Po Na Na’s, London
2nd November 1998
Po Na Na’s is a bit of a new venue in London, emerging from underneath a pub on the increasingly busy (musically as well as with traffic) Highbury Corner, and decorated in a faux-Moroccan style which actually suits the sounds emerging from The Third Eye Foundation‘s DAT player and mixer quite nicely. Matt Elliot tweaks levels and twiddles knobs to suit the unfavourable acoustics, setting out a stream of juddering Drum & Bass breaks overlaid with increasingly unsettling noises. These range from the (by now, Elliot himself having done much to establish the form) conventionally drilling screams to unnerving looped moans, reaching a peak with the Eastern flavour on the still-powerful “Semtex” before its transition into the loping Latin version “Galaxy of Scars,” Elliot hunched over his console as the audience steadfastly refuses to dance in the face of his increasingly rolling breaks.
To Rococo Rot follow some versatile deck menipulations from the DJ with a late arrival and some technical adjustments. Soul Static Sound man D joins the group from behind an array of boxes to wreak disruption on their otherwise semi-smooth live sound, which still lacks some of the assurance of the group’s studio recordings. Sometimes befuddling the audience with a combination of their own mechano-organic rhythms and D’s interference, To Rococo Rot are contributing further incremental motion to the project of artful live experiments which is flourishing currently in this city and beyond. Where it will plateau is anyone’s guess (if it hasn’t already), but it remains an interesting journey away from the old triptych of guitar-drums-bass, even if the new creed of sampler-decks-mixer contains the same ultimate possibility of stagnation.
-Freq1C-
