18 Kingsland Road, London
7 March 2001
18 Kingsland Road is not a squat, but looks a bit like one, or that it once might have been. It’s now an art gallery and occasional music venue, with steep leg-endangering staircases twisting into the depths of the improvised cellar bar among the salvaged chairs and exposed brickwork, and up to the tiniest of tiny toilets. It really is quite fun going to see a band play in front of a white sheet at the back of a converted Nineteenth Century shop front rather than in the glossy bars and clubs which now populate the neighbourhood. This is also a niftily symbolic location, with Hoxton being fashionable to itself over the way, even next door too at the bijou rag-washed trendiness that is Herbal, and just a few doors along the other side of the road, the sleaziness represented by the local strip joints and the road to dreary Dalston. 18 Kingsland Road is so uncool, it is, of course, cool.
Geography and sociology aside, the main room is heaving with a small but perfectly crushed crowd who brave the clinging plaster which adheres itself to clothing in the tightly-packed space to boogie along to Man Woman. They have an MC 505, some backing tech and a penchant for Hoxton grooving on a kitchly-cheesy beats and a solid disco sensibility which will see them through a hundred nights of cocktail lounge bookings. Thanks to their mish-mash of mellow, sometimes dub-referencing atmospheres topped off with Tech-House beats with emergent reverbed stompers among the light-fantastic pulse, their ethos seems to be summed up by set-opening track “Sex On The Minitel” – tech+sex=fun, with a penchant for Seventies schmaltzy-listening style grooves. Bricolage to go, in a soulful sort of manner.
So back to the geopolitics for the sharp, sharp suits of Icebreaker International; rarely has anyone seemed more right in their use of a laptop for making live music, at least in their corporate-mocking (NATOArts ID badges and all) guise, than Simon Break. It’s like being at a business seminar, or a conference on the state of global trade and the implications of Free Trade for a post-modern population – which is pretty much the case, with twin back projections showing the places visited during the trip Break and Alexander Perls made from Yokohama to Halifax on the container vessel Trein Maersk. Strangely symbolic shots of either group member stock still in the landscape; maps and diagrams; architectural tourist snaps are all contrasted with newsreel images of warfare from the Gulf all the way back to cinematic depictions of Waterloo and the land-grabbing free for all of the Wild West, and the beatifully melodic Electro-trip continues.
This sort of thing has been done many times before, from the industrial to the more ambient; but the Icebreaker duo like their object lessons to sleek beats informed as much by global capitalism as Kraftwerk and Michael Rother-style guitar of Perls. Video footage of smart missiles and Singaporean police boats on harbour patrol merge with the onward ploughing stem of Trein Maersk, Iraq gets another pasting as the status quo is fought over and maintained, and Icebreaker play the wave-lapped 21st Century multimedia blues. Their music is a statement, or an accompaniment of a statement, of the way things are, but with the political content as a reminder that the fluid electronic revolution which their instrumentation and its availability on a mass consumer scale has its price and its process in the harshness of economics. Those casually-fashionable new trainers? Think who made them, where and for how little as part of what downsized, relocated insecure job. And the computer, screen and keyboard, hard-disc and mouse being used to read, and write, this review…
Is this all too much to draw from a band band playing on the Dalston-Hoxton interface to sweating crowd? No, and where better than in a city built on commerce, in a district rising up in a new wave of entertainment-led development on the debris of a thousand shoe shops, warehouses and merchant’s offices. The music flows like the virtual cash which still pumps the City which trades in the labour and produce of the world, ceaseless, day and night across timezones; it’s good to have a sense of purpose, a chance to speak out in some form or other on the way things are and how they got to be that way. Some people take to the streets and dance; Icebreaker have taken to the seas and reported back on what they saw and heard there.
-Antron S. Meister-
