London
27 October 2026
It is great to know that The ICA is still at the forefront of modern art and music appreciation in the big Smoke even after all this time. It must be nearly thirty-five years since 4AD hosted their Thirteen Year Itch celebration and that was the last time I set foot in the live auditorium, but its industrial darkroom chic seems barely to have changed.
The first thing we noticed on arrival amidst the lilac lighting and Jon Hassell soundtrack was that the square stage was set up in the round, the raised platform centrally placed in the room with three sets of electronic gadgetry facing inwards and one facing away. This arrangement was for support act Nik Colk Void who, even after nearly twenty years of electronic exploration still looks incredibly youthful; although against the grizzled throng of Wire fans, Mic and me included, that isn’t too hard. Dressed in black with a long fringe, Nik suited the monochrome vista, a haloed wan-faced figure in the dry ice with only the blue of the patch cables and the multi-coloured glow of Daniel Miller‘s setup standing out from the shadows.
A threatening flood of crackling snarls is unleashed and as the set starts a dry sun rises somewhere in the distance, washing the horizon with a throbbing rumble that emanates from the ceiling speakers and vibrates our conceptions. Hollow pennies roll and the cold, harsh waves ebb and flow, generating unconscious bodily reactions.
The sounds are feral and animalistic, and their encroachment produces movement in Nik, who rocks and taps with the emanations. Waves of white light suffuse the stage with the sounds all echoing corridors and shorting strip lights. At one point in the lightning-like flashes it was like watching some remake of Frankenstein as Nik poked and prodded with the cables, deliberating over what to assail us with next.
The second piece is more malevolent, more destructive and disruptive; bells peal from within a sandstorm as she surgically places the cables, constantly re-evaluating and readjusting the swathes of sound as sandstorm bells herald a scattered beat; it develops quickly and is then subsumed by some cavernous echo that feels not of this Earth, trapped deep below.
I always wanted to record the wailing of the London Underground for its grinding banshee scream on the Piccadilly Line and towards the end, Nik manages to replicate this until finally a settled and satisfying monotonous drone arrives, its tone cautiously interrupted by the tightening of skin until all sound vanishes. It must be daunting having to support electronic music royalty, but Nik manages it with panache and verve and is very well received.
Once the folk have made their checks and dust covers have been removed, Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis and Daniel Miller make their way to the stage, again all in monochrome except Bruce’s white wizard hair and trainers and Daniel’s salt and pepper crop. Bruce is looking pretty frail, helped to the stage as he is, but the other two look robust. The reason they are out on an autumnal Tuesday night is to revisit an outlier in the Wire catalogue, but one that has enthusiasts salivating. Back in 1983, these three convened for the Duet Emmo album Or So It Seems, an anagrammatic Dome versus Mute meeting of minds that was both mysterious and essential, and put a lid on the first rush of the Lewis / Colin Newman Dome project.
Once they had settled, if anybody was expecting a carbon copy of the album they were in for sheer disappointment as the slow introductory throb immediately overwhelmed the audience, a slowly pulsing threat that reached much deeper and churned much slower than Nik’s set. The stately build was like a glacial flow, interspersed with static crackling across arctic tundra. The spaces are vast, the sounds drawn out and distended until a deathly ghost organ rises hand-in-hand with some attack sounds that slaver and gnash like they are straining on a leash; the ugly torrent overloaded and claustrophobic.
The overall sound is unholy and disorientating, Graham’s voice when it arrives threatening like a crooner that has been driven to the dark side and left to survey the heartbreak of the world. It yearns for something, but that something is amorphous, malevolent and suits the disembowelled bass guitar that drops relentlessly around us. Textures vanish and are replaced with some motifs staying the course, fighting to be heard. Some pieces as remembered are mere distant memories, replaced with epic desolate grandeur; while others are turned into the strangest love songs, the sort that drill into your head.
The repeated mantra “Or so it seems” briefly flashes with familiarity before the second microphone distorts the voice in to a purgatorial hangover. Unsurprisingly, they have no interest in gratifying the audience with a trip down memory lane and instead tear the songs into strips, and with surreptitious looks of agreement assail us with nagging, pulsing streams that echo the line “Nothing will remain”.
Part way through I thought how compared to Nik’s sinuous movement, Duet Emmo have a sense of stasis, of being trapped, the bowels of hell bass doomy and dirge-like. We hear it grow, seething, cracking the sky and we see inscrutable faces measuring out the infernal noise as the stage ripples with clouds of sustain.
It is a tour de force and one that perhaps highlights the bravery of both Dome and Daniel Miller. They could have taken the easy option and give us a facsimile of the recorded work but instead, forty-three years later, they rip it up and scatter the parts allowing them to thrill and confound in equal measure. Remarkable.
-Words: Mr Olivetti-
-Pictures: Michael Rodham-Heaps-
