Red Rose Club, London
16th September 2000
A night of drones on Seven Sisters Road, strangely light on traffic in the aftermath of petrol protests, but still teeming with North London’s variegated Saturday night fun seekers and the requisite fully made-up Goths on the 253 bus. The Red Rose is no stranger to the extremes of music, and the venue’s home as a noted comedy club is somehow appropriate to the onstage antics of Bajina. Two geezers in various stages of hand splatter-painted scruffiness, face paint and a “Police Line – Do Not Cross” headband (the fashion item de jour for the less publicly-supported kind of road protesters) behind a bunch of electronic kipple, making an unholy racket with all the glee of children set loose to their own anarchic devices.
It’s an enjoyable blend of guitar feedback, radio noise, snatches of charity shop recordings of the likes of Thunderbirds and Wout Steijnhuis‘ sonorous Hawaiian guitar, all mashed into a bundle of fun from the tapes slapped from Walkman to Walkman. Best of all is when the bandana man sits feet up in a leather-bound formal chair while the deck abuser does his worst to sundry vinyl, leering into the audience and stabbing his teeth with a live jack plug in painfully faithful imitation of a dentist drill. Still, they took it just too far in time terms, but how exactly does this kind of noise assault end gracefully anyhow?
∞ (as in Infinity) have a similar problem knowing how long to make a set of drones extracted by E-bow from their acoustic and electric guitar. They sit at their mixers, making the drones rise from a low hum to an all-enveloping swarm of electricity around the hall over what seems like an hour but may have been substantially less. This is one of the appealing facets of the drone: the distancing of time from the listener as the subtle shifts in tone and frequency make the transition from one second to another liquid variables. But the problem with this set is not of ∞’s making; it comes instead from the too-good acoustics of the Red Rose in picking up every last inane comment of certain sections of the audience, some of whose every last impolite natter (“Has it started yet?”) somehow makes it through the moments of maximum volume, even in the front rows a few metres from the PA, to mood-deadening effect.
There is less of this problem for Dual, fortunately. The trio make their beginning on three bowed guitars and a few flight boxes of effects, accompanied by slithering red and white abstract projections. Another long piece, but with simple, slow percussion backing which adds a new dimension to the Dual sound, one which once again is reminiscent of the shifting drones of Main. The night becomes alive with the rise and fall of bows on coiled steel, and even with the distractions which are still there to spoil it all at times, Dual largely break through to the core of the audience’s attention. A mixture of the meditative and the abstract, the music makes itself felt.
Last up are 2nd Gen, tonight being main man Wajid Yaseen behind a black box or two (even if one is a yellow Sherman box after all) and accomplice Paul of the charmingly-named Dachau. Paul looks like a demented, fresh-faced Sixth Former in his untucked grey shirt and tie, and his performance is in suitably Punkish style. While Yaseen wrenches a series of squals and spaceless distortion from the electronic kit, Mr Dachau sticks a mike between his teeth and spends much of the set screeching his accompaniment to Wajid’s occasional microphone shouts. Then the blasted beats kick in, and a mashed-up bash of recycled metallic riffs and loops for what passes for the evening’s closest resemblace to individually identifiable tracks.
2nd Gen’s set is short but noisy, and wraps everything up before the DJs and excellent cut-up films finish off the night in a welter of neglected sounds from Coil, Loop and beyond. What is refeshing about this night was the concentration of some wilfully-extended drone music and avant-stupid sonic exploration under one trembling roof; if only some of the punters would show more respect.
-Antron S. Meister-
