The Moog In June

I'm giving up on wirting introductions to these.  Let me know if you don;t like that idea.

WILL GREGORY MOOG ENSEMBLE, Pindrop & OCM, St John the Evangelist, 10/6/15

By coincidence, the BBC’s science and technology show Tomorrow’s World went off air only a few months after the digital channel that would become Yesterday was launched.  And today, the idea of prime time telly devoted to explaining gizmos seems itself astonishingly old-fashioned , so embedded has hard- and software become in our lives.  Tonight’s gig is a smiling nod back to a faded future, (dis)played on a selection of historic, clunky and primarily monophonic synths - not all Moogs, but all far from their circuitboard salad days - more fitted to a loving museum than the rough sticky gig circuit.  Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory is the charming host and ringleader, with a whispered avuncular air like a trendy supply teacher filling in as Jazz Club presenter, but despite a few light chuckles and cheeky nods to baroque classics, the show mostly avoids middle-brow novelty, and gives us excellent musicianship couple with intelligent composition and arrangement.

Perhaps in honour of Wendy Carlos, the first half centres on classical pieces.  There’s never a bad time to hear the snaky glory of JS Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, and the Moogs’ farty portamento brings out the rolling melody beautifully, whilst a burst of Handel has a burnished elegance, like robot knights tilting in some cyber-tourney for the pixellated hand of Princess Peach.  However, it’s the new pieces that truly excite the ears.  “Snow Steps”, based on material from Debussy, is a breath of hyperborean sobriety, whereas “Swell”, by ace composer and ensemble member Graham Fitkin, lives up to its name by taking a tumescent tip from Godspeed! You Black Emperor.  The pinnacle, though, is “Noisebox”, a hissing web of sound that uses the instruments’ ability to generate white noise.  Over a Kraftwerk train rhythm hissing blocks are pushed about and tweaked in a manner that recalls minimal dancefloor overlords Ricardo Villalobos and Porter Ricks – like the trombone we associate vintage synth sounds with vaudeville and pratfalls, and can forget what subtlety they can achieve.  A few people near us leave in the interval.  We’re not sure whether they hoped to hear “Ooh La La” or a Klaus Schulze prog epic, but for us the charmingly warm programme features the best of both man and machine.

That Petrel Emotion

I bought my first charity shop records of the year this afternoon, and I'll be at my first gig of the year in a few hours.  2015 has, therefore, begun.

I don't think this is a very good review, but my editor seemed pleased enough, so what do I know?

PETRELS, PADDOX, AFTER THE THOUGHT, Pindrop, MAO, 11/12/14

They called it Dronefest.  Hard to argue, as there isn’t a moment tonight when guitars or keys aren’t filling the air with drones.  Before any act has officially started, Lee Riley and members of Flights Of Helios and Masiro are sonically decorating both the venue space and the upstairs bar with thick tones, the sort that soon start to seep into every thought - one of Nightshift’s more wild-eyed writers greets us with “I’ve been here 45 minutes.  It’s brilliant!”   Apparently, lonely souls even continued playing to an empty foyer whilst the acts performed in the basement, although we can’t believe anyone listened (Schroedinger’s remix, anyone?). 

On the stage, After The Thought shifta slow, elegant notes round in the manner of Eno’s Shutov Assembly with early 90s twinkles a la vintage Global Communication, not to mention a penchant for heartbeat rate decay that’s positively Pete Namlook.  Although the set gets pretty claustrophobic and the high tones nag, it also sounds like warm, friendly pop music underneath.  Is Bubblegum Tinnitus a genre?  Or have the drones started to twist our thoughts, like a dystopian 70s alien infiltration.

Our first impression of Paddox is that it’s brave to puncture such prettiness with loosely sprayed static coughs and rusty corvid caws.  Our second thought is that it isn’t brave, but idiotic, and our third that it is clearly unintentional.  The set is awash with technical snafus, bad connections and unwanted hisses, and whilst there are delightful moments, not least a mournful Gavin Bryars violin motif that floats above the pulsing noise (deliberate and otherwise), we’re left feeling we’ve not seen a performance that it would be fair to judge.

Petrels set is inventive and varied, in a fashion that the event’s name might not have implied.  The excellent tonal tapestry brings to mind images of blasted souls trapped in an old Amstrad floppy drive, skirling seabirds enveloped in thick syrup (perhaps in tribute to the stage name) and even some Artificial Intelligence offcuts.  The set ends with a looping emotional chorus, like the refrain from a lost Spring Offensive song slowly disappearing into a searing sunset.  As we leave James Maund is still making guitar noise in the foyer.  Perhaps he’s still there.

I Want You To Play With My Stringaling

I thought that this was going to be a rubbish gig, and that I was bored of Thomas Truax.  but I wasn't.  So hooray for him.

THOMAS TRUAX/ THE AUGUST LIST/ HUCK, Pindrop, The Art Bar, 19/4/14

Huck’s voice is a fascinating thing, a delicate, charred blues keen that can be roughly triangulated from Chris Isaak, Neil Young and Kermit.  The songs he’s playing tonight, with a second guitar to add electric trills, all come from his folk operetta Alexander The Great, which isn’t about Alexander Of  Macedon (or even Eric Bristow), but appears to be a beat-flavoured rites of passage tale.  The full stage show is coming to town soon, and should be well worth a visit, but perhaps the songs feel a little thin without the theatrical element: they have all the grand dramatic gestures, as well as a dollop of highly literate tragedian’s nouse that can throw Pandora, Babel and Thomas Aquinas into a single lyric, but sometimes feel sparse when we yearn for a big, Jacques Brel arrangement.  The final number ramps up the gutsy bluesiness in a way that unexpectedly reminds us of PJ Harvey circa To Bring You My Love, and provides the set’s highpoint.

There’s not much we can tell you about The August List except that they’re great: they’re the sort of act that encapsulates you for 30 minutes, and leaves you realising you’ve still got a blank notebook.  We could tell you that “All To Break” sounds like Sabbath’s “Paranoid” rewritten by Johnny Cash and played by The White Stripes, or that their cover of Scout Niblett’s “Dinosaur Egg” has the rootsy quirkiness of a downhome Lovely Eggs, but what really matters is that this duo has the unhurried, natural sonic chemistry of all your favourite boy/girl duos, and a neat way with a high octane country blast like “Forty Rod Of Lightning”.  Alright, some of the yee-hah accents are of dubious provenance, but the music is wistful and frenetic by turns, and one tune features a Stylophone, so they’re clearly not too in thrall to deep South influences to add a cheeky Brit wink.

Stick insect thin and surrounded by home-made mechanical instruments, Thomas Truax looks like he’s come direct from a scene cut from Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.  His creations, such as the Hornicator and Mother Superior, are either too well known to require a description, or too alien to be captured by one, but tonight’s set really brings home the quality of his songwriting – we’ll be honest, we thought we’d seen all he could offer, and that tonight’s show would be a tired trot through his cabaret schtick, but we were wrong.  A straight, eerie ballad version of Bowie’s “I’m Deranged” turns up early in the set, and quickly confirms that Truax is a talented performer without all the trappings (even as it confirms that he ain’t David Bowie), and from there it’s only a short hop to the abstract campfire howl of “Full Moon Over Wowtown”, performed acoustic in every cranny of the venue, including a quick jog round the block and a free shot of tequila behind the bar.  “The Butterfly And The Entomologist” is still a beautiful tale – and surprisingly apposite for Easter weekend – and a slow, treacly cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is a proper dues-payin’ roadhouse grind.  Perhaps the evening’s high point is “You Whistle While You Sleep”, which uses our favourite instrument, the Stringaling, to build a cubist house loop a la Matmos, before cutting to allow Truax to improvise insults to a loudmouth at the bar (who stayed wonderfully oblivious for the whole tirade).  Truax has enough tricks and techniques to last a roomful of musicians a lifetime, but this set proves that it’s in good old-fashioned composition and performance that he really shines.

Hiss And Hearse

I know, I know, it's been ages since I posted anything. And you won't get much out of mwe now, either, I'm afraid. I have to unpack my bags from the obligatory family visit, and then go and watch the Only Connect final. I wonder if the other 7 regular viewers will be tuning in...


WHITE NOISE SOUND/ THE BRAINDEAD COLLECTIVE – Pindrop, Bully, 12/12/10

By all that’s rational and reasonable, The Braindead Collective should an embarrassment. Imagine it, Seb Reynolds, ex-Sexy Breakfast and Evenings keyboard player, being smug enough to convene a loose improvised collective based around whichever of his old scenester chums is around on a given night. Imagine the self-serving tiresomeness, imagine the sickening in-joke winks. But, imagine is all we’re able to do if we want this band to be bad, because in actuality they’re excellent, not only a surprisingly well-controlled unit, but also one that can balance awkward noise with alluring melody better than many bands that have practised twice a week since the fourth form. They start with an eerie, reverby pulse of a piece that sounds like “Astronomy Domine” left out in the rain for six months, and develop a balance between Chris Beard’s chiming, ingenuous vocals and some oscillating keys. Over all this Seb spills reverby sax trills and Jimmy Evil throws in some ornery guitar figures that were left over from Suitable Case For Treatment. The reading from William Burroughs might be somewhat sophomoric, but in other ways the band is highly original, at one point sounding like exotic sonic mould growing on a forgotten Chris Isaak ballad. Irrational, unreasonable, and frankly wonderful.

White Noise Sound’s drone rock owes a fair amount to Spacemen 3, although the unexpected synth chugs also recall Add N To (X). Although the simple music might sound as though it just fell out of bed into a bigger bed, the material is actually carefully thought out, and it’s rare to find a band with three guitarists that can so effortlessly control the texture of a piece, especially when none of them go within a mile of soloing. The emphasis on song structure makes the band come off a little like Black Rebel Spaceship Club, and this is what lets them down a little. Nothing wrong with any of the vocals, but tracks stop because the song has finished , when it sounds like the music is just warming up. The final two pieces are comfortably the best, a pair of longer instrumentals that use the humming guitars as a launchpad for hypnotic repetition, rather than a peg on which to hang three verses. It’s not often you see a band, and wish they’d done half as many tracks in twice as much time, but if this is space rock, it helps to give it some space.

Chat Lines

Today's entry is dedicated to Oxford music photographer Johnny Moto. Not that he's dead. Or, I guess he might be, he doesn't check in with me every hour, so how would I know? God, I hope he's OK. No, hang on, let's assume he is.

Anyway, Mr Moto gave me a pen when I was writing my first review of this year and the venue was so damned cold the ink froze solid in my ballpoint. I never gave it back. Anyway, whilst writing this review I dropped said pen and said Johnny trod on it. He was so apologetic he bought me two new pens! So, now I'm in his debt to the tune of three pens (and each pen rather niftily had four differently coloured nibs, so perhaps it's more like twelve pens - although they were short pens, so let's call it six on aggregate). Still, he's dead now, so I suppose I'm off the hook...


CATS IN PARIS/ UTE/ COLOUREDS, Pindrop, Cellar, 16/9/10

The surprising thing about electro duo Coloureds – aside from the hand-crafted face masks that make them look like Ray Harryhausen’s Michael Myers maquettes – is how much contemporary club music seeps through their distorted, jittery IDM. Just as Funkstorung a decade ago took hip hop rhythms and twisted them into Wire pleasing glitchfests, so Coloureds seem to have taken garage and funky as their base metals, to be experimented upon ruthlessly. The music is all about texture, and there isn’t much in the way of theme or melody (although the odd arpeggio recalls Orbital, and a scuzzy three note organ breakdown sounds as though Philip Glass tried to create one of his scores on an Etch-a-sketch), but the rhythmic intensities, the subtle twists and the theatrical performance make this set musically captivating as well as pummellingly excoriating.

We’ve vacillated in our opinion of local trio Ute, and tonight we find ourselves doing so mid-set. The first half is all keening vocal lines and twitchy semi-acoustic rock, and it’s fine, but apart from the excellently regimental drumming, doesn’t truly excite us: at its best it’s Radiohead enveloping Robert Wyatt, but at its worst it sounds like a generic copy of any lightly groovy artrockers (and does the refrain “Psycho killer” suggest anyone, hmmm?). But then, suddenly they win us over again, with loud and well thought out rock songs, one boasting a bass that impersonates a truck burping, and one which is a manic grunge thrash, like a skiffle Mudhoney. Most importantly, the vocals switch from annoying self-conscious wheedle, to an effective growl that drops into unexpected valleys of delicate harmonising. If this gig were a football match, you’d assume the half time talk had been ruthlessly galvanising.

Manchester’s Cats In Paris also rise in our estimations, but this is probably because it took us two songs to calibrate ourselves. What does one make of their maximalist maelstroms, where jazz funk bass meets keyboards from a budget ELP and vocals from a literary EMF? But, once the fluent violin came in, the power of the rhythm section became apparent, and the joyful refrain “This is modern British cooking” had invaded our mind, we decided their Zappa child grab bag of pop oddity was something to be cherished, and in retrospect the fact that opener “Chopchopchopchopchop” sounded like a mixture between “O Superman”, the theme from Let’s Pretend and Flaming Lips made perfect sense. They didn’t fulfil the promoter’s description of their sound as “electro spazz swing”. They surpassed it.

Foggy Notion

Mr Clegg, Mr Compo and Ms Batty were unable to attend this gig, I suppose...

MR FOGG/ BRAINDEAD COLLECTIVE/ TARIK BESHIR, Pindrop/Kicking Ink, UPP, 17/9/09


When internet promotion for a gig describes it as a “cosmic event” and an “amazing astral vibez show” featuring “projections from the ether” expectations are low – surely we’re either going to be dumped amongst a teeming mass of well-medicated hippies attempting to marry us off to Princess Leyline in a giant naked healing ceremony, or in a hideously knowing Shoreditch preenfest. As it is, despite one preposterous neo-Oakey fringe flapping gratuitously, this turns out to be a friendly evening of approachable music. The ethos is best encapsulated by Brickwork Lizard Tarik Beshir, who plays songs on his oud accompanied by fiddle and qanun, a large plucked dulcimer. Beshir doesn’t boast the ghostly keening tone of great North African singers, but his quiet voice adds to the conversational feel of the set. Where the ambience is uncomplicated, the music is anything but, fragments of melody mutating like fractals, and fiddle lines arcing away gloriously.

Once, when musicians wanted a busman’s holiday, playing outside their normal bands, they’d start covers acts. Now they all choose free improv. Fears that Braindead Collective - featuring members of Guillemots, Keyboard Choir, Joe Allen Band, etc -would be a smug bundle of poorly placed skronks are dashed by their opening salvo, a Godspeed-plays-the-spectralists cluster of wafts and pulses. The set may be improvised, but it’s built on small packets of horn melody and bolstered by groovy basslines and tap-tempo laptop effects, until it ends up resembling the jazzier end of the Ninja Tunes catalogue: The Cinematic Orchestra without the rustle of Rizlas, perhaps, or Mr Scruff through a refracting lens. Surprisingly coherent.

Mr Fogg’s post-Radiohead glitch-pop is the most conventional fare on tonight’s bill, but he makes up for it by squeezing at least three sets’ worth of rock cliché into his performance. Musically it’s all rather good, some well written laptop pop songs performed with the broad strokes of the contemporary “mainstream alternative” (think Four Tet versioned by Muse), and there are some great arrangements, especially the gorgeous trombone interjections, but the effect is scuppered by thirty minutes of desperate rockist posing and manic “good evening Wembley” gurning. We’re the sort of people to find all stadium postures pretty ridiculous, but what looks dumb in Budokan is almost unbearable in a slowly emptying provincial cinema. Go see Mr Fogg, but take a blindfold to enjoy the experience.