Bristol
19 June 2019
Audience-surrounded, EP64 kicked an intense noise. Dali’s word-tangled molasses kicked around by tribal drums and hawking sax in one of the most energetic performances I have witnessed from them. At one point it sounded like there was a load of argumentative Vietnamese fishwives trapped in there, not to mention the Diamanda Galás-like gurgling hypertensives exploding round those nailing beats and infectious atonals that flew straight to your hips.
The energy flew between the duo like a hot potato, cavaliered plenty of corrosive curls that suddenly Haino transformed into an epileptic explosion for a gurning Charles (he twisted some superb faces) to lunge into, to salvo the serration, cutting back on the expected fall to re-sequence a broken return, which Haino scooped up in waspy reverie, a splintered reply Hayward drifted into like a snow-blind explorer.
Underneath the drum fall purred an acidic noise generator, full of bubbling battery acid and slicing shards. Some distorted blues beamed in, flipped into a deep fat-fryer full of chicken-winged mousetraps (you had to be there). This was great! Haino’s vocals have always fascinated me, and I’m glad tonight’s show was bountiful with some of those gymnastic gems. Japanese yodelling interspersed with snippets of English, glimpses of recognition abound. “I hate everything”, he said, something I find hard to believe by the amount of deranged passion he put to the fore; then some darkened poetics on (was it?) surfing waves, his words full of spiking curiosity akin to the prophetic dark-aging of his album titles. Haino wandered off to his rack of amps regularly throughout the show, turning up the gain/volume, then qualified the adjustment with an explosive maul of his guitar (I’m thankful I brought my ear plugs) as the stage roared in electrical exorcism, squealing feedback he looped and yelled across. Charles’s whirring tones scalpelled the zeezzzt of his cymbals, the delayed effect of some of his kit slapping splashy hues over the noisy ecstasy.Both relishing the vivid violence of their creation, they suddenly cut it all back to reveal a blissfully haunted ambience. A chanting oasis of reverb-thrown voice, expertly encrusted in some lightly brushed cymbal shimmer and whispers of sweet medication in a pin-drop silence. A sugar-filled memory that tsunami’d on a thorn filled screech, Haino bent over his electro-magnetic palm gadgets like some esoteric magician. A theremin (or should that be terror-min)-like action that ripped through Hayward’s percussive punch, ascended like errant rockets to implode in fresh colours. The loop capturing goods, churning like an ugly scribble of wire wool which Haino skewered with a fresh cascade of assaulting/assassinating aerials.
Life-affirming stuff that successfully tinderboxes all that (boring) political junk that’s been filling our ears for far too long.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
