Limpe Fuchs / FACS / Copper Sounds (live at The Brunswick Club)

Bristol
13 November 2018

Deep in the building’s basement, illuminated by flashing red strobes, Copper Sounds totally seduced with their ritualistic roast of belt-driven bicycle wheels and contact mic(ed) boulders. The undulating mechanism murmured like an arthritic after-shadow in the PA as the calcium rub of the stoney surfaces was effect-fed, bent across grainy percussives in a parade of pendulum-painting pennies that spun, cul de sac(ed), then ruptured to spectre new-found freedoms.

A disjointed poetry that sort of kidnapped you, needled an ELpH-like itch that skull-scuttered some paranormal wows. The people surrounding were bathed in red, starring down into the blinking ellipticals, locked into its bayoneting rhythmics as the clean sound of rubbing rock was warped into rodent-infested tinfoil and beyond, until one of the boulders spookily flung itself off and things ground to an abrupt halt.

Tightly wound and mercenary, FACS hail from Chicago. They threw out some divine post-punk/industrialised thorns, each track skewered on chiselled accents, the bass keeling like a tethered animal, straining on taut tremoloed over-cuts and catapulting angles.

They reminded me of the sodium-soaked insomina of Dead Gum with rubs of Savage Republic, maybe with a touch of Bauhaus gothness to them soaring incisions, and that yummy chiming Sonic Youthness that nailed a couple of numbers. Theirs was a chemistry that gasolined the basement’s gloom that had me falling over myself to acquire their LP.

Upstairs, the audience had assembled on the cushioned periphery like a Hogarth etching, all looking onto the dance floor occupied by Limpe Fuchs’s home-made wares. The oddness of the venue’s run-down razzmatazz totally disappearing as she hit into ambling percussions, a gallop of tonal differences and scattered rhythmics unravelling themselves from musical structure.

Apart for a bit of violin playing, this was all about resonance and savouring its brief glow. The curling darkness licking those gong-like metallics that eerily burrowed. There was room for accident too, the odd collusion of chance picked up upon or compassed by. The swishy narratives of those printing plates slapping the floor like metallic fish out of water, the prospector-like rolling transits of glassy marbles around a large metal pan.

A brave odyssey , the sparseness of which I think some found a bit difficult to grasp — normally you’d expect these lovely sonics to be looped, blistered with overlaid saturation; but this was more about the joy of exploration. And explore she did, giving the sounds space to breathe – freeing them from compositions shackles, totally at odds with this condensed existence we find ourselves in, and better for it. So quiet too that my camera shutter sounded monstrously loud, so apologies for the lack of pictorial evidence.

It was a parade that captivated, occasionally turned comical – those elephant-like funnel sounds, upping the spontaneous yodelling betweens that Limpe was peppering the performance with throughout.

I think Limpe used everything she brought with her, except for the drum skin filled with walnuts, all heading towards a the grand finale of emptying a bag of wooden batons on the floor that blasted through the pin-drop focus. A gift the audience rolled back across the floor in a gradual encore, the odd beer can’s clank accompanied by a flutter of laughter.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-