Cargo, London
28 February 2001
It only seems like, ooh, five years since Rough Trade were celebrating their 20th year as the Indiest of Indie shops; tonight’s gig in the cavernous railway arches which are the hyper-trendy Cargo venue showcases some of recent years’ emergent electronic and guitar-droning artists.
First up is the geekly-chic Duplo, who continues in jump-cut noise Electro style even through his towered-up PC crashes at the start of the set. How weird it seems now to see an artist using a full-sized chunk of kit on stage instead of a laptop, but the effects are the same; buzzing, funny swatches of distended beats and fractured rhythms made into an enjoyably silly-putty blast. Then the main stage area begins to fill up from the bar side when Janek Schaefer starts his drone set, and even if the crowd don’t stop chatting for his blend of Main-styled loops and cheap Alba portable record-deck dynamics, he doesn’t actually mind too much.
Penlight in mouth to work the array of minidiscs, Sherman filter and mixing desk, Schaefer’s concentration is intense, and somehow it’s only right that a sizeable chunk of the audience slip to the ground to sit cross-legged in appreciation. Given enough floorspace it would have been pleasant to stretch out, but feet, the hardness of the dancefloor and beer stains conspire against this fancifully pleasant option. Building on stopped-disc vinyl lock-grooves and samples thereof fed through a bunch of effects, the short but enveloping improvisation draws from his recent Above Buildings album into a shimmering slide of drone on drone.
So when the DJ slips into Ragga as a followup, it’s a little bit of an odd juxtaposition perhaps, but one which works itself out when Pilote prances onto the stage. His set is all very well – crowd-pleasingly groovy even – but quite mundane in the end, even if his blend of dancefloor beats and keyboard punches owe a lot to early Autechre. Occasional church organ chords merge in peculiarly hallucinogenic effect with the scent of frankincense mixed with ganja, but all those happy major key stabs are ultimately unremarkable.
Karamasov are something else entirely – an old-fashioned Space Rock band, but a pretty good one. Yes, they’re shambolic enough to the point where a sampler conks out and has to be repaired mid-set; but this comes across as endearing in the midst of the fuzzy Moog’n’roll trim through the Kosmische cosmos. There’s some nifty vibraphone playing during old favourite “The Sun Always Shines In Space”, and they kick out the good-time jams with aplomb. Final number in their truncated set is “Reaction Man”, which nods to Sonic Youth and Krock (that’s Kr**trock to all the xenophobes out there) alike with its whooshing synths and drum-machine-impersonating beats. They’re basically a lot of fun, in a retro kind of way, and the lack of polish is really a positive benefit in an age of slickness.
The same can’t really be said of Appliance, whose mish-mash of Motorik chugs and whirls doesn’t really go to far down the road of interest, but they seem to go down well anyway. Max Tundra, on the other hand, radiates fun, but of a slightly demented, weird kind. He jumps up and down and waves his hands in the air (like he don’t care – which maybe he doesn’t). Max plays guitar, melodica, samplers spewing out mashed-up exotica-electronica. It’s a fast and furious blast of good-natured humour which gets the room heaving – nauseously, in some cases. What a silly man, but quite unique really, and definitely a recommended performer to those in humourous mood – not a performance for chin stroking, in other words. His outpourings of rapid-fire cheese is of the most unpasteurized, pungent kind, balanced precariously on warped beats of a clodhopping tendency and spasmodic in nature. Max Tundra is the DJ selecta from a parallel universe, and he ends the night in suitably festive manner.
-Linus Tossio-
