RATTLE/ FARM HAND/ AFTER THE THOUGHT, Divine Schism, Fusion
Arts, 26/3/19
It’s been some years since Matt Chapman Jones performed
as After The Thought, but we assume the music has been quietly playing
somewhere all the while, the stately melodies and soft, glowing synth pads
hiding behind the moon or in the spaces between electrons waiting for him to
plug in again and broadcast them.
Wielding a guitar, keyboard and a Tetris endgame block of pedals,
Chapman Jones ladles Mogwai noise onto John Carpenter motifs, simplicity taking
us by the hand, and bouncing us between fuzzy warmth and isolationist
eeriness. Don’t make us wait so long for
the next one.
Another person who would be welcome to come back over the
Severn Bridge is Shape Records founder and Islet member Mark Daman Thomas, AKA
Farm Hand. If After The Thought’s
palette is relatively sparse, Farm Hand’s is positively digi-Spartan, consisting
of loops or tinny backing and vocals that tend to be so smothered in reverb or
effects that lyrics are largely indecipherable, although when he tells us the
songs are about “summers in rural mid-Wales” or “eating nettle soup”, we
believe him. There’s a playfulness in
the performance, Thomas prancing around, cracking jokes and jamming over a
recording of himself greeting each and every one of us by turn, but although
his set is a cheerful lo-fi joy - a market stall knock-off of Fixers’
cyber-euphoria – there’s also a strangely monastic feel to much of it, like
religious rites corrupted into secular games.
Perhaps there’s never much distance between druid and clown.
A scribbled note on the door of Fusion Arts reads “No
drumming tonight. Sorry!!” But, seeing as Nottingham duo Rattle had
dragged a pair of drumkits all the way to Oxford, we guess they decided the
ignore the injunction. In common with the other acts, their music is
ostensibly simple, but powerfully hypnotic, repetitive interlocking patterns
occasionally decorated by tuneful little chants. Like vintage techno or even vintager New York
minimalism, there’s a shudder of excitement when a chugging groove is
punctuated by a new element, a sudden authoritative snare crack or floor tom tattoo (or some
sparingly utilised dubwise FX from a gent hunched over a tiny mixing desk). Rattle sound like a robot Art Blakey playing
under some demonic skipping rhymes. You
try keeping that sort of wonder out with a handwritten sign, mortals.
