Bristol
11 November 2019
“My vagina’s really angry”, goes the walkie-talkie on the table, crackling in flick-knifed distortion and abrupt statics. DJ Ductape has a few people scattered about outside the venue, supplying miscellaneous inputs to her show — one random conservationist, the other drumming railings and yet another going Mozart with random Casio melodies.
The stage overflowing with equipment, she opens proceedings relegated to a table in front of the stage plying a distorted cocktail that sounds like the Grouch from Sesame Street chewing aluminium cans. A haphazard parade of fractured dialogue falls through, and I swear I can hear somebody yelling “Wellington wankers”, the k’s curdling into a barking canine howl.
The sound whips around in shimmering accents and karate-kicked rubber bands, retracted then smothered in grainy rubs, swamped in digital-delayed stutterings, feedback crowdings — as if soundtracking a mental breakdown, suggests Mr Olivetti. And I’ve got to agree; this was intense, disorientating, a twist here and a press there, the confines are re-configured in stormy mutation or fall back into an eddy of bent keyboards and tango(ing) nails.
She phones a friend in Dublin, adds her contribution to the mix via an over-amped mic. I’m not sure what we are eavesdropping on, but it sounds radioactive as it scuffs the skirtings of some rumbling kinetics to disappear into the reverb voice of Buzz Lightyear, something that raises flutters of laughter before scooping a loudness of double exposures and angled abstracts that fade to applause.
Next up, Group A (usually a duo, but tonight the violinist is missing) flows strictly solo. Hidden behind semi-opaque black drapery, Tommy Tokyo plies a darkened deliciousness of exploratory aethers that filter though as milky moon-lit vapours spiral the cloth gauze, slither silkily to the watery embryonics that creak with haunted debris. Nurse With Wound-like atmospherics full of tapering manatees and the reverbed suck of metallics nettling the flow, a real immersive experience that plays on your mind, fills your head with shoaling sinisters overtaken by blurring mechanics that whip the slurring polymorphics, flicker in explosions of reverberated fireworks.
A tribal thud feeds on in, curves the calliper clank and murmuring spectres beset with smashed glass that sounds like bottles are actually dropping from the venue’s ceiling as the projection gets feisty with a savage overlays –- a mi-optic eyeball spinning to biro(ing) bows of sound, the splatter of iconography to shuttering scars as the artist’s body leans into every blow like a tide-swept puppet lost to her own bewitchment. Once the trapping of Group A’s set are cleared away, four diminutive figures make their way onto the stage, two guitarists, a drunmer and a sylph-like woman carrying a saxophone. We are suddenly plunged into darkness, sparse melancholics set a foreboding tone with an ’80s gothic sensibility that gradually escalates in volume, dramatically tilted to rim-caught accents and brooding tangles. Qujaku‘s androgynous singer, his voice restless and ghostly, raises up to freak-out mode as the guitar shimmers and buckles in his arms, the drums flying to fuck and the second guitarist adding a dirty grumble to the mix. Every track is so satisfying, healthy in length, full of explosive de-rails and oozy orientals.Little oases drift in on fuzzy harmonics, lull around in echoed exchange and chased reflection, then are slaughtered in another massive blow-out. The distant scream of the sax, those jingling highs hooking over that stampede and those slicing signatures. A couple of tracks in, and the saxist Hiromi Oishi picks up a bass and drives it down into the earth, the sound goes monolithic, carnivorously crawling out of the strobed surrounds as she makes shapes like a Laura Ashley-clad Lemmy, the drummer pulls a floor-tom / snare combo and the rest fold round it. Layer after layer, the sound grows until it’s knifing all the air out, scribbling over your thoughts in a plumb of delicious noise.
An overblown psychedelic racket, clearing out all that toxic goo society keeps putting in there, Qujaku certainly get my seal of approval. The lead guitarist is siren-like one minute, crumpled in angry exorcism the next, his silhouetted seizures enhancing the energy the band is putting out. The other guitarist beckons people up from the front row and Big Jeff and Rich oblige, flinging themselves along as the band let out a motorik surprise. It was intense, incessant and every spare molecule filled with this insane fizzing.From Les Rallizes Dénudés to Overhang Party, there’s a long line of Japanese bands that have brightened my ears over the years and I’m glad to find another to add to the list. After assuring us of their love for Bristol, Qujaku erupt in a satisfying display of that fact with a sound you could literally chew on, and the audience raises the roof in reciprocated appreciation.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
