London
18 October 2023
We totally missed out on Sunroof, having taken a few wrong turns and getting completely lost, but fortunately managed to catch The Raincoats‘ Ana da Silva as she started her set.
Immediately found the backing tracks to each song way too dominant, but her guitar supplied plenty of accenting attitude to compensate. A choppy rawness, her thrown-over vocals the same, purring a nice angular shoutiness very much in keeping with The Raincoats’ DIY ethos. Three tracks in, the laptop backing malfunctions, so she introduces some off-the-cuff solo guitar fire.
When the backing returns it’s softer; she sings a few guitar-less, accompanied by looped glitches / pulses – these are excellent — her lyrics burn on the breath, torchlit in your head. That disco ball track towards the end is ace too, finds her voice caught in an FX-drenched reflux, sounds that have got me enjoying her album The Lighthouse of late. Pity it’s all over too soon.
The place is absolutely crammed, so much so people are spilling outside the front door; the large ring of reserved seating doesn’t help matters either, but we find a good vantage point and stay there for the whole of the main act — being over six foot tall really helps in these situations.
Phew’s initial microphone problems were quickly forgotten as the warmth of her electronics flowed through, filling the venue with dronal cobwebs and flickering voice. An otherworldly tannoy whose lullaby qualities are splattered-snared, evolving from choral pull to the desiccated distorts of a gale-wrapped coastline … then gifted to a pulsing invite … whir-chucked explosions and bouldering chinks … the sound’s shifting aperture always incubating new textural diversions. Her frame sways to the dilating miasma that creeps over you like a ghostly classical recording interspersed with creaking timbers and tuba-torn heralds …the action constantly layering up as she finds new roadmaps in the overlap and instinctively expands upon them.A police car’s blue lights flows through the venues windows from outside. A random moment that dances the back wall to Phew’s sleek slivers. Blurring fragments that compass a faint fœtal heart’s beat that’s reverbed to boom outwards, as subtle injections of Japanese leak on through pinched-in reversed glints.
She’s so animated, caught in the kaleidoscopic clatter, constantly adjusting, corralling the focus into a war dance of assorted percussives and cymbalised tints. A lattice-laced plethora all rhythm-tied impulsively, her hands deep within the structure, mutating the colourways, adding erupting flares or scalding sci-fi surprises. I’ve loved all Phew’s records, but it’s fascinating to witness all this first-hand, see how interlocked the creator is with the moment. Her head buddha-nodding to the kinetics, arms stretching the controls. A sound that transforms into a weird approximation of her recent vertical jamming LP that finds Phew straining into the chaos, grinning to its gathering intensity. Her fingers switching the syncopation, melding all those triggered sounds into a white-hot hammering harshness that blisters a capslock wow of a finish line.Thanks goes to Upset The Rhythm for inviting her back to Blightly; thought I’d never get to see her after the closed motorway debacle of last year.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
