Beyond Baroque, Venice, California 29 June 2001
(15 in attendance)
Consolidated Lint
Guitar, Pro One and toy spun over the head of the person furthest right. Pitch shifts and the bowing starts. Chattering, like automotive idling, wells up and fills the room. Much bowing, and it’s as if the doors in a thousand old homes shutter and slide, hinging and whinging, open and shut. Now, the spinning metal implement pulls tones from the amplified boxing gloves (a thumb piano, quite literally). Much checking of levels and adjusting of dials.
It’s as if one is falling down a very long pipe and these are the sounds all around, above and below.
Vertonen
An echoed scraping and various high pitches, very high, quite near the speech of a mouse. Rods are inserted and bowed. It echoes and aches – pebble thrown down
Continue reading Consolidated Lint/Vertonen/Coeurl (live) [...]
The Spitz, London 7 June 2001 
The Spitz tends to look different every time I go there. Tonight it is a late arrival just in time to see Appliance play their version of Krautrock-inspired Electronica. Projections on small screens around the room show Rand McNally maps of the Great Lakes areas of the US, Chicago Art Institute-like photos of fall/winter nature scenes, and stage backdrop of goldfish tank. Appliance seem to have a healthy loyal following here for support. The bloke on vocals has a nice singing voice and they range their own way into sounding a bit Jesus & Mary Chain; fuzzy, lightly motor-ish, but on the whole, uninspiring. I have got to face the million flight walk downstairs to the
Kosmische @ The Garage, London 31 May 2001
Beware all snow leopards; indeed all mammals were at risk of having their asses rocked Thursday at the Kosmische Club‘s presentation of Acid Mothers Temple. Once Southall Riot was done with their opening imitation of all that was Krautrock in a Nineties sort of style, all three chord-led and droney – and most of which I missed – Acid Mothers Temple strolled on, lit up and rawked out. An enthusiastic audience had to have been relieved by the breathing space afforded by the last minute manoeuvre to downstairs at The Garage, knowing that Upstairs would never have accommodated the sweating, grooving, smoking crowd, much less the band’s hair. You would never want to invite this group over for showers, unless