as she went. Through all of this she’d stream-of-consciousness into a head mike At such times it feels like she’s embodying childlike exuberance, umediated and unconstrained, with Makoto as the enabling parent. At times things would stray towards the twee, but Pikachu’s engaging personality normally stopped them slipping over. (Weakest parts for me were when Makoto would abandon the guitar for a chest-slung rinky-dink keyboard.)
Yet that’s not the whole of it. At other times they’d lock together form a sheer sonic onslaught, both heads lowered and no-one the star of the show. Points where you’d have to stop chin-stroking and start holding on to your hat.
And if both were good places to visit, their combination was key. The intersection between free impro and pyschedelic space jam turns out to be one of those double virtue places, combining the ceaseless inventiveness of one with the other’s fondness for riding a groove as far as it could take them. With my ignorant English tendency to put together all things Japanese I couldn’t help but think of the classic opening line from ’Monkey’ - “the nature of Monkey was irrepressible!”
You probably do need to watch the full eleven of minutes of this to get the full flavour…
DJ SHADOW
Concorde 2, Brighton, Tues 15th Sept
The visuals to the opening track were of a spaceman flying through the cosmos. While for later numbers they featured news footage of demonstrations with the lyrics thrown up on the screen. Which bodes well...
It always seemed to me a virtuous combination when late Sixties underground bands would alternate between punchy, riff-driven numbers and spacey freak outs. Hawkwind for example could combine ‘Urban Guerilla’ with ‘You Shouldn’t Do That’. Like we were going to rise up against the system and blow our minds.
And at such times this gig suggests some modern dance music equivalent of that combination, but one which pushes the parameters still further – the most insistent uptempo hip-hop morphing into the most spacy house, like focusing in on a newspaper headline then pulling back to reveal the passing of geological time.
And it was certainly a whole lot better than most college kid hip-hop. (You know, the stuff which goes “rappin’ with a thesaurus, bet you wanna hear more-us”.) But for me it didn’t quite have that vital sense of abandon. And with electronic music in particular you do need the lunatic factor, or you’re reduced to watching a bloke on stage twiddling knobs and pressing keys on a laptop. The feeling was accentuated when the gig ended with a credit sequence, making it seem less visceral and more of a movie.
I may be guilty of not quite comparing like with like, but earlier electronic dance gigs by Fuck Buttons and Squarepusher had more of the sense of sheer sonic derangement, as if we were inside the minds of madmen and could only cling on for the ride.
It should be said I seemed to be alone in my slight underwhelm-ment, in a gig which sold out so quickly a following night had to be added. And, in a genre known for it’s larger than life personalities and the associated bragadaccio, Josh Davis (to give him his de-shadowed name) is remarkably regular and unassuming. At one point he asked us to “put one hand in the air if you love rap music”, like two would be overdoing it. Teach him the accent and to drink tea, he could probably pass for a Brit.
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