The Water Rats, London
2nd November 1999
The Water Rats seems like a broken place, barely still pulsing with the life of the twenty or so people inside. I wonder if it was once posh, evidence: rubbed-off velvet on the too few bar stools, forgotten glass cases built into dingy walls, and a mid-size double paned front door, spread wide and chained open. It lets in the chill November night air which is perhaps all that save us from being assaulted by the smell of age and decay. I wonder who would know this is here, but apparently they do; people file in and I’m fascinated with the creative ways people in London find to keep warm, all the while avoiding looking like eskimos.
Zan Lyons comes to play, and it is easy to get up front to see what he is about. The man stands like a spider figure, poised and crawling over the smallest set of boards. Cartoon long arms and fingers, his physical presence strikes at first as strong as his sound. I can’t remember the first song he gives us. I’m too intent on trying to see him and his little set of gear, none of which I can identify by sight, but the sound of which echos nostalgia in my cold ears. I’m thinking I’m hooked by the second song, then the fourth song plays, then the sixth. I want to memorize every note of it all, and memorize how this feels, but finally I just dance, give up analysis, get carried up on waves of high end sonic flow, and buried under bass.
Ten years ago this man would have needed classification, wardrobe, a decision. Today he can stand in front of a room now filled with chin stroking stand-stills and leave them with jaws hanging as he blows up speakers which are probably larger than his studio. Bass flies up through my soles, through our souls. String samples pull as black and lovely as the darkest Goth and then Techno, but better. Is it legal for technology to improve options this much? Is it legal for this small man to bring me here to this big place I can’t stand still in?
It wouldn’t be so easy to now to walk away from what Zan Lyons is about. The shabby old faux theater is full, and most of the chin strokers are dancing as much as me, packed in, closer and closer to the spider’s trap. Webbed and caught by music that has mixed up as many things as one can think of and delivered it all with a grace of compounding that is rarely achieved, rarely this natural. I spoke briefly with the man afterward. Zan Lyons seemed pleasedand suprised that his set was so enjoyed. He said he was just putting up what was coming, as and when. And that may be the key- raw, stripped, astonishing.
Faultline are headlining for the first time tonight, with a line-up consisting of main man David Kosten with violinist Kyra Humphreys and cellist Emma Black, and there is a general sense of bewilderment at the reception they might receive after the stunning perfomance from Lyons. They needn’t worry, however, as when they get underway performing pieces from Closer Colder, all eyes and ears in the house are drawn back to the compact stage. Compared to the album versions, tonight’s renditions are stripped down to the Drum & Bass sequences emerging from Kosten’s electronics, and the hauntingly emotive sounds of the strings. When the trumpet of “Mute” opens the set, it paves the way for a show which takes the caustic schematics of urban Dance music into striking contrast with the live orchestrations.
“Partyline Honey” in particular makes for a disturbing, attention-grabbing piece of subbass-booming dub intensity, even shorn of the pornographic voicemail samples which provided the original’s title, and while the concluding “Closer Colder” likewise suffers from the absence of Dennis Hopper‘s Blue Velvet interplay with the sorrowful violin, it’s still a shudderingly entrancing work of slow, window-rattling low end and haunting piano stylings, and an effective way to end a gig which could however have continued for much, much longer.
-Freq1C and LN99-
