The Kosmische Club
Upstairs At The Garage, London
28 July 2001
For the Kosmische Club’s fifth birthday, the party hats, balloons and banners have been brought out to celebrate half a decade of putting on one of the best clubs in London, if not the country and possibly the world. A touch of hyperbole, perhaps, but the nice thing about this club, despite the almost unbearable heat in the small roof-space room which has plagued Upstairs At The Garage in summer since the year dot, is how intimate it is. Not just in the sense of being small, but there’s usually a general air of seriously friendly fun and frivolity to be found, and it’s especially the case tonight. The party mood may not be that different from the average Kosmische, but the selection of DJ’ed tunes and live guests makes for a happy happening; and where else would play The Residents‘ sadly-twisted “Happy Birthday” to mark the occasion? Add in choice favourites from Harmonia to NEU! to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop‘s analogue synth classic “Dr Who” with Jon Pertwee narrating to boot and a whole host of underground and leap-about Electronica beside, and Kosmische is the club with the best music in town.
So while Ticklish may lurk behind laptops and a bunch of electronics, they at least have brought along some nice shifting abstractions to pump out of the graphics software in the background. Planes and cubes and Platonic solids writhe and blend in psychedelic style to the accompaniment of the sort of abstract Electronica that the late Twentieth, early Twenty-first Centuries music is possibly going to be noted for. Unfortunately, what with the preponderance of the glitch and micro-beat, it’s going to be hard to remember any one set of sounds in any particular arrangement. Characterised by the sharp snap of a percussive sound, the fractured bass and the deracinated sample melody, Ticklish’s music drifts and uncurls itself, but never makes up a particularly noticable sound for all its forground energy and competence.
The same could likewise be a problem for Tennis, but Douglas Benford and Ben Edwards have only brought the one laptop computer. This gives a much warmer feel for some reason, and Benford’s live manipulations of his sampler drive their post-Dub sound into the depths of bass and the finer ranges of crackle and hiss made tuneful. The rhythms throb to the accompaniment of the archaic strains of vinyl grooves foregrounded to become designed texture, and Tennis make a bouncy space to get proceedings warming up nicely. Douglas even leans over his mic between every piece to pass on thanks and track titles, breaking that distant barrier which can so easily fall between Electonica’s more self-absorbed programmers onstage.
There is no such distance at all from Kling Klang, whose bright combination of vintage synthery (plonked on matching ironing boards as stands), energetic live drummer and the occasional guitar freakout soon has the crowd jumping up and down and generally getting a full-on Electro-Punk thrashing for their benefit. Kling Klang’s tunes are simple, but deceptively effective; three chord bleep and buzzers predominate, with much slider-tweaking and key-stabbing in a build up of riffing melodies which urge those feet to part company with the floor and to leap around to the joyous sound of electricity in its element. Likewise the band, as they headbang, swelter and pound the keyboards, coaxing the technology into emanating some quite frazzled electronic Punk to set the room twitching.
Like Add N TO (X), Stereolab and numerous other analogue drone enthusiasts before them, the band bring out the cheap synths to mix with the old tech-fetish items to happy, envelopingly fuzzy effect. With current single “Vander” to twirl away in the memory for hours and days after the gig, there couldn’t be a better way to get the kids rocking on that celebrated Kosmische dancefloor.
-Tango-Mango-
