93 Feet East, London
8 March 2002
Kitty-Yo hit London, taking over the snazzily labyrinthine 93 Feet East venue on Brick Lane for an evening of the label’s quality acts and a host of guest DJs from Berlin, London and further afield, one of whom seems to be playing Generation X‘s “Dancing With Myself”. Retro-chic has enveloped itself after all, it seems. The event is sold out with rapid ease, packing every available bar to the point where escape onto the roof terrace and the freezing night air is sometimes the only escape possible.
Back inside among the vibrantly chattering throng in the main room, Maximillian Hecker slips onstage alone with his guitar, keyboard and voice. His songs seem to resonate lonely angst and anguish, matched by music which strums glumly to itself and the audience seem to be witnesses more than participants in the live performance. The occasional punctuations of static and amped-up chords only serve to throw the pained songs into sharper relief.
Laub are here to perform their Filesharing album, and consequently bob up and down beind their matching Powerbooks with an air of somewhat nervous enjoyment, now dressed in black against a black background in direct contrast to the record sleeve. Their music is not the most immediately danceable, nor much suited to a live crowd talking amongst itself, but they do a good job of slipping out the glitchy pulses and clicks on a sliding scale of arryhtmic beats. Perhaps theirs is an esoteric form of dance music; related but not entirely of the club in and of itself, crackling with a soft energy which is revealed more than thrust forward, emergent instead of upbeat.
Antye Greie-Fuchs, spectacles propped strangely over her fetching beige post-HipHop wooly hat, occasionaly wanders forward to sing and/or vocalise into the mic; sometimes her vocal contributions appear as samples too, which adds to a sense of otherworldly communication. It could be that Laub are one of those bands who appear best in a dream sequence. Still, it is good to see live laptop musicians twiddling the knobs of their mixers and tone gerators too, actually putting hands to the instruments with an immediately audible result rather than the somewhat less than interesting sight of hunched programmer-artistes stroking the touch pads and wheeling their mice `net café-wise.
Tarwater are up next, standing lankily behind tall stacks of electronic kit in the case of Roland Lippok, while Bernd Jestram wields his bass across his own selection of electronic musical tools. Unfortunately, the sound seems to have got decidely murky for their set, and while the projections flit through multiply-angled gauzes above the crowd`s heads, it almost seems as if those same decorations are filtering the music. Words and individual notes, tones and the subtle tweaks which characterise Tarwater’s langorously arch streamed consciousness on record are largely lost among the babble and the acoustics, so curious puzzles like “Tress” and “Seven Ways To Fake A Perfect Skin” are lost among the muffling and the talk. Which is a real shame, because they should be listened to properly, preferably while sitting down and relaxing to the lateral bass and electronica, pondering what exactly Mr Lippok might be talking about so elegantly in his sharply precise, relaxed and German-accented yet 99% perfect English.
No such difficulties with Peaches. Her show is full-on, in your and everyone in the vicinity’s face, and provides a suitably energetic way to celebrate International Women’s Day, if that indeed is what anyone’s doing tonight. She puts on a highly sexualised show which somehow really only has comparision in that put on by Iggy Pop. This may seem a strange comparison, as Mr Pop is decidedly masculine, while Peaches flaunts her femaleness with no concern for the properness of femininity as the term isusually used. Feminist in the same way that Kathy Acker or Lydia Lunch are, she assaults the audience aurally and visually while teasing and provoking at the same time.
In this task she is aided by the equally full-on duo Cobra Killer, who act as her backers, sidewomen and interlude agitators, high-kicking, flag-waving and above all screaming cohorts of chaos. Is there a structure or a spontaneous riding of the mood of friendly mosh-frenzy which soon erupts? More than likely it`s a bit of both, as guest male Taylor Savvy lets rip with the fire extinguisher on a delighted crowd by now whipped to a frenzy by the stage-diving, cock-teasing and generally anarchic goings on onstage.
When Peaches exhorts “Boys, grab your dicks/Girls, shake your tits”, she does more than alittle of both herself, the former with the aid of a vibrantly red strap-on rubber appendage. Very silly perhaps, but itseems to go rightly with the sleazy territory this Electro-Rock entertainer manages to summon. even the security guard onstage gets a few tweakings, looking thoroughly nonplussed throughout while retaining his composure admirably. Even if the sound is still as blurrily murky as for Tarwater, no-one really cares, because it`s a grinding, pumping, dirty groove on which to lurch and sway in the sweaty front of stage after all, and a fun one at that.
-Antron S. Meister-
