The Institute for Contemporary Arts, London
30 January 2008
Here is my ATP festival experience. I always seem to miss the bands that I wind up liking the most. So, having missed Fuck Buttons at The Nightmare Before Christmas I wasn’t going to miss them again when they came to Ithe CA, and they more than lived up to my expectations.
First on was fellow ATP label mate Alexander Tucker, who built up a goodly wall of avant-folk loops. Tucker is always worth seeing and didn’t disappoint on this occasion. Playing a solo set, he built up his loops using a cello, acoustic guitar, mandolin, and voice. He lulled the audience into a false sense of security before saturating the ICA with noise, which reappeared and vanished as abruptly as it came.
Fuck Buttons, Bristol-based Andrew Hung and Ben Power, faced each other at opposing ends of a table filled with gear and spewing cables. The show was a run through of their forthcoming and rather marvellous début album Street Horrrsing … no mean feat given the amount of thought that went into the album. Big walls of distortion and screams, raw and tender textures by turns, and seriously hard beats.
Seeing them live added a whole new dimension to Fuck Buttons for me. Their sheer enthusiasm for music is infectious, and their music is seriously physical stuff. They leaped around the stage as manically as they screamed into toy microphones and jumped up and down the table like they were playing some crazed electronic version of table tennis. When they played “Bright Tomorrow” the house started to rock to its pounding drum beat, by the end the audience were nodding their heads like a convention of different drummers.
Fuck Buttons are more than loud loud loud …but don’t get me wrong. They are loud, especially in a venue the size of the ICA. I walked back to Charing Cross partially deaf and feeling like my sense of balance had been impaired. It was worth it, though. Fuck Buttons are great fun live and not to be missed.
-Cuddy Banks-
