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Audioscope is an annual chairty all-dayer of leftfield music, and I'm an enormous admirer, the events are always fun. Peppers Burgers is in Jericho, Oxford, and also gets my seal of approval. There you go, a day out constructed for autumn 2010 - you never know, you might even get to meet me if you do it...

AUDIOSCOPE – Jericho, 17/10/09


Audioscope’s reputation as an austere day of difficult music is smashed in seconds by Bitches, who may have had a liquid lunch. Their music has rock riffs and punk noise, but exhibits an eerie lack of propulsion, feeling excellently like a drunken Fluxus take on an early Sebadoh rehearsal. Cats & Cats & Cats charmingly announce that they hope to get their single into “the indie charts” which makes us feel at least ten years younger. They play a pleasant set of contempo-folk introspection, which is rather spoilt by unsuccessful leaps into grandiloquent climaxes, turning them into Arcade Embers. Talons turn out to be much better at the Godspeed crescendos and have two excellent violinists, but could do with some of Cats’ songs to retain interest. Call it a draw.

Worcester’s Theo loops tricksy Don Caballero guitar licks and accompanies himself fluently on drums, and this Billy Nomates Mahonie turns out to be our set of the day. He has some trouble with guitar leads and drum pedals, but we cynically wonder whether he fiddles with them deliberately to hide the fact he hasn’t quite worked out how to end his songs.

Ute have come leagues since we saw them in January, mixing rousing folk songs that wouldn’t be out of place during the miner’s strike with tremulous indie delicacy, before unexpectedly flipping out and going all Shellac unplugged. Occasional Thom Yorke vocal moments are less satisfying, but the set is a winner. Audioscope favourites Bilge Pump proffer the closest thing to sonic extremity on this year’s bill, with their well- honed take on post-McClusky artcore, and it’s fine but Bronnt Industries Kapital is far more exciting. He opens with what may as well have been an excerpt from Blade Runner, synching faultlessly with the video projections, that are like being overtaken on the autobahn by Petronus charms. He keeps up the Vangelist approach for some excellently sleek mid-80s synth romps, headbutting the keyboard to inject some John Foxx drama. The Ferris Bueller shades are a step too far, however.

We get a brief palate cleanser before the headliners, as Glasgow’s Remember Remember folds looped glockenspiel and melodica motifs in on themselves like Fuck Buttons lost in Toytown, which sets us up nicely for the disappointment of The Longcut. There’s nothing hugely wrong with mixing New Order with Doves and throwing a bit of NY funk over the top, but it seems that every third band in 2009 sounded exactly like this. The Longcut still don’t upset us too much until something sounding like Editors playing “I Feel Love” drives us to the bar.

We ask the organisors why they don’t have anyone famous on this year’s bill, like Kid 606, Clinic or a krautrock legend, to be told that Mercury nominees Maps are better known in the real world than those other acts put together. It comes as no surprise that we lost our grip on the public’s taste years ago, but it is eyebrow raising that they’ve gone for something that sounds so much like The Beloved. That is, when they don’t sound like Crystal Castles played by Candy Flip. Nothing revolutionary here, then, but Maps play a warm and unhurried set of comedown electropop that makes us wish we were watching at four am in a room made entirely from pillows and Gummi Bears, until we’re absolute converts. We were all set to bemoan the lack of a Shit & Shine, Parts & Labour or Datapanik epiphany, until we realised that the least adventurous Audioscope lineup had perhaps become the most consistent, and good music’s what matters ultimately, not its obscurity. That and the £1700 raised for Shelter, and an excuse to subsist on beer and Pepper’s burgers for a day.