The Third Millennium Festival
Union Chapel, London
14th October 2000
Generally I would say that if you want to see a gig in London, there are not many more beautiful places than Union Chapel. I would also add to try for summer. This cavernous gothic spired chapel all of stone and wood and beautiful doorways into maze-like passages provides an atmosphere of spooky tranquility and usually gorgeous acoustic quality. Unfortunately, the cold could not be kept out this night, even with the radiation of a dozen or more electric heaters, and according to some of the artists, the sound system was more than a little off. Putting an audience on hard pews in a cold stone room and expecting them to stay awake for hours on end of quiet dreamy music proved to be too much, so what should have been a promising bunch of performances did eventually become tedious and uncomfortable and a lot of the crowd had dispersed for warmer sites long before the end.
Waveworld came on first amidst mild theatrics, monk’s cowls and funny make-up which was easily forgotten as soon as their video work went center stage and the music became the accompaniment. It was like a video travelogue between a Richard Bach biography and a Jeff Noon novel. Pollen severely came to mind and my sinuses ached in the cold with the visuals of loose clusters. Writhing organic sexual forms, blue and green and then variances all askew in a swampland of space music. Funny, I never think of spacey electronics as this organic, but the video made it so. Nest, pollinate, bed of birth… a fecund background for a DX7 simulator simulating the pollination, conception, coronation. It’s good to be so enchanted with film work, especially animation, and the music did not distract from the random thoughts of creation it inspired. Rainsticks, spermatozoa, sea creatures as stage left blows us beautiful horn songs. Digital eels, underwater aircraft, wave form manta rays with a beat… jellyfish ovum-life began in the oceans? Of course, the obvious creation story set to a lonely engulfing sound generation. Every man and woman is a cloud? Or a puppet of the “others”. Truly masterful computer renderings, and over too soon for as soon as it stopped, I remembered how chilled I was.
Next up was a bizarre woman called Alquimia. With a bank of synths and a man coercing strange tribal percussion tools, she makes herself sound like a chorus of angels, or a choir of herself; must be the echoplex. She is spindly and weird. Her music is rather too much Hippie nostalgia, though her voices are sweet and chiming. What I hear in her lyrics, what little can be deciphered, cries out too much like rape and usury. Victimised femme. Operatic indeed, but not like Diamanda, less ethnic than Lisa Gerrard. On a few songs she is either helped or hindered, (one hesitates to judge), by Michael Nyman, doing some rather blatantly Charlie Brown sounding piano. I think she wants us to think of the suffering of Mary, the scourge of Artemis, but it sounds more like a Mellotron backing for old Star Trek shows. The percussion man was quite good though.
I will have to admit to seeing only a few bits here and there of the evening’s next offering. White Noise featuring David Vorhaus and special guest Alex Paterson from The Orb was looked forward to by many, but looked at by only a few in the end. Mr.V was well talked-up before the show, about his oddities of old, so there were a lot of disappointed would-be fans when his show seemed to turn into an aural jack-off of himself. It was a strange instrument he has devised, which was quickly dubbed “the phallotron” by a friend of mine, but the sound was not white noise-like, it was not even memorable. At one point, there was an obvious contention between Vorhaus and Paterson who was going his own Orbish way from the elevated pulpit. Paterson seemed to be as annoyed as the audience and ignored Vorhaus’ gestures that he turn himself down. Other than that, what I saw was trite and dull, and what was talked about after was worse.
What seemed like a few hours later, it was finally time for the headliners, Michael Rother and Dieter Moebius. After their show in February this year – which was stupendous – I think all who had been there were hoping for some redemption to the lost evening. It was a shortish set for the pair, who struggled against an uncooperative sound system and probably had as cold of fingers as I did. Still and all they did put the only light on the evening when Mr. Rother got hold of his guitar, and they found their groove in that post-“NEU!-tastic” way they have. The audience visibly woke up and smiled. I think we all could have done with a night of just this, and perhaps a hot toddy or two.
