Horror Novel

Another review, obviously. What were you expecting?


NEW NOVETA/ LISTING SHIPS/ MANACLES OF ACID – Neural Ohmlette, MAO, 27/1/12


Let’s just clear up a few things before we start.

1) Now they’ve moved the cafe upstairs, Modern Art Oxford is a fantastic gig venue, low, sweaty and loud, but with a handy airy upstairs that sells nice coffee. More events should happen here.
2) There’s a reason why most side projects aren’t in the spotlight.
3) Neural Ohmlette is a hideous name for a promoter, it sounds like something Ozric Tentacles discarded as an LP title. Let’s never talk of it again.

Watching Manacles Of Acid, you wonder, who exactly is being manacled? Does it mean heavy, controlling music, to enslave us on the dancefloor (or something equally retro-dystopian) or does it refer to the constrictions inherent in using vintage hardware? Not sure either of them work, really: the music is surprisingly airy and attractive, despite jackboot kickdrums and inevitable acid swampgas bubbles, and the sonic palette is intricate and varied enough to put any number of SoundCloud-vomiting brosteppers to shame. Literally anything with a 303 squelchline sounds great to us, but in fact Manacles Of Acid are at their very best when they veer closer to Bellevue techno than pure acid – both the opening and closing moments of this set remind us of the great Model 500. An act that originally looked like a music shop worker’s sly joke is bearing unexpected fruit. Let’s hope they’re rifling through the Derrick May and Drexciya twelve inches for inspiration as we speak.

Tonight Listing Ships fail wholly to convince us. Not only do the drums appear to falter uncharacteristically once or twice, but an annoying mix of earth hum and bass feedback mires a band that has a much better grasp of interesting dynamics than the vast majority of krauting post-rockers. Because of this we find ourselves concentrating less on the Godzilla lumber of tracks like “100 Gun Ship”, and on lighter touches we’d previously missed: a synth organ part that sounds like mid-80s Tangerine Dream, a death disco rhythm that seems to cross ESG with Joy Division. A compromised set by a very strong band.

We saw Maria & The Mirrors at last year’s Supernormal festival, and were suitably floored by their glam tribal hedonism, so we leapt at the chance to see them in Oxford. We soon discovered we were actually seeing a spin-off called New Noveta, but hopes were still high. However, New Noveta are not so much a spin off as a deliberate miscue and a white ball in someone’s Bacardi, taking the digital noise underpinning Maria & The Mirrors, and using it as the backdrop for some ritualistic performance art that boils down to two women wrestling in a puddle of fruit and raw fish. As a spectacle – not to mention an olfactory experience – it certainly has a power that very few gigs can match, and inevitably an image resembling Tweedledee and Tweedeldum bickering over the remains of Luke Skywalker’s eviscerated tauntaun hangs in the mind’s eye for a while, but the entire experience is only partly satisfying.

Firstly, lose the strobe: unless it’s the 60s or you’re David Lynch, strobe lights are a tired signifier of chaos, and are far more annoying than they are thrilling. Secondly, is ten minutes really enough to justify a headline appearance? Thirdly, we do get bored of half-naked body-based performance: in the past feminist performance artists returned to their bodies in desperation that all traditional media were tainted by association with a patriarchal art history, whereas Viennese Actionism saw the corporeal as a final frontier in visceral, confrontational art – but performance nowadays often means arsing about with some flesh on display, and it gets dull quickly. Fourthly, the musical aspect of the show is thin, at best, and what promises to be an industrial soundscape soon becomes a forgettable hiss.

Actually, fifthly, you know what? Ten minutes was plenty. An act worth witnessing, perhaps, but not one worth celebrating