A Music Club at The Others, London
25 July 2008
Glass used to have more members, but tonight they’re a duo who make their presence felt as is, shimmering and rattling their soft motorik way through a set which shows copius affinity for the soporific psychedelia of Spacemen 3 and Harmonia‘s elevated drum machine rattle and hum. Guitarist Ben keeps the mood vibrant on a cluster of simple yet effective strokes of the strings, while Chris (sometimes cupping his ear intently as if he is listening to signals from a different world) at the controls of the keyboards and sundry electronics brings a bright set of curvaceous drones and tones to life over the backing track – which manages to sound like it was recorded on a wheezing vintage electrical percussion device – and occasional vocals, some of which appear to be sung backwards. Glass’s set evokes an electronic superhighway which never was, and the endless skies of a bright RGB yesteryear, an analogue dronescape where the pastoral pleasures of rattling along to the sound of a v-6 beat make more than enough headway for the long journey into blissout.
When Man From Uranus shimmies onstage, he announces that he’d probably have preferred to call himself Rockhausen. While this certainly would have saved him from the endless innuendo the name he’s stuck with brings, Phil Uranus still cuts an eccentric figure in his Sun Ra t-shirt and scientist-gone-bad-on-experimental-drugs demeanour. No-one could accuse him of not engaging with his audience, and Phil annotates each number with footnotes before tending to his machines with the air of someone who loves and cares for them, but really, really wants to abuse the sounds they can make.
So there are gurgling and droning loops, beats made manifestly unhinged, analogue bass thumps and some hardcore avantgarde interference with the notion of the straightahead four-four rhythm, mostly selected from MFU’s new Amazing Science Friction Volume One CD. No sound is left unstoned, the mood shifting between happy-go-lucky toytown electronica and a scattering of heaving stabs fried enough to bring the electricians in to check the wiring. Phil brings in various boxes of tricks into play in his best electronic rock star manner, twisting them to his midriff and wrenching further sparks from their innards; the best buzzing coming from a Stylophone amped up to eleven and used to strip paint from the walls. All the time he is obviously enthralled by the malformed sounds the various devices are capabale of having coaxed from them – and anyone still so misguided as to believe that electronic music is dry or devoid of emotion should come and see Man From Uranus some time for a lesson in applied synthesized dementia.
-Tango-Mango-
