2006 |
Last updated 27th June 2006
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The band are also somewhat hirsute, though not at this stage in their UK tour much more hairy than their crowd, whose beardiness is omnipresent. Somehow throughout a set which lasts well over two hours, they manage to achieve the sweatiest of bodies in a band who remain seated for the large part of the gig. One of the key elements in the Akron/Family schtick is keeping the audience guessing as to just what they might play next. Opening with a rising cacophony played on penny whistles, melodica and anything else they might have to hand before launching into fully-fledged psychedelic freakout noise pieces, the quartet sit at the juncture between good ol' boys out for a barnstorming good time, and literary city sophisticates (they have been known to have William Blake readings as part of their live set before) who know their post-modern place in the spectrum of the rock idiom - and also how to splice the boundaries with convincing results.
Ever difficult to pin down, Akron/Family's show defies their already elusively outré records to make for a live performance which is somewhat at an angle to the rest of Rock and Roll. Yes, they have two guitars, a bass and drums; they reference other times, decades, places and moods - but where their own identity lies musically is somewhere at the interstices /between/ the easily-recognised and over-familiar patterns. This is their strength, and along with a simple love of what it is that they summon live on stage both individually and collectively, Akron/Family are a particular experience which is sufficiently like unto none other as to demand witnessing.
-Richard Fontenoy-
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Boredoms;
At its best, Tucker's music would be enjoyed where there is no babble of a bar crowd, requiring as it does complete immersion in the thickness of the drones. When the loops cut out to the simple sound of the acoustic again, the contrast is refreshing, fragrant even, as the songs reveal themselves before slipping away in thele waves as the loops build around the melody again. Meditative and circuitous, Alexander Tucker sets the tone for the Boredoms in suitably frazzled style.
Yelping into his microphone and cavorting into the space formed at the junction of the three kits, Eye is a shamanic presence on stage. He moulds the music, taking on an atavistic role, leading while being an integral part of the Boredoms whole. When the percussion en masse hits its heights, the interlocking rhythms can be dissected into their Rockist, Jazz and hyperdelic components, all wrapped up into a surprisingly engaging avant-garde whole. It is salutary to notice the number of people who drift, then stride away from the stage - who knows what they were expecting, perhaps the full-tilt freakout bliss of Super Ae, the deranged mania of Soul Discharge - or maybe even the more Poppy Punkishness of Chocolate Synthesizer and Pop Tatari? Instead, the audience get something even more daring: a supercharged rocketship setting course for the ehart of the drum, a trance mission flotaing on rhythms not held down by the brutalist domination of the Techno machine, but instead bursting with human-powered energy.
Surely at the point of exhaustion, the finale is as different as can be imagined, with eye manipulating samples and feedback with the aid of two illuminated controllers, with which he invokes yet further pinnacles of freakishness. A sudden slammed-brakes coda prefigures yet further spasming reserves of percussive and glossolalial acrobatics as Boredoms let rip into a seemingly eternal groove, dreadlocks flying behind Yamasuka Eye and the evening comes crashing down to what is without doubt now a shudderingly altered version of reality. -Richard Fontenoy- |
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Lightning Bolt In a Garage not exactly rammed to gills for a sold-out gig, Lightning Bolt - positioned as ever in a corner on the floor instead of taking to the stage - open their set with a looped low fidelity rhythm which soon wavers into loudness sliced by stabs of tuning-up sounds. An emergent chug struggles foal-like into unco-ordinated yet groovesome earshot, and given the amount of time they let the process continue, it's certainly one way of building up anticipation. Such is Lightning Bolt's cult status that even a jack plug interjection is greeted with eager yelps from the crowd, so when they actually lurch into a double-tapped frenzy of skronk bass guitar and flailing drums, the tension is pitched towards a cathartic release. Live or on record, Lightning Bolt's ethos seems to bo to take riffs and rhythms and worry them beyond death into oblivion. Once the full range of FX, face mask vocals and bashed out drumkit battery kick in properly tonight, there is no doubting their ability to channel electricity into broad-spectrum noise with aplomb, in front of a crowd who clamber onto every available vantage point and press in as close as possible to the safety cordon set up around the duo. They whip up the velocity into a cacophonous melange of even more furious percussion and aggressive riffs knocked out with intent, and each wave of audiac assault reaches fever pitch by accellerating from nought to twisted in the space of a few bars. One consequence of Lightning Bolt's rule of only playing on the venue floor is to bring their sound into closer proximity, to mingle with the audience, making the experience of witnessing them live at close quarters very different from how they might otherwise be if presented on a raised stage. It does mean that the only way to dive into the full-on intensity is to press forward into a crowd jerking to their spasmatic music as if plugged into the mains, while muffling the noise emanating from the speaker stack with their bodies, the mosh pit forming into a weird cyclonic flocking motion when Lightning Bolt's rich soup of tonal aggression reaches critical mass. Their placement emphasises the sense of the band's presence and makes the audience part of the event rather than witnesses to a spectacle presented on the proscenium arch. This is important to the sense of immediacy Lightning Bolt might not otherwise possess - removing one layer of audience distance is thoroughly liberating, and the idea of going to a gig where they played in a seated venue is bizarre and almost unthinkable. The layered overtones they generate make the whole project make a sense pretty much deserving of the unique tag - it's not just about setting everything to 11 and letting rip; as their records demonstrate, Lightning Bolt have successfully isolated the snarling, roiling avant-grind riff and are intently spreading the meme. To assume that making a racket like this successfully is as simple as turning the gain to maximum and bashing away on the kit until Metal Machine Musicis acheived by osmosis is perhaps to miss the point about Lightning Bolt and noise music in general. Likewise, the assumption that it is all some kind of elaborate arty joke bears little relation to the actuality of their performance, becoming simply irrelevant in the face of the hard graft on hand tonight. The construction of Lightning Bolt's dense, autistic noisefest occasionally plunges into the same richly textural miasma of overloaded amplification and percussion as Konono No.1 in full flight. They are artificers of anti-slickness, as the build up and release of perennial favourite "Dracula Mountain" demonstrates with a simple smacked-out riff which drives the active part of the audience - and some of the otherwise chin-stroking bystanders - into ecstacies of pogoing and even circular crowd-surfing around the axis of their amps, before a final lurch which finds the drumkit seemingly drifting further into the midst of the crowd itself before the latter dissolves into yells for more. Noise shouldn't just be for the head - it should shiver the body cavities as much as the architecture, and tonight they do so in ultimately inimitable style. -Richard Fontenoy- |
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Wychwood Festival 2006 Lying in the green heart of the Cotswold valleys is the small town of Cheltenham, where the remains of the emerald giant Wychwood Forest stands. This had been a site for forest gatherings and folk ceremonies until the 1850s when the land was sold to the Navy, so there is special significance now to dance over those rotten dealings in the name of better things. There is a lot of conscience here, with a big presence by Greenpeace, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth and more, and its also a really good way to discover new performers who are and have been playing in the Folk circuit for a long time already. There is a Songlines tent doing artist signings and selling records of the bands playing, and generally a world of wonder and wierder musical acts that you wouldn't see in some smokey venue in London, and if you did it wouldn't seem right - these are acts of the hills and the clouds. On that note, here is the walking diary of the 2nd and 3rd days. Saturday: It's always interesting to have no idea whatsoever about the place your about to explore. When we arrived on Saturday the heat was already working its blazing voodoo on the crowds. There is a peaceful vibe over the place, a bit too peaceful for my taste, but hey, it's early. Families wandered about, New Age parents and young business men types wearing hippie blankets over their t-shirts advertising law firms and such. Not many freaks about. I headed over to the main stage and just missed seeing the spasmic rythms of Polar Bear, the Jazz freakout outfit nominated for the Mercury Prize last year. Damn. The space in front of the main stage is quiet, people are having picnics on the grass with their kids. It has the feeling iof an abandoned railway station at the end of the line, as dazed by the first wave of summer's heat, people wander about on wobbly winter legs. The next band on was Guillemot who added to the eerie stillness with their singer sitting on a huge cane rocking chair, and playing their blend of power Pop occasionally possesed by the ghosts of noise with chainsaws for teeth and Theremin hearts, further confusing the young businessmen with hippie blankets drinking pimms. Suddenly, howling from the south of the arena came a full fanfare sound of a Balkan orchestra, and looking over i saw a giant red big top circus tent, like a pirate ship that seemed to float in my direction commandeered by the sound of The Destroyers. Hypnotised, I followed the music into one of the best live acts i've ever seen. A sixteen-strong stationary parade led by the fiery limbs of a bellydancer. It reminded me of Goran Bregovich or Emir Kusturica and the No-smoking Orchestra, but something like this really has to be seen live to be believed and their spirit was true to the ancient gatherings that used to occur in these parts. They banished the sedate atmosphere and soon had the whole tent writhing and moving, even the moths and the insects gathered round to see, through the steam rising the music of the gypsies. Do yourself a favour and check them out, live or at their website. I skipped out of the tent with violins playing my limbs and over to another tent where lay in wait another awesome surprise. The Ralfe Band are another new favourite. A four-piece moonshine wedding of broken leg pirate waltz and oh so sweet acid-dirge... they are the soundtrack to a surreal country that is all their own: see the video to their song "Woman of Japan" to get the idea. As the night rode in on too many beers and too much sun, I dragged the cauldron of my body into the film tent to watch the Glastonbury film and fell dumb and happy into dreams with soundtracks by The Ralfe Band. Sunday: This was the day of Folk worlds meeting. First was Sild, a two piece with beautiful singing and violing playing women from Estonia and a fantastic guitar playing bloke from Wales. They use traditional and sometimes extinct languages and instruments from the Baltic, like the Estonian bowed harp, combined with traditional Welsh guitar playing. Were symbolic of the whole festival for me, bizarre and interesting crossovers between traditional Folk and exotic reaches into stranger realms, with the odd Pop band thrown in to keep the families happy. Next was another 16-piece band called Salsa Celtica joined by Folk queen Eliza Carthy, who last year played on the same stage with Finnish band Varttina. Salsa Celtica do what it says in the name, to great effect and with sooo much spirit that the sun was right up there with them, dancing rum footsteps between the trumpet players. And there in the middle of the day even the the half moon came out to watch, the veil of space across her face. Salsa Celtica dance and move more than anyone in the audience, and it's impossible not to get carried away on their sweet wagon. The Paetbog Faeries are up now, another band with over ten people, who really do look like rough pixies taken human form and imbued with bog savvy trumpets. Highland folk at its best, calling the spirits home. And that was it. I climbed the mountain in the dark and watched the sun come up with a calm fire in my eye and belly, looking out over the glory of the cotswolds with a head full of some of the wierdest and most original music I have heard in a while. Wychwood is a peaceful and inspiring journey and if thats what you feel like then definently go down to see. -Lucas Owl- |
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