Last updated 20^th November 2007
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Live

Comets On Fire; Part Chimp The Scala, London 29th May 2007 Part Chimp not only open with a big, metallic stoner rumble, they compound matters by using almost the exact riff from "Electric Funeral" to confirm that they are coming from a location somewhere between Black Sabbath and The Melvins. So then its heads down for an excercise in riffology, volume and mass squared by amplification, with the product being ringing ears and nodding heads. Under a gathering fug of smoke, spotlights and noise, it's exactly like being blinded, deafened and punched in the thorax by bass and feedback - a singular experience, and one not without its enjoyable aspects, as Part Chimp ramp up the sludge factor and roll out the drums, mashing and slow-moshing with a dedication which is at once admirable and single-minded. Applause seems almost superfluous; a bit like congratulating a mountain for being impermeable and made of granite. Comets On Fire sprinkle the introduction to their set with fractured springs of almost hushed guitars, soon boiling off into a throbbing spurt of pre-orgasmic skullblasting riffs and yelled utterances. The answer to the question "do they rock?" is not so much "yes" as "how much?" Substantially, might be a good start, or enough to wail and flail their way into the feedback book of records. The first half of the set doesn't give much place to lyrics or melody, preferring instead to lumber from meandering squalls of analogue synth to slews of distended guitars. Why sing comprehensibly when some asynchronous headbanging explains the Comets On Fire experience so much better in this context? It's a lot like having a head massage done with a food processor plugged into an amp - the layered churning exacting a heavy toll, with low end freqencies making the walls and floor heave in rhythmic sympathy. The band are soon spewing out acid rock laced with methamphetamine, surging in waves onstage like some kind of speedball-powered grungy octopus, a hopped-up, maniacal Seventies-style trip of Altamont proportions gripping them as they heave their way to the stars. There's some danger of losing dinner along the way, with fret-busting solos pulled writhing from the morass - just because they can - dripping with reverb and fuzzwah in ways that Messers. Fender and Gibson probably didn't quite expect for their guitars to sound, while the synth has its controls twisted in implausible directions until shards of electronic ectoplasm drip out. In the second part of the show, Comets On Fire bring about a gentler re-entry into earthbound pastures, an electric piano and cymbals shimmering the drop down into the relatively mellow Avatar material. With the emphasis on country-rock psychedelia, they're still more than capable of ripping jagged holes in the cosmos, just in a more relaxed, laid back style, with the twin guitars soaring for the higher planes on a crest of good vibrations. But they can't resist a return to the spasmolytic rocket-fuelled energy which brought the Comets into frenetic life tonight, frazzling the ears of the audience with malice aforethought for a finale which continues even after the house lights go up. If this were one of their festival appearances where the end of the evening didn't involve buses home and venue curfews, the Comets could doubless keep this sort of distortion storm up well into the night. Instead, they ride their wave as far as will go until it crashes into oblivion. On the rocks, naturally. -Richard Fontenoy-

Tony Conrad; Paavoharju; Richard Youngs; Islaja St. Giles in the Field, London 1st June 2007 I hit the church shortly after opening time, still muddleheaded from work, the sun only just beginning to slip it’s way behind central London’s monstrous office monoliths, and St. Giles' church is already packed, a situation not helped by the decision to close off the balconies. I succeed in grabbing a pew toward the back though, and bear happy witness to Islaja’s helplessly ineffable drone-pop as it soundtracks my fellow cultured punters politely pushing past each other, negotiating seating arrangements as if boarding a longhaul flight. All I can see in the direction the music’s coming from is the bobbing torso of a stern bass player who seems to be generating much of the gorgeous tonal rumbling, of which there is a whole lot goin’ on, whilst vocal stylings akin to Bjork auditioning “CONTENTMENT” for a demanding movie director and some so-so keyboard meandering emanate from somewhere to his left. Abandoning my attempt at viewing the proceedings, I concentrate instead upon the sunbeams flickering through stained glass and shadowed tree branches. About half an hour passes. I seem to recall that they cram a lot of overtly poppy and rocky elements into their psychey droniness, but nothing too jarring. Well… that was quite nice I suppose. Glasgow’s Richard Youngs has quietly amassed an astonishingly varied body of work over the past decade or two, encompassing improv, noise and psychedelia, contemporary composition, folk-based singer-songwriter material and full-on technical prog-rock with his group Ilk, and is name-checked by many as one of the British avant garde’s….. yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, you know this, or else don’t care. Richard stands before the altar this evening, alone save a microphone and music stand, and it seems he intends to present us with a solo vocal set. The couple of shots of complimentary aniseed vodka I picked up at the door are starting to feel like pretty inadequate preparation as he opens his lungs and lets rip. But Mr. Youngs is a man who approaches his music with a rare spirit of humility, good humour and openness of both heart and mind, and doubts about the novelty of his chosen format are soon dispelled. “That was an old one”, he says after wordlessly hollering at us for five straight minutes, understandably prompting some chuckles, and from thereon in his set is a revelation. Appropriate to the location, he launches into a post-Blake/Ginsberg rhythmic declaration of everyday holiness, pounding his music-stand with some kinda metal beater(?), establishing a steel mama-heartbeat with caveman intensity. For his next piece, Youngs tries out a bit of audience participation in place of a broken ebow, instructing the congregation to hum a drone on a particular note. But the accompaniment is soon forgotten as his voice alone fills out the church, soaring high and lonesome on an awe-inspiring and endless ode to joy, a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting melodies, evoking fragments of distant FM pop as much as it does the Scottish balladic tradition of Shirley Collins et al and the vocal mantras of Indian raga, whilst his words speak of the bricks of tenement housing, of sunlight through the windscreen of a transit van, as much as they do the seashores and hills of yore. A brave and beautiful, genuinely challenging performance, and undoubtedly the best thing I took from this evening. And if I thought I needed more vodka earlier on, by god, wait until Paavoharju take the stage in this house of the lord. Simultaneously convoluted and cack-handed, Paavoharju seem to resemble the kind of stoned music student jam band that helped give The Grateful Dead and their fans a bad name for so many years. Buried somewhere is maybe a hint of the kind of shimmering, psychedelic cacophony Sunburned Hand Of The Man routinely dish up, but I think that’s maybe just because their playing is really slack-assed rather than through any deliberate intention, and an excess of utterly unnecessary baroque electric piano wig-outs seal the deal for this lot I’m afraid, casting an unsavoury whiff of failed Eurovision Song Contest contenders over proceedings. For the first few songs they have a female singer, whose purrs and shrieks are best things on offer at this particular sonic stall, but then she soon makes way for a middle-aged dude in a baseball cap and gigantic shades who strums a classical guitar and throws new age dance moves to the band’s terminally unfunky grooves, looking for all the world like the Finnish Free-Folk Roy Orbison. What the HELL is going on here…? Who booked these guys? Maybe there are cultural differences at play or something, maybe they’re suffering from a bad sound-mix, I dunno, but whatever point it is Paavoharju are trying to make, it’s not coming across too well tonight. Tony Conrad’s set begins with some impressive low budget dramatics; a bedsheet stretched across the church’s knave, electric fans and bright lights. A lone silhouette of our man, be-hatted, looms over us. He raises his violin, brutally scrapes out an open-stringed roar like a charging dinosaur, and the drone is awakened. Conrad’s current music remains true to the intentions of that which he helped create as part of LaMonte Young’s Dream Syndicate / Theatre of Eternal Music back in the ‘60s, channeling a pure, unified sound which shifts and expands at a geological pace, exhibiting a crushing, pre/post-human density. In a similar spirit to H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, this sound seems utterly ambivalent toward, or uncomprehending of, a human audience, drawing itself down from a whole other plain of being entirely. It’s a deathless cliché when approaching this kind of music to say that the sound has no beginning nor end, and that the musician seems to simply tap into its frequency for a while and channel it for us, but that Is very definitely the feeling created by a performer such as Conrad. So, the spirit of "Eternal Music" is alive and well on one level, but any stargazers in the audience here in search of a good evening's celestial tripping have another thing coming, for something at the heart of Tony's drone has gone very wrong somewhere along the line. Utterly lacking in the kind of bodhisattva bliss embraced by contemporaries such as Young and Terry Riley as an aesthetic backdrop to their music, Conrad seems to have been drawn instead to the opposite extreme, mapping out a space that is very, very dark indeed. A place more likely to draw admiration from, and comparisons with, the contemporary noise and power-electronics scenes than with anything a damn, life-loving hippy like me might be liable to enjoy in the comfort of my own home. With a lot of the violin tone quickly submerged within a powerhouse of brutal, unseen noise machines, Conrad presents us tonight with an hour or so of unremitting, apocalyptic dread. Building from a starting point eerily reminiscent of the crumbling beauty channeled by Birchville Cat Motel, Tony wastes no time In taking things to the next level, whether we want to follow or not, the sheets of sound straight from his instrument bringing forth the majesty of towering infernos, collapsing skyscrapers, charred cityscapes with all the bombast of a Hollywood disaster epic, whilst a cacophony of electronic demons shriek and babble beneath. Through the majority of Conrad's set there's a sound going on exactly like a skipping CD - whir, whir, whir, whir - that CAN'T be deliberate, can it? But if it isn't, surely he would have turned it off or fixed it by now? But on it goes, and after a few minutes I see the point - it provides a solid pulse to the sound, a fixed, hypnotic spine amid the deluge of looped overtones that nonetheless refuses to give in to the compromise of an organic/animalistic 'beat'. I'm getting quite into it. Then the sky splits in two and all is lost beneath a storm of Merzbow-esque insectoid global death agony… which goes on, and on, and on. Astonishingly powerful, astonishingly pure in it's inhuman tonal vastness, but, I mean… shit man… the clock is ticking down to a time when we're not going to need some geezer with a violin to make us feel like everything in the world is dying, assuming some of us don't feel that way already. And it's FRIDAY NIGHT, y'know? What am I doing here? What are YOU doing here? Put your head between your knees and wait until it's over. Queuing for the toilet after the show, I watch Tony Conrad, still behind his curtain, packing up his gear. A grinning roadie hands him a couple of CD-Rs. "That's the last time I trust these damn things!" says Mr. Conrad good-naturedly. Draw your own conclusions. -Ben Haggar-

Michael Gira The Water Rats, London 27th October 2007 Even though it's about as far from the stuff he plays these days as a non-executive directorship is from a proper job, the spectre of Swans' Cop weighs heavily on proceedings tonight- particularly its mantric repetition of the phrase "THE HEAT… HURTS! THE HEAT… HURTS!" Mr Gira, avuncular and smiling, has decreed that the lights be turned on full. On the audience. And that the air-conditioning be turned off. It's fucking boiling. I dunno… if most performers did that, everyone'd fuck off. But we stay, because it's Gira, and because in a strange way, the discomfort adds to the experience. And what an experience. Beginning with "God Damn The Sun" (from Swans' criminally-underrated first major step away from noise The Burning World), Gira treats us to an hour or so of glorious miserablisim straddling the line between auteurism and outsider art with the hand of a master. He has the gift, like Nick Cave and Will Oldham, of writing songs which in the hands of anyone else would collapse under their own relentless gloominess into the depths of self-parody, yet here partake of both his well-publicised relentlessness and his less-often-appreciated gift for inspirational beauty. Even stripped down to the barest essentials of a voice (though it's quite a voice, it has to be said) and an acoustic guitar, these songs still work. Basically, to cut a long story short (or “tl;dr”, as I believe the young people say these days) he's a bloody good songwriter, in the old-fashioned, even “classic” sense. Whether screaming his way through "My Brother's Man" (from the latest Angels of Light album We Are Him) or gently Lou Reed-ing his way through the almost hymnlike "Destroyer", Gira is every bit as compelling a spectacle solo, and every bit as captivating a performer, as when he's backed up by a sonic wall of death. Introducing a bare-bones reworking of "The Rose Of Los Angeles" by telling us rather movingly about his late mother, his wicked sense of humour shines through with a display of impeccable timing suggesting that stand-up tragedian might be an alternate career path should the songs ever stop coming. See also Gira's self-deprecating comments near the set's end about it having been fifteen years before Swans were ever asked for an encore. He finishes with "Blind", still every bit as beautiful and tragic as ever (“But I was younger then/and young men never die”), and still one of the best songs he, or indeed pretty much anyone else, has written in the last couple of decades. To think he's gone soft in his old age just because he's not hidden under swathes of feedback is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of music. Gira's still as powerful a force as ever he was. -Deuteronemu 90210 with a bottle in his hand-

Mick Harvey Bush Hall, London 27th May 2007 It's raining. Not just raining, but absolutely pissing it down. The streets are running with water, and my eyes are so full of rain it takes me fully half an hour longer to find the venue than it should otherwise have done, meaning that by the time I get in, Mr Harvey's set is already underway. And by crikey, he looks like he's having a great time. Yes, ladies and gents, that's the most shocking thing - Mick Harvey, who seems to have spent the last nigh-on thirty years of his career looking stern while he tries to keep some discipline among his bandmates in the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds, actually seems to be enjoying himself. Swigging contentedly from his beer, chatting away in between songs, he comes across as the all-round genial chap, even as he croons and growls his way through a set which unsurprisingly enough leans rather heavily on his ace new album Two Of Diamonds. Accompanied by sometime-Bad Seed Thomas Wydler on drums, Rosie Westbrook on cello and James Johnston of Gallon Drunk and the Bad Seeds on organ and guitar, Mr Harvey is every inch the rock'n'roll troubadour, by turns suave, sad and soulful. From the dark gospel of "A Walk On The Wild Side" to "Slow-Motion-Movie-Star"'s wall of sound, effortlessly switching from a whisper to a strident baritone as the situation demands, there's never a doubt that he means every word. As with the album, all the non-self-penned numbers were clearly not chosen lightly. For the encore we're treated to three - yes, THREE! - Serge Gainsbourg numbers, including an incredibly cool "Intoxicated Man" and an absolutely stunning "Bonnie and Clyde", every bit as epic as either Serge's original or, indeed, Peckinpah's movie. And, of course, with a nod to the weather at the end, he returns for one last number- a bittersweet rendition on Fred Neil's "A Little Bit Of Rai"n, before the adoring crowd have to head out into something substantially more than that once more. -Deuteronemu 90210, the Out Of Time Badger-

A Hawk And A Hacksaw and The Hun Hangár Ensemble Bush Hall, London 11th May 2007 Bush Hall is a strangely grand venue for A Hawk And A Hacksaw to appear, all faded burlesque glamour in the plaster cherubim and beneath the voluptuous chandeliers. Given Jeremy Barnes' reinvention and re-imagining of a multitude of folk styles, the image conjured by his music is perhaps more one of rustic dances and Eastern European taverns, but since ultimately his music is about cross-cultural meetings and melding, it is perhaps appropriate after all. What might seem more at home at a wedding party than in a concert hall is part of the movement which proclaims folk musics to be the new rock and roll (again). With Balázs Unger tapping out a gentle rhythm on the hypnotic strings of his cymbalom and Heather Trost scraping out a violin introduction, Barnes and the rest of the Hun Hangár Ensemble enter to the sound of a single drum beat, filing masked and marvellous through the audience with rattles waving and trumpets blowing in a carnivalesque invocation which sets the show off to a magical start. And what a show it is that follows: the Hun Hangar Ensemble reveal themselves as a superb group of musicians, sweeping high and low across the dance numbers and more melancholic moments alike. Unger in particular reaps a fervent round of applause for his cymbalom solo, while there are flashes of humour in the performance with sheep masks being waved behind band members' heads and mugging furiously on the part of Béla Ágoston when he brandishes a behorned set of bagpipes to wild applause. It's Barnes who is the natural focus of the two sets they perform, pumping away at his accordion, deft fingers flickering across the keys, simultaneousy stamping out rhythms on drums and cymbals played with foot pedals. There's no bell hat tonight, but with the aid of Trost and the ensemble he keeps the capacity crowd dancing and swaying rapturously through the night. From Transylvanian dances to a curious place where (New) Mexican brass meets Ashkenazi strings and Magyar melodies, the sound of A Hawk And A Hacksaw builds its own particular brand of authenticity – just like the music it is derived from, this is a pan-cultural blend which brings nuances of what at first might seem widely divergent musical styles into a proximity which reveals that there are more affinities than difference between them. Above all, tonight's show is a huge amount of fun, inspiring dancing and delight as the show warms up, with a second round of masked marching through the audience, surges of frenetic soloing from the guests until the final stretch where everyone improvises in a jazz style jam. It is timeless, invigorating and unmissable. -Linus Tossio-

Jesu The Scala, London 20th November 2007 This has been a long time coming. Last time I tried to see Jesu (supporting Jarboe, in this very venue) it got scaled down to a Justin Broadrick solo perfomance as Final, which consisted of him hunched over his laptop making incredible noises. Now, while this may have sounded awesome, on every other level there was little to distinguish between the experience and watching a young Paul Weller playing World of Warcraft. And when I say young, I mean very young indeed. Considering Mr Broadrick's pushing 40, and the album which really made his name as King Of Distorted Guitars, Godflesh's Streetcleaner, is nearly half that old itself, he really does seem to have the fresh-faced, shy yet intense demeanour of a high school shooter. Drummer Ted Parsons, on the other hand, is his polar opposite, looking more like what I'd imagine Anton LaVey would have had he been a professional wrestler, and he does his Swans/Prong heritage proud by not so much playing the drums as slowly beating the shit out of them. Diarmuid Dalton's bass grinds through the whole thing, like Big Black reincarnated as a mammoth or something equally huge. Now, I know it's lazy journalism to describe a band as sounding like being on (insert drug of choice here), so I'll compound that laziness by stating simply that Jesu sound like being on drugs. All the drugs. All at once. Exactly like that. Which is kind of handy, as I'm too cheap to have bought any before the gig. Turned out nice again! When they lay into "Old Year" two songs in, what had up until now just been damn good-sounding psychedelic noise actually slips into something a lot more transcendent. When people get really fucked up and God talks to them, I kind of imagine Him sounding something like this. With a bottom end that resembles Swans and a top end recalling My Bloody Valentine, this is the best musical example of full spectrum dominance we're gonna get until someone convinces Sunn0))) to record with Skullflower. Layers on layers of feedback, and discordant harmonies to die for. At times it sound like there are fifty guitarists on stage. Not bad for a three-piece. Simultaneously relentless and uplifting, Jesu have managed to make the nastiest of sounds beautiful, nowhere better than on set closer "Friends Are Evil". Managing to come over somehow even more brutal than the album version, and simultaneously more gorgeous than ever, it's a thing of beauty and terror, ending only when the rest of the band leave the stage and Broadrick is left alone, wrestling every bit of feedback he can out of his poor amps. In short, THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME. Like being punched repeatedly in the face by an angel. Yeah, that good, and that indefinable. -Deuteronemu 90210, while playing Battletoads-

Nurse With Wound; Christoph Heeman Ether 07 Queen Elizabeth Hall London 3rd March 2007 Christoph Heeman opens proceedings as special guest at the debut London performance of Nurse With Wound as part of the Ether 07 festival. His solo presence onstage, lit by sweeping blue light projections, is not the most engaging of perfromances visually, but the drones and surges of electronic tones he coaxes from a small assortment of devices soon swell up to fill the auditorium. While there is a reasonable amount of truth to the assertion made by some members of the audience afterwards that the minimalist sounds Heeman was generating were no longer the most original, he is someone who was - and arguably remains - an innovator in deep listening sounds of this sort, and kudos is due to Heeman for his role in making amelodic music swim beyond the mere lounge sounds of Ambient and into the rich depths of venue-filling presence. Nurse With Wound should be a different kettle of surrealist fish - and there is a whale and a  toy sailor to be seen perched among the lengthy table-load of gear they stretch a goodly part of the full width of the broad stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Having hosted their peers Current 93 and Coil, it's only right and proper that the South Bank Centre should bring NWW to a live audience in the capital at last. As with the first Coil show here in 2000, there is an atmosphere of expectation - perhaps tinged with trepidation - on the part of many in the audience who had missed the Nurse With Wound shows in Preston (albeit not under that name) and at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in recent years that this most eccentric and eclectic of the (former) World Serpent roster could create an effective live performance. To some extent, the first section of the show turns out to be less experimental than might be expected, taking up the drones left almost palpably hanging by Heeman and expanding on them without pushing the envelope much further. Steven Stapleton wanders from prepared bowed guitar to sundry bits of musical kit while Andrew Liles and Matt Waldron do similar duty at the other end of the table. Percussionist  Marcus Ripley clatters and scrapes an alarmingly tall array of drums and gongs, while Colin Potter draws everything into something approaching coherence at his multifariously-appointed mixing desk in the centre, darting sharp glances at the musicians at any hint of feedback like a bespectacle lecturer keeping hawk-like alertness for anything which disturbs the totality of the unveiling sound. Thankfully, given Nurse With Wound's avant-garde credentials as well as their experimental reputation, the odd stab of feedback doesn't actually go amiss and fits into the semi-improvised structure quite well on occasion. The continuing show picks up an element of dramtic fervour when David Tibet sneaks himself onto a darkening stage as the rolling projection of layered digital surrealism above the ensemble keeps the focal point of the show moving along to accompany the steadily more and more weird music NWW generate onstage. With his voice passed through some seriously warped effects, Tibet's first number brings a sense of (admittedly alienated) human contact and presence to what is shaping into an otherwise strong but not yet overwhelming performance. One of the unfortunate side effects of putting music as potentially outré as this on the stage of the all-seated, hushed environs of  the QEH is a certain amount of sterilisation which occurs to any sense of drama, pasteurising the more bacterial sounds and sensations cultured in the NWW petrie dish and innoculating to some degree what could have been an unnerving, or at least highly surreal, event. However, Matt Waldron does his best to provide a sometimes uncanny, frequently tricksterish element, and he whacks himself on the head with maracas, manipulates a variety of light-emitting toys or miked-up ball bearings and even dons a gas mask with tone-producing tube in proper Musique Concrèt fashion. The serious tone of the night is undermined delightfully though when Matt Waldron sings a Blues number in  a rich baritone before segueing into a medly which includes the opening verse of Sheena Easton's "9 To 5", and it's around then that the show really starts to pick up, if not always with complete success. Tibet makes a barefoot return, stalking in possessed Bushi style to the stage to sing - some might even say rap - the words for a funked-up version of "Two Shaves And A Shine", Waldron plugging away on bass guitar as the group kick into a rhythmic groove which still feels somewhat constrained by the environment. The last section of the show is a forty minute-plus version of the creakily nautical "Salt Marie Celeste", built on a repeated sample of the sound of a wooden ship straining its beams. NWW eventually construct the long-awaited climactic layers of hypnotic, overarching loops and unnerving sounds around the creaks in a passage which takes full advantage of the hall's superb sound system, percussive beats slapping around the air above the audience in waves of gripping intensity as patterns of green and blue light ripple on the walls and ceiling in suitably aquatic fashion. Nurse With Wound receive a standing ovation, a tribute which is well-deserved given their longevity and persistence of skewed vision. While tonight's performance was maybe not as weird throughout as might have been hoped, it ws still a superb London debut and one which deserves refinement, and repeating. The audience flock out in time to catch a lunar eclipse reflecting off the waters of the Thames, perhaps finding themselves angled a little more laterally by the singular sounds of Steven Stapleton and his big avant band to the heart of a city bathed under the light of a blood red moon.   -Richard Fontenoy-

Owlls Corsica Studios, London 2nd May 2007 Looking like refugees from several different bands who all met up in a jail cell after a drunken night gone horribly wrong, it's north London's finest pirate bar band Owlls, and they really should be playing in Tortuga in the 17th Century rather than Elephant & Castle. But no matter; by the time they're a couple of songs in you feel like they may as well be. Bring me the horizon, and why's all the rum gone?  Every inch the rock'n'roll preacher of doom, frontman Luc growls, howls and yowls his way through a set of rock-solid whiskey-sodden numbers, taking in sea shanties, gypsy dances, gothic terror and all points in between. One moment a mass of flailing limbs,the next, constrained by the stage, throwing himself to the floor, where he kneels and screams at the sky, as if calling on God for salvation, damnation or possibly another double. And you bet God can hear him. This is big music. The fact that Owlls have mastered that trick, like the Birthday Party and Gallon Drunk before them, of being absolutely watertight yet sounding like at any moment things could descend into total chaos, shouldn't distract you from just how fucking BIG this music is. Listening to the violin-led near-instrumental "Little Smoke" you could close your eyes and wonder just how those pirates managed to fit an entire orchestra into some dodgy bar in Tortuga. Or alternatively you could wonder just how someone managed to provoke Tindersticks into a chain fight. And while a lot of bands claim their music is soundtracks for non-existent films, listening to Owlls makes me want to make films just so they can do the music. The cowboy-friendly guitar on "DogHead" serves only to convince me further that if anyone ever manages to film the seemingly-unfilmable Blood Meridian, it would be a crime against humanity were they not to have this playing in the background. But that's not to say it's background music, not at all. This is in your face, spitting tobacco in your eyes and killing your dudes. That crazed preacher man in his desert chapel, howling in the face of the storm about a coming judgment? This is what it sounds like inside his head. Only, y'know, a lot more fun. And the crowd are lapping it up, reactions raging from closed eyed dreaming to rabbit-in-the-headlights WHAT THE FUCK?, but in a good way. If they didn't come across as being such nice people in between songs, Owlls would be one hell of a scary band. None more so than on crowd favourite "Raindrops", an epic stomp that sounds like the results of a pretty messy lock-in during which Tom Waits manages to convince a really fucked William Burroughs to get up and dance on the table, and several people leave in bodybags. You know. A Saturday night thing. Ending in a near-polka of which Gogol Bordello would surely approve, and containing the wonderful couplet “He said there's no light at the end of the tunnel / I said fucking go down and light it yourself”, being inspirational, funny, and FUCK YEAH all at the same time, Raindrops is an instant classic, and it's surrounded by similar rough musical diamonds. Right now you can go and see Owlls for a couple of quid. Do so, because if there's any justice in the world, very soon they'll be playing somewhere you have to have the resources of the Spanish navy to buy a drink. Seriously, they are MADE OF AWESOME. It's like drinking grog with gypsy pirates in that town that gets painted red in High Plains Drifter. It's that good. -Deuteronemu 90210 and a bottle of rum-

Sunn 0))); Chrome Hoof Meltdown 2007 Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 18th June 2007 The smoke and glitter which characterises Chrome Hoof's performance at Meltdown 2007 is something of a wonder to behold. Unleashing a brain-boggling riot of progtastic disco - complete with intoned disclaimer for any responsibilty for the effect of the show on the audience at the start, this thirteen-piece bunch of silver-clad space invaders proceed to set out to do their level best to give the term weirdo a good name. It's a good thing that Chrome Hoof have a stage big enough to fit them all on with room to spare, and it later becomes apparent that the troupe will make the most of the freedom a nice bit of artistic real estate offers. There is a string section, a horn section, two drummers and a pair of spangled dancers whose prop horns double up as beam weapons to make the effects unit on the Buck Rogers Saturday morning picture show proud. Decked out in more glittering robes than a gathering of the Venusian chamber of commerce circa Nineteen Twenty, Chrome Hoof set out on tightly-orchestrated voyage which soon blossoms into a full-blown galactic funk metal extravaganza worthy of the deranged excesses of Sun Ra's live show. This is the kind of psychedelic kitsch which succeeds so well because the band take the show just about as seriously as it needs to be, playing it as straight as possible when the guitarists have a tendency to wear shining steel helmets and brandish flourescent, barbed axes. Musically Chrome Hoof exist at the hazy juntion where disco merges with space rock, where freeform jazz funk splashes down on the borders of the Canturbury Scene's legacy, passing through a time warp to one of the more outré worlds imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the lysergical brainwaves still rippling down from Hawkwind's performances of the Space Ritual tour, glowing all the while with some kind of strange electronic radiation (or that's what the sensors indicate). There's a touch of Gilli Smith vs Eartha Kitt about singer Lola Olafisoye, who holds charismatic court like a brash queen of the spaceways while the band shift gear from Magma-magnitude grandiosity to delicate chamber interludes, offset into the world of strange by stage-sweeping figures and the occasional drum duet, never mind solos. But the piece de resistance comes in the shape of the gigantic glowing green-eyed silver goat monster which lurches onstage in gouts of smoke and mind-battering strobes, as laughable as and way more impressive than anything Iron Maiden could ever begin to dream up. Despite breaking the spell of weirdness by announcing their last song - as if they were a mere band of entertainers playing a show! - the finale surges once more into the by now relative normailty of the skiffy disco blast, which by rights would have the audience making some seriously groovy moves if only it were not a seated venue. Pray that when the aliens overlords come down to earth in a fleet of horribly-beweaponned flying saucers that they are half as funked-up with intent as Chrome Hoof. Keep watching the skies. If Chrome Hoof are jaw dropping for their outrageous take on the unearthly delights of interplanetary Romance, Sunn 0))) are prepared to push the envelope of suspended disbelief even further, swathing the their enourmously impressive stack of (suitably monolithic) backlit amps and the rest of the stage in more smoke than even Faust tend to let loose on an unsuspecting venue. Despite the odd nervous titter and yelp of encouragement from the crowd, a bated hush descends in the gloom as a mordant whisper sussurates and a scraping drone announces this most portentous of bands. The cowled and freakish figure of Attila Csihar from Mayhem slowly stumbles into the fog-shrouded stage front, intoning an incantation of suitably high weirdness as the doom drone rises with the gouts of green-hued, feedback-flavoured smoke. Barely visible is the hooded and robed shade of Steve Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, who helps keep the low end mood suitably avant, building a clangour of chimes and scrapes, working  his bowed guitar with a sinister motion reminiscent of the sawing of bones. Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson are barely visible through the murk, an occasional fist or devil horns rising above the glowing amplifier cliff face at the peak of any particular seismic riff, or the shade of a pointy guitar in robed hands between them as Sunn0))) play on with the slow motion of a behemoth sound which eventually seems to envelop the unknown reaches of a very bleak space where the stars have grown dim - never mind the mere auditorium back on earth. All the while, Attila assumes the form of a great old bearded one with an unheimlich ability to hiss backwards as D.O.R's Rhodes swirls into the ritual of drone which by now has, thanks to the door-rattling bass, created some kind of brown - never mind black - mass and transformed the Queen Elizabeth Hall into a veritable cathederal of doom. -Richard Fontenoy-

The Young Gods; Shy Child Dingwall's, London 15th May 2007 It's been a while since The Young Gods have appeared in London, but they're back at last, in support of their new album Supeready/Fragmenté. Dingwall's turns out to be a good choice of venue, allowing for a capacity crowd but without getting stiflingly overstuffed with people. Support band Shy Child are a duo of a drummer and synth player, the latter playing standing up with the keyboard on a strap for a more energetic performance, presumably. They're not bad at all, angry buzzing blurps meshing well with the powerful percussion, but the vocals are monotone and hectoring in tone while remaining largely inaudible. Still, they do a good job of warming up the night.  When The Young Gods arrive onstage, it turns out they've adopted recycled militay fatigues both for stagewear and band merchandise, stitching the little stick figure logo on the backs of army shirts - which are suitably enough German Army surplus, as Switzerland doesn't go to war very often these days, accidental invasions of Liechtenstein aside. With Bernard Trontin's drums kicking in to the steadyly-building throbs and jagged electronic metal of Al Comet's keyboards, Franz Treichler bounds onstage, full of energy as ever, dancing and throwing yogic shapes throughout the show. Cavorting to some mammoth Techno-Industrial beats on "Freeze", he sings "I'm one,two,three,four tons of TNT" - and it doesn't seem like he's exaggerating too much. Treichler is at his best as the focus of the performance, leading the shuddering throng into wave after wave of propulsive rhythms and phenomenally-pounded out drumming which lurches from industrial samba of "El Magnifico" to cathartic spasms of the grinding rock machine, where crowd-pleasing riffs surge back and forth in unison with the heaving moshpit. He scans the room with his searchlight mic stand, sings in operatic bliss drenched in delay effects with a range which encompasses the warm techno-rock groove of "About Time" and the furious singalong splurge of "I'm The Drug" - a standout track on the album - words and sampled riffs streaming off into skyscraping immensity onstage, and judging by the effect he has on the crowd-surfing masses, Treichler is probably suggesting that he is some sort of amphetamine. This is a classic Young Gods performance all round, a man-machine mashup which blends the essence of rock'n'roll (among other things) with a characteristic Romantic futurism, electronics and guided-muscle beats matching the vocal delivery which streaks into the void - though it's strange how some of the older material such as the normally epic "Skinflowers" pales in comparison to the new, heftier songs, seeming a little less rounded in the encores after the battering which has come before. It's not all epic noise and thobbing bass; at one point Trontin plays what Treichler descibes as a flying saucer, coaxing and tapping out a gentle rhythm to the sounds of the electonic forest, while there is of all things a guitar/sitar passage played by Franz Treichler on "Stay With Us", where he sings "Who's gonna paint the clouds?/Who's gonna put the tools in place?" with echoplex melancholy which borders on the clichéd while keeping a beatific sense of perspective. He even pulls on an electric guitar for a fuzz-feedback solo at one point, but their version of Kurt Weill's "Mack Der Messer" is suitably melodramatic at first, soon bursting into industrial punk mania and back again, prompting the thought that if Alec Empire ever remixed them, this could be how it would sound. And their closing number? What else could it be but the Young Gods' version of Gary Glitter's bombastic "Did You Miss Me?" from the selft-titled debut album, Treichler belting out a menacing, gutteral growl for the audience, gesturing to Trontin and Comet in turn as he sings the chorus questioningly to them. "Yes!" is the response; "And we missed you too" sings Franz in a touching finalé to a triumphant return. -Tango-Mango-

© The Contributors and Freq 2007 e.v.