The Garage, London
18th May 2006
In a Garage not exactly rammed to gills for a sold-out gig, Lightning Bolt – positioned as ever in a corner on the floor instead of taking to the stage – open their set with a looped low fidelity rhythm which soon wavers into loudness sliced by stabs of tuning-up sounds. An emergent chug struggles foal-like into unco-ordinated yet groovesome earshot, and given the amount of time they let the process continue, it’s certainly one way of building up anticipation. Such is Lightning Bolt’s cult status that even a jack plug interjection is greeted with eager yelps from the crowd, so when they actually lurch into a double-tapped frenzy of skronk bass guitar and flailing drums, the tension is pitched towards a cathartic release.
Live or on record, Lightning Bolt’s ethos seems to bo to take riffs and rhythms and worry them beyond death into oblivion. Once the full range of FX, face mask vocals and bashed out drumkit battery kick in properly tonight, there is no doubting their ability to channel electricity into broad-spectrum noise with aplomb, in front of a crowd who clamber onto every available vantage point and press in as close as possible to the safety cordon set up around the duo. They whip up the velocity into a cacophonous melange of even more furious percussion and aggressive riffs knocked out with intent, and each wave of audiac assault reaches fever pitch by accellerating from nought to twisted in the space of a few bars.
One consequence of Lightning Bolt’s rule of only playing on the venue floor is to bring their sound into closer proximity, to mingle with the audience, making the experience of witnessing them live at close quarters very different from how they might otherwise be if presented on a raised stage. It does mean that the only way to dive into the full-on intensity is to press forward into a crowd jerking to their spasmatic music as if plugged into the mains, while muffling the noise emanating from the speaker stack with their bodies, the mosh pit forming into a weird cyclonic flocking motion when Lightning Bolt’s rich soup of tonal aggression reaches critical mass. Their placement emphasises the sense of the band’s presence and makes the audience part of the event rather than witnesses to a spectacle presented on the proscenium arch. This is important to the sense of immediacy Lightning Bolt might not otherwise possess – removing one layer of audience distance is thoroughly liberating, and the idea of going to a gig where they played in a seated venue is bizarre and almost unthinkable.
The layered overtones they generate make the whole project make a sense pretty much deserving of the unique tag – it’s not just about setting everything to 11 and letting rip; as their records demonstrate, Lightning Bolt have successfully isolated the snarling, roiling avant-grind riff and are intently spreading the meme. To assume that making a racket like this successfully is as simple as turning the gain to maximum and bashing away on the kit until Metal Machine Musicis acheived by osmosis is perhaps to miss the point about Lightning Bolt and noise music in general. Likewise, the assumption that it is all some kind of elaborate arty joke bears little relation to the actuality of their performance, becoming simply irrelevant in the face of the hard graft on hand tonight.
The construction of Lightning Bolt’s dense, autistic noisefest occasionally plunges into the same richly textural miasma of overloaded amplification and percussion as Konono No.1 in full flight. They are artificers of anti-slickness, as the build up and release of perennial favourite “Dracula Mountain” demonstrates with a simple smacked-out riff which drives the active part of the audience – and some of the otherwise chin-stroking bystanders – into ecstacies of pogoing and even circular crowd-surfing around the axis of their amps, before a final lurch which finds the drumkit seemingly drifting further into the midst of the crowd itself before the latter dissolves into yells for more. Noise shouldn’t just be for the head – it should shiver the body cavities as much as the architecture, and tonight they do so in ultimately inimitable style.
-Richard Fontenoy-
