ULU, London 23 April 2008
Ah, what better way is there to celebrate St George’s Day than to avoid all the jingoistic flag-waving nonsense and go and see a band who come from the other side of the world? Probably none. None whatsofuckingever.
First up we get Growing, who I heard described by someone in the queue as “a friendlier Black Dice”. That’s not far off the mark, really. True, a lot of it’s just “I could do that!” noodling, but when they lock into a motorik groove there’s something really quite jaunty and hard to dislike about the whole affair. And then there’s the part where a Beefheart-esque guitar phrase gets fucked with, and you suddenly feel like you’re trapped in a factory. A factory making clowns. ROBOT CLOWNS OF DEATH. And it’s all a bit scary. But still
Continue reading Boris/Growing (live) [...]
Merzbow was brutal. That could be the whole review. We went in knowing he would be brutal and he delivered. We came back out deaf, balance impaired, and probably several shades paler. Merzbow, aka Akita Masami, is one of the pre-eminent industrial noise artists and has had a prolific career since the late seventies. As with some of his other recent releases, the concert had traces of beat, pounding distorted and garbled rhythms that battered the audience into submission. The guy standing next to me was trying to dance, but mainly succeeded in acting out a (more than likely) ecstasy mime representation of being deafened. The sonic attack
Skin Turns to Glass is epic stuff, I love it. Huge shoegazer doom from Toronto-based duo Nadja, who began as a solo project of Aidan Baker. In 2005 Leah Buckareff joined him allowing them to leave the studio and go live, though this album was originally released in 2003 in a slightly different version with Buckareff on bass and vocals. Between them they make a sound that could conquer the world.