Simon Fisher Turner / Nik Colk Void (live at Strange Brew)

Bristol, 21 January 2022

This is a pairing of contrasting acts, both enterprising bastions of electronica, one coming from a cinematic sensibility, the other skewing the dance equation.

Simon Fisher Turner‘s soundtracking sensitivity is all over the heavenly creep he’s plying, hatcheting sounds that worm in there, knit a blurred unison. A mellow ménage shot though by flaring feedbacks, clanging sonars; beats threaten to take hold, but are submerged in favour of pulsing gravities, a Javanese richness rinsed through a piano’s curl, itchy in metallic and shimmering after-burn.

A sound that seems to be actively manipulated, full of illusory breaths dry-spun’n’diced, petri-poured. A tangled bag of tarantulas that I want him to stay with, explore more, but he prefers to pull it into a harbourside of purring mechanicals and pebbling percussives that travels elsewhere in shrill ascents. A precursor to acidly over-driven wah guitar and Thelonious splinters that later hit and drip into the recoiling temples.

You could say this is a collage of mood pieces, sketchy and erratic, strangely detached. A chemistry lesson slipping into a duet of see-sawing violin and bassy cello scoops as the impact candy of snooker balls follows the strings’ swaying gait, finally swimming out on diamonding dancables, a lounge-core lilt whose polite beats shimmer out to a sibilate silence.

Nik Colk Void starts with a lot of randomised rubble and repeated roasts as she flings her modular shapes around to see what sticks. Lots of fine-tuning and dial-twisting ensues, until this lovely semi-techno chute is released, full of colliding halflings and break snakes. A constantly mutating soup daggering in there, briefly rupturing in some eerie symphonic before slamming back into a filthy thump.

An elasticated abstraction that gets the audience whhooooping for joy, souped-up into a fist repeatedly banging a solid piece of mahogany overtaken in addictive eels that hold your limbs in an obscene zigzag.

Very danceable alchemy indeed, full of smeary petroleums and whorling feedbacks. I’m not normally a synthetic beat lover, but these percussives are something else, full of bickering personality, far removed from the drilling clinicals of, say, Underworld. A crimsoned complexity letting loose chattering mirages and robotic slivers, elliptically jacking your engine with a balsamic tang.

A good night that gets me wondering if there might be a tasty collaboration on the cards sometime soon.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-