The Spitz, London
26 April 2001
The I/O event at The Spitz was a little bit of a nerd-fest (meant in the best possible way), as several generations of audio technophiles opened up their various laptop computers and let rip with the best in glitchry they could muster for the occasion. To a shifting realtime backdrop of manipulated visuals, the fizzes, pops and rumbles of digital experimentation shuffled around the venue like so much modem download noise.
Three chaps and their PowerBooks and mixers were on, with the screen helpfully identifying them as Crowd Formation, and it’s a good thing there was some visual stimulation too. As exciting and innovative as software music can be, without the techno-psychedelic projections, the experience would once again have been as interesting as peering through the windows of a cybercaff. Rock and roll this was not. However, the soundscape emanating from the soundcards, with its smeared cuts and pastes of delay, distorted sparkle and voices from the aether exemplified the flavour of the night.
Crowd Formation, as befitted their name, whisked out a densely claustrophobic melange of tube-train rushes into strident treble and repeating washes of glitches made for a suitably urban babel, and more than enough to drown out the chatter at the bar too. Offbeats merged upon whines and drones, gurgled noises crowded together into a rushing in the ears like a delusional dream. Their set was punctuated with inchoate voices, mobile phone interference (was it real or was it sampled?) and the sound of plumbing in extremis.
More churning noise came from the hard-disc of Ivan Seal of Nish and Antenna Farm‘s Alistair Leslie. Sheets of excited electric splurge bounded by a more rhythmic sensibility of disjointed beats and snicking splurts of clicks and cuts led a trek through the vibrant heart of the digital machine. Definitely not for migraine sufferers, the duo’s stop-start spatchcocked rumble and fizz had the capacity for dread but became non-threatening in the end, even through the higher-pitch squeals broadcast at considerable volume. A blast of sorts then a bundle of distorted rhythms made a vague concession to conventional listenability, but in all their set offered a crisp selection of cacophony.
Among the breaks between acts, the screen offered such slogans as “Do not allow yourself to be programmed”, a fair statement of the theme of the night perhaps, and only slightly ironic considering the amount of effort the gathered musicians-programmers were making to undermine the linear conventions of electronic music. Bourbonese Qualk have been at the experimental music game for quite a while, so it was especially pleasing to find Simon Crab and new cohort Andy Wilson included in the line-up. Once again it was laptops at thirty paces as BQ throbbed into action, building up a threnody of liquid samples which rose into a burbling sheets of audio hailstones emerging into patterns of sound-drops of room-filling intensity.
Bourbonese Qualk: Live in Naples and London (2001 / 2006).
A respite into darkly-tinkling ambience of music-box Electronica of shimmering, disturbing aspect offset by bass warmth and a wistful sense of mordant dread followed, while the backdrop expanded out into kaleidoscopic abstraction and geometric blocks. With electronic dub tendencies emerging to make a bolder link into the groove possibilities inherent in sequenced music, the click-swathed rhythms merged up to the level of circling drones to slow-paced hypnotic effect. As the music changed, so did the visuals, with images of digital cityscapes focussing on the windows of the different block providing a suitable accompaniment. A change of pace followed, gliding up tempo into full-tilt delay FX spasms of whittled-down, warped-up noise to the degradation of the bitmaps behind.
Sound soon became disengaged into raucous judders and frenetic non-beats as virtual chaos ensued onstage, with rapid-fire pulses underpinning a drilling refrain. The conclusion came though a slow descent via looped, vaguely HipHop rhythms and the rising swell of mid-range tones which became even noisier by stages. The end was a dense shuffle of non-swinging beats and layered deviant sound dissolved finally into a breathtaking cyclone of meta-sussurus. Bourbonese Qualk put on quite a show, definitely the highlight of the gig.
Last up, from New York, was Aidsbot 2000, complete with woolly hat and Hustler T-Shirt. His post-Autechre take on the Drum & Bass shuffle had a welcomingly distended low-end throb underneath the brightly-chiming mash of wheezing polyrhythms, but suffered somewhat from lack of real conviction. The skipping trajectories of each slippery beat slid off into aural plasma clouds, with no two phrases remaining the same for long, but the groove, while funking up the digitaria, had little sense of anything groundbreaking about it. As the beats got less coherent and glitchingly arrhythmic, they somehow drifted into sameness. Perhaps it was simple fatigue with what was undoubtedly a challenging array of performers though, and in other circumstance Aidsbot 2000’s music seems likely to be more invigorating.
-Freq1C-
