SLEEP/ DEEP MINIMALISM (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

SLEEP

The Forum, Kentish Town, London, Wed 6th July

Sleep are effectively the parent band whose original split begat the sublime and majestic Om, as caught at last year's Mutations festival.

Much heavier than Om... in fact much heavier than pretty much everyone else they're perhaps the band who took the Black Sabbath baton and decided to run with it the furthest. Unlike most copyists they had Sabbath's talent for compositional dynamics, knowing when to pile on the heavy riffing and when to throw in changes. The result is music which sounds like it's forever growing more and more intense without ever becoming predictable.

But while Sabbath never really burnt their boats to song structure, Sleep pushed further away. Vocals are less frequent and less foregrounded. Bass and guitar combine in their resonances, until you can hardly separate the heady stew of sound back into it's constituent parts. While tracks can stretch and stretch. They are after all the band whose best-regarded album is one seventy-five minute heavy riffing number. (Which left their label so aghast they initially refused to release it, effectively ending their first incarnation.)

But they're perhaps most unlike Sabbath in that they don't really have the same heady sense of ominousness. Despite commonly being tagged as doom metal (or as Wikipedia would have it 'stoner doom metal'), at least in retrospect the seeds of Om's cosmic odysseys are already present. Like one of those flowing yin/yang symbols, Sleep struck the point where heavy tips over into spacey. They're not a band for whom lyrics are necessarily importantly but notably, rather than Sabbath's... well blackness, the sun is a recurrent image. There was a Sabbath song called 'Warning'. There could be a Sleep track called 'Invitation'. (Alright, there isn't. But there could be.)

Their name, in the context of their sound, suggests astral flight. Or the Surrealist desire to break down the walls between the conscious and the unconscious, only by repeated riffing rather than anti-rational imagery. However much they might pummel your ears, Sleep will give you pleasant dreams.

It's almost perfect music to hear live. Push their cavernous sound through a powerful PA and it's less like hearing it than being placed inside it. The sound got so heavy the floor was vibrating beneath my feet. But more, like Damo Suzuki there's a ritual element to it, as if they're making music with the sensibilities of the stone age while merely adopting electric instruments.

The band are about as un-botheredby audience rapport as Godspeed, hair-bedraggled heads bent permanently over their instruments. But then the stage was so lowly lit at points all I could see were the lights of the on-stage amps. There was even a similar feedback howlaround ending, shrugging off the showbiz adage about closing on a high. And as with Godspeed taking away the sense of this being a performance just makes it more of an experience. The focus is on the music, and how far it can send you.

Like the recent Boredoms gig the audience ran the spectrum of types and, for a band who first split up over twenty years ago, ages – if anything weighted towards younger faces. It suggests there's life in the old band yet, and in fact rumour suggests there will be more recordings.

Sleep do turn out to be one of those bands you haven't really heard until you've heard them live. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to see both Om and Sleep within the same nine months was very heaven.

The opening of 'From Beyond', from the States...

...and if you liked that try this, seventy heavenly minutes from Hellfest...

DEEP MINIMALISM

Sunday 26th June

St John's, Smith Square, London

This event in its own words “celebrates music that takes its time, which envelops the listener in deep sound and leaves space for contemplation”. Of the three days, alas this non-metropolitan was only able to make the Sunday. And while some of minimalism's more cutting-edge composers were sadly not included on the... oh alright then! Of the seven names know-nothingeme had heard only of the two headliners. But sometimes you get a good feeling about stuff and you go with that...

Laurie Spiegel, a New York based electronic composer was represented by three pieces - from the Seventies, Nineties and whatever they're calling this decade. A short film about her was also shown, 'Little Doorways to Paths Not Yet Taken', in which she was keen to deny the notion that electronic music is dehumanising. The programme emphasised her involvement with Slow Change Music - “we wanted [music where] any sense of being sonically on guard against sudden change would fade away and we could be in the experience of the moment”. Two statements which made for a pretty good introduction to the whole day.

And the first piece, 'Return to Zero' (1971) exemplified them well, conjuring warm fuzzy sounds. Like the feeling of sun on your face this was music to bask in. I took the title to mean “back to the fundaments of sound-making”, to get on with some Yoda-style unlearning. 'Passage' (from 1990) was more of a sound collage but simultaneously more of a composition. It was based around the repeated tolling of a bell, the sort of sound that summons you, above electronic drones and hums. Despite the greater use of 'real' sounds it actually felt more like a dreamscape than 'Return to Zero', the 'unheimlich' sense of the familiar defamiliarised. It would work well as a soundtrack to a Surrealist film.

Spiegel seems to have been a pioneer of musical software and 'A Harmonic Algorithm' (2011) was based around a programme she'd written to reproduce the work of composers, here Bach. Like the binary version of one of those 'Futurama' heads, able to add to the Bach repository. Now I'll confess upfront I don't like this notion at all. In fact even before I'd finished reading this in the programme I had three issues with it!

First, it reminds me of the Great Upload notion popular in tech culture, that silicon version of the rapture where we'll get our consciousnesses uploaded to the cloud. I think it comes from the nerd desire to be on-line as much as possible, hence having to invent a device where your connection Facebook is no longer plagued by toilet breaks. But I like doing real-world things, including going to music events such as this.

Worse, the idea is consumerist – we want Bach on demand. It pretty much happens now anyway. Further material is released after a composer is dead, seemingly perpetually and often indifferent to quality or importance, like we've become so infantalised we can't adjust to the concept that story time might now be over.

Worst of all, it glosses over a vital element in music or art in general. An artwork is always a dialogue between the artist and the society he inhabits. Cut off the dialogue and you're left just with his tics and mannerisms – the nuts and bolts of his language not assembled into an actual mechanism. Spiegel's defence was that, as she'd written the algorithm, that it ends up as a de facto collaboration with her. (She spoke of this as an unforeseen consequence, but we can assume that's a poeticism.) But tics and mannerisms is exactly what we got. It's true I'm not a huge Bach fan to begin with, but it sounded like baroque music for New Agers.

I am often to be found arguing that the term minimalism is misplaced, that as soon as you actually listen to Reich or Glass you find it doesn't fit. But this wasn't a pressing problem with many of the pieces here. Any Reich/Glass influence was in fact conspicuous by its absence. For example with Eliane Radigue's OCCAM 1' (2011) for solo bowed harp, the minimalism got pretty deep indeed. The bows turned the notes into drones or near drones, one tone constantly blending into the next.

Radigue wrote in the programme of “the freedom to be immersed in the ambivalence of conscious modulation... the freedom to let yourself be submerged in a continuous sound from where perceptual activity is heightened...pulsations, breath”. It may well need the live context to work, as it may require a base level of commitment to sit and listen to such micro shifts. As the sounds build and fall, sometimes shimmering on the edge of hearing, it might too quickly get assigned as ambient music. But to hear it live, in a room full of people listening as intently as you, is both enthralling and exquisite.

In fact it may even be the piece itself is partly a means to an end, encouraging you to listen in a way our distraction-addled world usually prevents. You don't follow the grand sweep of the music, like taking in a view from a commanding hilltop. You get engaged in the nuts and bolts of the sound, like a botanist with his nose in a hedgerow. The way of looking at things you don't do in normal daily life. Really, this isn't just great music. It's a cure for what ails yer.

For Edmund Finnis' pieces, a cello, viola and violin lined up rather conventionally on a stage. But instead of playing together they consecutively provided a separate piece. Only with so much reverb to their sound, they were effectively playing along with themselves. It's rare and invigorating to hear such modern technology, so common in electric music, used with 'classical' instruments. But it was highly effective. Though perhaps it didn't work quite so well with the higher-register viola, which inevitably casted less of a sonic 'shadow'.

You know those songs which are merely strings of nonsense phrases, but somehow seem like they're forever on the cusp of making some kind of sense? (The White Stripes 'Seven Nation Army' would be a good example.) Catherine Lamb's 'String Quartet' (2015) did a similar thing with musical dynamics. Over forty minutes it sounded neither static or dynamic, but always about to resolve into one or the other. Think of those weird photons which are neither wave nor particle.

After vocals had only appeared via occasional samples, the final section was not only vocal-based but – with one exception – unaccompanied vocals. The first two Meredith Monk pieces were charming in themselves, but a little slight and even conventional compared to what had gone before. (They were sections from a longer work, 'Quarry', and perhaps don't withstand isolation from it.) 

But the final piece, 'Dawn' (1985), despite being from the same opera was much stronger. It combined 'churchy' singing, complete with the venue's organ, with a wailing Arabic vocal. There may be an attraction, given the way the world is currently, to hearing European and Arabic culture combined. Though I'd prefer to think that it arose naturally rather than schematically.

Pauline Oliveros' 'Lullaby for Daisy Pauline' (1980) was a process piece where the singers followed steps in a given process rather than recited from a fixed score. Which is always an appealing idea but the piece somehow didn't grab me.

Oliveros herself them appeared for a brief interview and to facilitate (not, she insisted, lead or direct) one of her Tuning Meditations. And we the audience would be performing it ourselves. This struck me with no small amount of dread, for as far as singing goes I am great at long-winded blog posts. Indeed, as Monk was made the actual finale, there may have been some similar nervousness among the organisers as to how this would turn out.

But Oliveros has that cheerily no-nonsense can-do attitude that Americans often exude, even when they're left-field composers. And she less talked us all into it than assumed we could all do it, to the extent that it just seemed easier to go along with her. The instructions were really just “sing a tone. A tone someone else is singing, or your own. Then again.” But through it's own volition, the crowd quickly created undulating waves and patterns of sound. It even came to a collective close. I'm fairly sure that, were you to listen to the audio, you'd be convinced someone was conducting. Yet I can attest that Oliveros simply sat and listened.

As the above recounts, the event managed a high hit rate. But perhaps it did even better than that suggests. Many of the composers were not only still composing but present, in fact several looked very young indeed. (Okay, most people look young to me.) It made it feel like a living, breathing scene. There was a laid-back, by-fans-for-fans atmosphere to the day which made it involving, made it more than the mere sum of its parts.

Despite being only a few minutes from bustling Parliament Square, the venue had a relaxed, open space feel. Performers played as often from the middle of the room as the stage, while people were invited to move about the room or lie on cushions. Some of the 'acts' were recordings (albeit with bespoke sound design), but it simply felt like someone had said “back to mine to listen to cool music” to a few hundred people. And the audience for the most part took advantage of all the informality, while still staying quiet and attentive while the music actually played. It was similar in mood to Cardew's 'Great Learning' at the Union Chapel, but perhaps even more so. We can only hope this becomes some sort of a fixture...

An excerpt from Radigue's 'OCCAM 1', not from the festival but with the same player, Rhodri Davies...

BREXIT: CAN’T HAPPEN HERE – UNTIL IT DID!

(A sort of sequel – well more of a prequel – to this)

Most people in my social circles took it as almost axiomatic that Leave couldn’t win. After all, everyone that everyone knew was voting Remain. Our social media was thick with it. Like the Bush election, common sense would surely reassert itself. Can’t happen here. (Myself, I had imagined it would go to Remain by a slender margin, once the don’t knows were forced off the fence.)

And okay, it only went to Leave by a slender margin. Seemingly trivial factors, such as if young people had voted in greater numbers, might have nudged it the other way. It virtually went down to a coin flip. But a miss is a good as a mile. Leave did win. Talk of re-runs is not just fantasy but absurdity. So – shortly after taking a stab at what might happen next - we need to backtrack a bit and look at how we got here.

Remain campaigners have tended to reply with “well Leave lied”. And yes, so they did. But Remain lied too. What about Osborne’s projected Project Fear budget? The point about Leave is that those were the lies people wanted to hear. People could be even told “these are lies” and they’d reply “I don’t care”. To say “you shouldn’t listen to these lies” proved about as useless as telling an alcoholic they should stop drinking. The question to ask is what made those lies resonate.

Let’s ask a more specific question. In the (interminable) debates whenever Leave were asked a difficult question (like, say, what’s the plan? Or, is any of this even true?) they could just cry “but we’re British!” and everyone would cheer. As almost anything counted as a difficult question for them, this happened rather a lot. But it still worked every time. It’s ludicrous, of course. Once Britain was the strongest country in Europe. But it was over a century ago and one or two things have happened since then. Why are people primed in that way?

What’s widespread in Britain, and was all over Leave supporters, isn’t just nationalism but feelbad nationalism. We've all experienced feelbad, feelgood for masochists. People wallow in it, just like it makes them feel good. Even though it makes them feel bad. Feelbad is almost a national sport in Britain. In fact it overlaps to a considerable degree with out official national sport -football. The Mail and Express are like the crack cocaine of feelbad. But feelbad seems almost the exclusive form of British nationalism. When you hear someone, almost always from another country, expressing feelgood nationalism it seems strange.

And this expressed itself, inevitably enough, through stab-in-the-back theories. You heard it over and over again. We should be the best country in the world but we got robbed. The EU is just a scam to fleece us, and burden us with other countries’ surplus populations. In Brussels they dream up regulations just to taunt us. Rip up the rip-off contract and we will be great again.

Very many people in Britain today are not just very poor, but very poor in a very rich country. And that has a special spin. You see wealth all the time, you just don’t get to touch it. And that’s something which has happened within the past few generations – jobs for life, wages you could live on, social housing, dole money not food banks… all those are still within folk memory at the same time they’ve been determined as politically impossible.

And if you can’t have anything else you can at least have an identity. People who live on the estates of Brighton, such as Whitehawk, will often have a strong sense of local identity. While for me where I live is just where I happen to be living. They don’t, in the main, like living in Whitehawk. As them what it’s like and they’ll quickly tell you it’s a shithole. But it’s something that’s theirs.

And feelbad nationalism, particularly with its stab-in-the-back narratives, fulfils a similar need in a broader context. The value of it is that it feels like a projection of your own situation. Despite all the ‘Benefits Street’ poverty porn propaganda that infests the TV, most working class people are actually working. That's how middle class people get to lead middle class lives. Yes, they’re reliant on benefits as well. But that’s because wages are so low and work so insecure.

You pick up all the shifts you can, and you can still barely keep your head above water. Clearly, you’re being robbed. So it fits that your country would be too. “Take back control” has a special resonance when you feel like you have no real control over your own life, when you're on a zero hours contract waiting and hoping for the next text offering the next shift.

It may be some Leave voters were even setting themselves up for the next stab. They'll take our votes and then renege on their promises? Of course they will! You think you need to tell us that? It's what always happens! And when it does it will be all the more confirmed, we will have another stab-in-the-back narrative to add to the others. In one way, when it happens it will be reassuring. We will feel more like ourselves than we did before.

But that’s just to describe how the kindling got so dry. You also need to look at who dropped the match.

It seems to me that the Eurosceptic Tory right is fairly unique to Britain. There isn’t really an equivalent among, say, the German Christian Democrats. In most continental countries Euroscepticism is confined to fringe groups. Or at least, groups which were fringe twenty years ago. (Anyone reading this who knows of a counter-example please do comment and let me know. I would genuinely like to hear of it!)

And that is mostly to do with the remarkably rapid shift to neoliberalism in Britain. The EU is without doubt a neoliberal institution, closely tied to the International Monetary Fund, keen to promote austerity and privatisation wherever it can. (Like I say, Leave lied a lot too.) But it is not keeping Britain’s pace on the road to neoliberalism – indeed it can’t. The British working class, after successive defeats, is unable to act as much of a brake against it. While, for example, the French working class is quite actively applying the brakes - quite hard and right now. For Britain, European neoliberalism is yesterday’s neoliberalism. And so pernicious, so deep-rooted is neoliberal ideology that yesterday's neoliberalism is equated to old-school “socialism”. “Too slow” means the same thing as “all wrong”.

Then put those two groups together, and do not return once lit. You can’t call it an accord because one group is quite clearly being manipulated by the other. But there’s a relation and it’s that which leads to Leave winning.

…all of which may sound specifically British. So at least there's an upside – it can happen here, but nowhere else, right? Unfortunately not. On the continent, it’s partially the lack of Euroscepticism in mainstream parties which has led to the growth of far-right fringe groups. (To a degree we haven't seen here. UKIP, politically speaking, are effectively a pressure group on the Tory party.) But, as said last time, such a growth is now much more likely in Britain. This Out is, by and large, bogus. But the next one might not be. While on the continent the reverse is occurring - those far right parties are getting a lot less fringe even as we speak. (There's also the irony that our first past the post system, the bane of many, serves to keep the far right marginalised at the same time as the more progressive groups.)

The choice we were given in this referendum was essentially between globalised neoliberalism and xenophobic isolationism. (Well, the apparent choice. The real choice was between two types of globalised neoliberalism, one of which was pretending not to be.) Neither option is good for you or me. But the second was once merely a protest vote against the first. Whereas it is now fast becoming a political force in its own right.

In Greece, for example,everyone knows the story of how Syriza won a popular vote but were prevented from carrying out their programme. So what is stopping people now turning to the second-fastest growing party after them – the blatantly fascist Golden Dawn? Where to go when democracy has let you down? Authoritarianism must be looking like a choice.

Marie Le Pen may be proved right. Brexit may be a seismic moment for the European far right.

And if that doesn’t scare you it should do.

BREXIT ONLY?

Okay, after the Leave vote – what happens now? Assuming for a minute we’re not told to have the vote again until it goes the correct way. (Despite that being precisely what happened to both Ireland and Denmark.)

Another way of asking the same question – why did Boris Johnson decide at the last minute to join Brexit? Not only is there little previous evidence of Euroscepticism on his part, he used to say he wanted Turkey to become a member. Precisely what he's now baselessly accusing others of. And the answer to that is obvious, he thinks it will hand him the keys to Downing Street. His arguments – a combination of outright lies, slander, bluster and suggestion – are essentially interchangeable to Farage’s. Why bother with good arguments? They just need to work.

The British Right has long had a particularly distorted view of the EU, compressing it into a caricature to best fit their agenda. In times past, the Soviet Union provided the always useful bad counter-example. We just needed to do the opposite to their moribund bureaucracy, eschewing planned economies for deregulation and ‘free markets’. Once a guy has the right to open up a corner shop, everything else will fall into place. Now that has gone, they are stuck with painting the EU in the same colours of “stifling” regulation. And the colours don’t apply at all. They raise an austerity-imposing, neoliberal flag to rail against an austerity-imposing neoliberal body. Just ask the Greeks about the gifts they got...

They were aided and abetted on this by a Left who largely preferred to pretend the EU was all about benevolent regulation. Most absurdly, during the referendum they continued to argue the EU was a safeguard of worker’s rights just as French workers were having to fight tooth and nail to keep theirrights.

But mostly it was fortune who handed Leave a hostage. Or more accurately, two hostages they claimed as one. A combination of EU enlargement and the refugee crisis, separate events they shamelessly spliced together, allowed them to fight this campaign on a basis of immigration, immigration, immigration. As RationalWiki has pointed out “The UK is only admitting a tiny fraction of the migrants which are seeking asylum in Europe. The 'take back control of our borders' argument is a false argument being used to justify a false argument.”

While the influx of EU migrants was already past it's peak. In 2004 ten new countries joined, including the sizeable Poland. As the majority of member states promptly got cold feet and delayed their right of free movement, a disproportionate number came to Britain. (Their only other choices being Sweden and Ireland.) There's no realistic prospect of another country joining in the near future. Even if we were to see immigration as some kind of problem in itself, which there's no reason to whatsoever, to act now would be the classic slamming the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Who voted leave? They were mostly skewed along two axes – older, and more likely to be from working class backgrounds. Look at a map of the results, and overall Out was strongest in the poorest areas. The people who had lost out most to neoliberalism were handed their target. Which wasn’t multimillionaires like Philip Green, the man who took the BHS pension fund to buy himself an extra yacht. The poor’s true enemy was the even poorer.

Johnson has cynically talked the turkeys into voting for Christmas.

Which leads us back to the question – what happens when it gets to Christmas? Not only will Johnson’s promises not bring about what Brexit voters are hoping for, he will not even be able to bring about those promises. Asked in one of those interminable TV debates whether he was actually saying Brexit would bring down immigration, he evaded the question in a blur of blondness. Of course he did.

My guess would be that, should he succeed in becoming Prime Minister, Johnson will do nothing to stop the free movement of labour whatsoever. Yes, he could in theory impose quotas. But then the affected countries would just respond in kind. Which would damage the economy he's always going on about protecting. Free market anti-globalisation is a nonsense, a chocolate teapot of a policy. It can only be promised while keeping your fingers crossed behind your back. Britain will almost certainly either stay in the European Economic Area (like Norway) or do that in effect while pretending not to (like Switzerland). ‘Leaving’ the EU will mean nothing of the kind.

But what he will do is further erode worker's rights within the UK. Some of this might actually be directed at migrant workers, such as lengthening the already discriminatory delay before they can claim benefits here. But most of it will be aimed at all British workers, if dressed up in terms of keeping migrant workers in line.

So will people then see through his flim flam? Or, noticing the promised drop in the number of immigrants hasn’t happened while neither have their wages improved, will they go on to blame the migrants and Johnson? And who might come along to capitalise on that?

However far right, however stuffed with fruit loops and racists UKIP might have been, Britain has not yet had the pleasure of an actual fascist movement as have so many neighbouring countries. (The nearest we've had, the English Defence League, has imploded. Britain First talk themselves up on-line, but barely exist in the real world. And being associated with the murder of an MP will scarcely do them any favours.) But opportunity may soon be knocking...

Things might not stay this bad. They may get even worse…

TELEVISION/ PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED/ LIFT TO EXPERIENCE (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

TELEVISION

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, Tues 14th June

Television came from the Seventies New York punk scene, with guitarist/vocalist Tom Verlaine frequently playing with Patti Smith. And indeed it's that thar punk music played on the PA before they emerge. But they were always a strange fit even for that strange scene, misfits among the misfits, a chess move from their surroundings. Much like the Velvet Underground before them, it's much easier to see their influence on what followed (Talking Heads, the less noise-based end of Sonic Youth, British post-punk bands such as Wire) than anything before or around them. I always liked the idea they were named after the term 'far seeing' rather than the goggle box. (Though admittedly I've no idea whether that's true or not.)

It was Mark Radcliffe who commented they were like a string quartet who happenedto use rock instruments. Rather than ploughing the familiar furrows of lead guitar/ rhythm section, the players intersect in ever-shifting combinations. With guitar solos I normally only want to know when they're over. But Television's extended instrumental breaks are so interactive they become the main draw.

Of course they don't conform to the cartoon punk image, as taken up by the Ramones. But neither do they sound much like friend or collaborator Patti Smith. Her music's convulsive, orgiastic. While with Television there's no power chords, no fuzz, echo or distortion, the overall sound is clean.

However, if all that makes them sound like pointy heads making music with set squares and protractors, they're as equally possessed of a keen melodic sense. Like Verlaine's voice the music's sharp but lilting, lively and spacious. A track like 'Marquee Moon' is a catchy pop number and free-form space-out at one and the same time.

It's slightly hard to tell whether the band's a going concern or not. But then it always has been. After a lengthy pre-history, they peaked with their debut – the celebrated 'Marquee Moon' - in 1977, and since then have been waiting for everyone else to catch up. They've only released two studio albums since then.

Live there's no backdrop or rock and roll theatrics. Belying the notion New Yorkers are natural showmen Verlaine's an unassuming figure, most of what he does say lost to audience cheer. Following Radcliffe's string quartet comparison, it wasn't entirely dissimilar to seeing the Kronos Quartet. They're so adept at playing together, it makes for an enthralling live experience. I found I could only focus on each player's individual contribution by framing my vision on the player, otherwise all the ingredients go into a greater whole.

It was perhaps an eccentric set list, in both good ways and bad. We heard no 'See No Evil', while there was a track or two which didn't really make up for its absence. But for forty year old band with no new record, there were a surprising number of surprises. There was a long, slightly psychedelic piece in the middle of the show, which I'd gather is called 'Persia', which while appearing on none of their albums (not even live releases) audaciously stretched to twenty minutes as Verlane bowed his guitar. Tracks would often build from scratchy, freeform intros, and rarely be performed just the way they did on record. You left thinking that forty years later they still sounded unique...

You'll know what this is. From San Francisco...

...then the next night...

PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED

Concorde 2, Brighton, Wed 15th June

Three years ago, in this very venue I saw the recently reincarnated Public Image Limited. And predicted the new line-up wouldn't last long under the weight of John Lydon's ego. Yet Lydon seems constantly able to surprise you, sometimes even pleasantly, that new line-ups still here and I am glad to be proven wrong.

With more new material under their belt, they're noticeably including less old stuff than ever. Jah Wobble must have played more numbers, despite only being in the band for two albums. And much of what they do play is quite radically reworked. 'Open Up', the track Lydon made with Leftfield, is all but transformed. While another uses the Swan Lake guitar part from 'Death Disco', but is to all intents and purposes a whole new song.

One old number which is retained is 'Albatross'. That the opening track from the seminal 'Metal Box' has been used as the opener both time I've seen the new PiL sounds like a statement of intent. The first time around, the references to “getting rid of the albatross” and “I know you very well”,delivered like the most withering put-down, sounded like a refusal to conform to anyone's post-Pistols expectations. Repeated it becomes like a credo, an avowal to never sit still but continue pressing forward. And the set end, morphing from 'Open Up', into the Tourette's syndrome abuse attack of 'Shoom' - suggesting age hasn't mellowed the man much.

It also suggests that Lydon's a keen judge of his own back catalogue, at least when looking at it in retrospect. In his time he's fostered as much shit on the gullible public as Lou Reed. Yet like Lou Reed, ultimately he knew when he was swinging it and winging it. Whole swathes of band history are eliminated, and while there's things you'd have liked to have heard nothing is included you wish hadn't. 'This Is Not a Love Song', though not from a favoured era, is a justifiably classic track.

And it all works because the band work as a band. Lydon often gesticulates at the musicians behind him, like some slightly demented conductor. But while in times past he's been content to hire a backing band for the Face of Punk, this lot are clearly a functioning unit.

It does at times feel a little less savage, a little more showy, than last time. Like they've got better in the un-punk sense of more accomplished and professional, and less edgy. Certainly 'Religion', which had previously reached white-heat intensity, becomes a black-comedy number with stream-of-consciousness rants. But the band still being here, still pressing forward, counts as an achievement.

Speaking of 'Albatross', slooow moootiooon from Sheffield...

LIFT TO EXPERIENCE

Royal Festival Hall, London, Fri 10th June

Part of the Meltdown Festival

When main main Josh T Pearson emerges clutching an electric guitar someone shouts “Judas!” at him. “You're a liar,” he quickly quips back.

The point being... Lift to Experience released the seminal 'Texas Jerusalem Crossroads' fifteen years ago. But their debut turned out to be their only release, Pearson swapped it's amped-up noise for acoustic music and was last seen around these parts playing country gospel at a church inBrighton. That gig came with gags about how broke he was, so reasons for the reformation may not be entirely uneconomic. But it's a rare chance to hear these classic tracks live, and the Royal Festival Hall is nigh-on full.

The electricity is not only back, the music packs such a punch you can feel it on your chest, the drummer often striking the skins with full arm strokes. But a better term than loud or heavy would be expansive. Texas-based and keen to tell you, they make music the size of their home state. Plus there's something of a psychedelic undercurrent. In their own way they're as sense-deranging as early Pink Floyd. When I first heard the band, inevitably enough for the era on the John Peel show, he compared them a spatial disorientation technique.

Yet combined with post-rock workouts and free noise there's classic songwriting. (Things often thought to be mutually exclusive.) Music and lyrics may both be summed up by the reference on 'These Are the Days' to “that great trumpet sound”. (Even though there's not a trumpet, great or small, to be found.) It draws on the wild apocalyptic imagery of American Christianity. Some songs even sound like they may be based on Pentecostal hymns.

It's a tradition which seems so foreign to us English it might as well come from a different religion, fiery revelation replacing announcements about village fates. But rather than the nihilism, darkness or derangement religious themes usually bring out in bands, for example Swans, it's – pun intended – elevating. Contrary to Hank Williams, perhaps we will be getting out of this world alive.

And yet at the same time they slam you in the gut the tracks have a twinkle in their eye. Borrowinga phrase previously used for Goat, it's bironic, the references to six-shootin' angels and promises of the promised land delivered with with tongue-in-cheek sincerity it's impossible to parse. (Pearson has said his Father was a Baptist preacher.)

But his greatest talent may well be compositional dynamics. The standard problem with the end of the world is that it doesn't leave you many places to go. (Creatively speaking, though I guess the problem applies in general.) If you come in with a big bang, what are you going to go out with? Yet Pearson can shift expertly between humungous soundscapes, shimmeringly beautiful ballads and aural-assualt noise, making you feel at every turn that the end of all things is just getting started.

I never saw the band back in the day, so don't have anything to compare them to, but they seem able to put the numbers over with full force and conviction. Backing vocals, sounding on record like they've been recorded by Pearson himself then overdubbed, disappear – and you kind of miss them. Plus there could have been space for another number with less banter, something Pearson confessed was down to lack of rehearsal time. But those are minor quibbles. Like the man says, it's never too late for the end of the world.

'These Are the Days' from their home turf of Denton, Texas, with that awesome ascending opening...

...plus the opening from the RFH (yes, the actual gig!) complete with "Judas!" exchange...

MY REVIEW OF 'X-MEN APOCALYPSE'...

...is now up at Comiczine FA.

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY VISITS STAFFA AND LUNGA...

... two Scottish islands west of Mull. Nature reserves uninhabited by humans, Lunga in particular teems with natural life while Staffs's geology makes it look like it's from some fantasy movie. As ever, full set on Flickr.

'THE ENCOUNTER'/ PIKACYU MAKOTO + ADRENA ADRENA/ CAVERN OF ANTI-MATTER/ FOLLAKZOID/ THE TIGER LILLIES (GIG - AND THEATRE - GOING ADVENTURES)

'THE ENCOUNTER'

Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Falmer, Wed 11th-Sun 15th May

Part of the Brighton Festival

If you wanted a soundbite description for Complicite's new show – a one-man performance with binaural sound and minimal staging – try 'Brechtian radio done as theatre'. Simon McBurney smartly starts this long and often intense performance with an on-stage announcement to turn off our mobile phones, which segues into some apparently spontaneous chat which precis many of the themes. Yet he's up to something else too...

Michael Billington's Guardian review comments “shut your eyes at any point and you feel... that you are in the Amazonian jungle”. And McBurney does ask us to do precisely that - but briefly and before the show's headed off for the Amazon. Precisely, I think, to get it out of the way and have us open our eyes again.

He demonstrates many of the devices he'll use, including two microphones – one for his and one for his protagonists's voice – even though it turns out he doesn't need them in order to switch. Many of his sound sources are old-fashionedly direct, from the grand old days of radio, such as crumpling a bottle of water to convey a water sound or – quite gloriously reductively - crunching recording tape beneath his feet to evoke tramping.

All this is foregrounded for two reasons. First, the soundbite description above does mean “as theatre”. The bare stage and the demonstrated sound sources keep us reminded that this is a story we're being told. But at the same time, if paradoxically, it gives them an element of magic. Electroacoustic music sometimes verges on the animist, the assumption that not only do objects possess spirits but have a 'voice' which can be unlocked. And as we follow his protagonist, the photographer Loren McIntyre as he gets lost among an Amazonian tribe, we get reacquainted with such animist ways of thinking.

And like McIntyre get lost is what we do. A dense work two hours long, with lines sometimes literally laid over one another, it's quite hard to parse in a single viewing. This is the best route map I could manage...

It's clear enough that as McIntyre loses his old Western possessions he goes through a symbolic death and rebirth, he goes through a shamanic journey. In fact, as he both joins in a tribal rite and is given his own to embark on (acting something like the play-within-a-play in 'Hamlet'), this is fairly literally what happens.

The tribe could be read as externalised aspects of his psyche, those antagonistic to his presence representing his own sublimated wish to get back home, and so on. This is most clearly suggested by the way the Chief, nicknamed Barnacle, can communicate with him psychically, a voice inside his head. Just as the binaural headsets are ensuring most of he play happens inside our heads. Notably, McBurney has described McIntyre's journey as “an inner one”.

It might be telling that Barnacle dies, yet we're told he is always “with” McIntyre. You can probably see the problem coming. It suggests he's not really a character in his own right, and that once he's fulfilled his role of passing on his validation he can be extinguished. An Amazonian tribe aren't there to represent another culture but map out the inside of a white Westerner's head. Barnacle is the South American cousin of the magic negro.

But when McIntyre undergoes that solo shamanic journey he sees himself as “the crack” in the fabric of the universe. Barnacle leads the tribe as they enact a ritual, burning all their belongings to get back to the beginning. The implication is that we're all lost, we've gone down the wrong path and need to retrace our steps. Yet McIntyre, who after getting lost in the forest is there for literally that reason, cannot commit to the ritual. Steeped in linear time he can only interpret “the beginning” as death, the extinguishing of everything as the end. McBurney acts out the destruction in an onstage rampage, but fails to see it through.

Rather than McIntyre taking back home some of that good-home-cooking simple tribal wisdom, gleaning new feelgood phrases to stick beneath his e-mail signature, he disrupts their lives. The storm that besets them represents his failure to commit to them, the flood relating to his earlier vision of the crack “from which our time might flood”. And this then segues into a Fall story. This is an Eden story in which our narrator discovers too late the snake is himself.

For all his protestations to not be like the other whites, the profiteers who come to burn down the forest, ultimately he's irredeemably from the same world as them. And if he, a clued-up guy and seasoned traveller to such far-flung places, is irredeemable then what chance do we have? Complicte make us complicit.

Perhaps the idea was to set up a more standard Western-guy-burns-his-sneakers-to-become-tribal-shaman story, and pull a bait and switch. He just ends up a Western guy without his sneakers, duh. Yet that feels like a post-hoc rationalisation. The noble savage stuff is too indulged to just jettison like that. What actually happened on stage was something more volatile, vying between the two notions.

And in a way this is played up. Early on, McBurney played a gag of claiming an old video cassette contained all the images of his dead Father, only for it to fall and smash on the floor. And the spool of cassette tape which messily pours out is an image which recurs later, when McIntyre finds the film from his camera wrapped danglingly round a tree. This is the messy reality, the truth against which the cassette box was the tidy mechanism we use to 'storify' our lives.

Yet neither am I sure the point was for us to not get the point. Certainly part of the piece was the necessity of our telling ourselves stories, despite their fallibility. But much like McIntyre, I was led entranced through two hours but found myself lost amid the spool of cassette tape on the floor.

PIKACYU MAKOTO + ADRENA ADRENA

Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Tues 24th May

Adrena Adrena are a duo of drummer E-Da from Boredoms and Drum Eyes (both Lucid Frenzy favourites) and “performance artist” Daisy Dickinson, who plays a laptop live. And if the live drums/laptop combination sounds unlikely, she frequently provides not just washes and tones but her own rhythms for the drums to play off against. The contrast is virtuous, throwing each instrument back on itself – on what it does best.

The centre of the stage was taken up by projections which, always simple and often semi-abstract, never stole the limelight from the music. It was more like watching a trio, just one at work on different senses to the others. Pretty soon you weren't taking in the sights and sounds as separate elements at all, but hand been induced into a kind of synaesthesia.

And if that seems like we're reverting to Sixties terminology like 'trip' we might as well go with it.... it felt like a trip (man), like being taken through some other reality then dumped back in ours at the end.

Not from Brighton but the International Festival of Projections (and I'm going to pretend I know what that is)...

Pikacyu Makoto are another of the near-infinite array of side-projects undertaken by guitarist Kawabata Makoto, alongside his mothership Acid Mothers Temple. (Lucid Frenzy was lucky enough to catch Mainliner some while ago.) This one's with drummer Pikacyu from another Japanese underground band, Afrirampo. The two bands previously made a joint album, which alas I've not heard.

As things kicked off I feared we were in for the whole 'too many notes' business, common when noise music overlaps with jazz. But after starting with a burst of 11, they then turned it down just a notch...

Styles and genres were still rattled through at breakneck speed, as if music history was sighted from the window of an express train – including Sixties beat music, Beefheart, Hendrix and some I probably missed as they hurtled by. After perhaps the least successful part, where Makoto turned to squelchy keyboards, they even provided a quite serene mid-section – Pikacyu providing holding patterns beneath Makoto's sustained tones. They then ramped back up for a thumping finale, chanted vocals over a power riff.

After seeing Lightning Bolt last year, I commented they “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.” And that seems even more true of this duo. And Pikacyu I suspect has a lot to do with that.

She seemed intent to hit every drum and cymbal in turn, a style common in noise music, but with tumbling rhythms that created spaces in the sonic onslaught. Overall, its perhaps her cheerful, childlike and almost poppy vocals which gave the set it's identity and raised things from the too-common angstiness of noise music.

It sounds like hippyshit to talk of some balance between male and female energy, and of course any kind of gender essentialism is pretty dodgy stuff. But there was something about Pikacyu's performance that took things beyond the babblebashbash noise music can sometimes degrade into, like a toddler endlessly smashing a Tonka toy against a wall.

Forty minutes from London... (Three days later and it seems an almost entirely different set!)

CAVERN OF ANTI-MATTER

Patterns, Brighton, Thurs 26th May

Truth to tell, I was always a little agnostic over Stereolab. There was something slightly knowing to their retro-futurist schtick. But Tim Gane's new band Cavern of Anti-Matter mix Neu!-style Krautrock beats, trancy dance and swooshy Sixties organ. Plus they referred to 'Doctor Who' in their track 'Tardis Cymbals' and named themselves after a Situationist painting. (One large enough to cover a whole gallery which then got sold by the metre.) I mean, theoretically they could bring in some reference to Jack Kirby comics and the taste of pistachio to tick all my boxes, but that's pretty good going.

There no bassist to their three-man line up and they specialise in stretched-out instrumentals, two things I think which go together. It's spacey music which doesn't want to be grounded in any way. Drummer Joe Dilworth, also ex-Stereolab, spends as much time on cymbals as drums. (In fact I'm fairly sure half his kit went untouched.) Listen to them a little while and I swear you'll start to feel like your feet are lifting from the ground...

Some bands, such as Moon Duo, achieve mesmerism by simple repetition until trance states take hold. (Leading to my review stating “more, please, of this less business”. I was quite pleased with that one...) While others, like this lot, are able to achieve a virtuous combination. They harness the power of repetition while morphing as they move, packing in changes you're not really aware of happening until after they've happened. They move and stand still. You can listen or trance out. In fact, you can listen and trance out.

Reviews tend to focus on the futurism of the band, but I'm not sure they're picking that up so much as getting a residue from Stereolab. Unlike the 'Jetsons'-style soon -everything-will-be-silver futurism of Stereolab, COAM lean more to the end-of-'2001' cosmic side of SF. The long numbers, the repetition, the psychedelic visuals – of course it's all about sending you. You'll be part-way through a track you were previously just enjoying, and suddenly you'll find yourself through the looking glass. Sometimes you can spot the trigger, the point where the music stepped up a notch. But other times it comes almost arbitrarily, presumably because they were accumulative – the point where your doors of perception got cleansed enough for the light to break through.

Actual footage from the gig! (No, really!)

FOLLAKZOID

Bleach, Brighton, Sat 28th May

Follakzoid are apparently prime proponents of the Santiago psyche scene. (And yes, it seems there is a Santiago psyche scene...)

If their German-sounding name suggests a Krautrock influence then, much like Cavern of Anti-Matter, there's a definite Neu! Element to the sound. There's the same extended rhythmic pieces, stretching to trance-out dimensions. (The CD I bought fits only four tracks on it.) But they also reminded me of the point post-punk crossed over with dance music, bands like 23 Skidoo or A Certain Ratio. If there's not the same uptight agitation, the David Byrne jerky dancing, there is the straight-faced euphoria. Vocals, when they appear, are de-emotionalised and intonatory, while album artwork exudes that post-punk starkness.

If Cavern of Anti-Matter's dominant movement is up, Follakzoid's is forwards. If Andrena Andrena are like a trip, Follakzoid are a road trip. Their tracks are driven by propulsive riffs, other shapes forming alongside them like trees and hills, some passing by quickly, others remaining a while. Certainly their tracks are journeys rather than destinations, often ending rather than finishing – like they're run out of road.

Reviewing one of their releases, the Quietus' Joe Kennedy commented how the motorik beat “can express both the experience of automated late-industrial modernity and atavistic impulses towards the cosmic and transcendental.” And certainly they have not just the tranciness but the sheen of Neu! In fact one of the surprises of seeing them live is how much of their sound is made by 'real' instruments.

Yet particularly with those vocals, which could be either trance-like or robotic, Follakzoid feel like both experiences at once. But then isn't something like the act of dancing like that? You repeat ritual gestures until you achieve an ecstatic state. Kraftwerk unveiled the Man Machine like their creation, like something they'd devised in their secret laboratory. But in our era, when Google glass and driverless cars seem imminent, he's something we just take for granted. Perhaps that's partly why it's Neu! rather than Kraftwerk that bands today are taking up.

Also not from Brighton...

THE TIGER LIILIES

Spiegeltent, Brighton, Sun 29th May

Part of the Brighton Fringe Festival

After the theatrical shows 'Lulu' and 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', this was the first time I'd seen the accordian-driven Brechtian street opera trio the Tiger Lillies do their actual dark cabaret set in an actual cabaret setting. And it made for a pretty good setting, laughter drifting through from the weekend revellers as they regaled us with their tales of debauchery and woe.

There's supposed to be an art exercise where you paint a painting from as many different shades of black as you can, the point being we so rarely come across 'pure' black. And they make music somewhat like that. They don't stray to the dark side of the spectrum so much as set up shop there. (Like their lyric of the woman who “always sees the black and not the gold”.) But they elbow out a range for themselves regardless. There's black humour. (A song about inserting hamsters which I won't repeat here gains fulsome belly laughs.) But there's also stuff that's pretty close to pure black, and all stations between. (I was reminded of the old Soft Boys line “And when there's no more tears to cry/There's nothing left to do but laugh.”)

Musically, they do a similar thing. Their default line-up may be accordian, double bass and drums. (Is there such a style as dark klezmer? I guess there is now.) But the drummer finds the strangest things to drum, while other instruments include piano, theramin, a “home-made ukelile” (which looks suspiciously like a chopped-off guitar neck) and a circular saw. And that last one, though sparingly used, may even be their signature sound – absurd, strangely melodic, mockingly sentimental and sinister all at once.

They smartly start the gig with the semi-diegetic song 'Roll Up' presenting a freakshow for an eagerly thrill-seeking suburban audience (“our lives a sideshow attraction, we do our best to please”), which inevitably frames everything which follows. By not being the subject of the song, we are somewhat implicated. And then comes another twist on that...

Though the Brecht and Weill influence is clear enough, there's none of Bertie's political themes. Their subject is human folly, people who became addicted to something or to someone until it finishes them. (Their universe is really a Snakes and Ladders board without the ladders.) And a song about the folly of drinking delivered to a roomfull of drinkers gains an edge. We're voyeurs, yet at any point we could find ourselves projected from out seats into one of those songs. If the musical saw signifies their sound, the default response is the uncertain belly laugh.

Not from Brighton... (But then they rarely are.)

Not sure if a theatre performance and three gigs really go together, but that's how the cookie crumbled...