Do you know what I'm not doing tonight? Going to The Wheatsheaf. Great place, of course, but if I did it three nights in a row it wouldn't do me the world of good, I suspect. You can't live on a diet of Oxford Gold and tinitus, can you?
V/A – WE DO NOT HAVE A DINOSAUR (download)
People doing things for charity, we like that. People doing bleepy things, we like that. So, let’s be honest, we’re well disposed towards this Japan tsunami fundraising LP from promoters The Psychotechnic League and The Modernist Disco, featuring various flavours of Oxfordshire electronica. As is the way with this sort of thing, the record feels more like a grab bag than a carefully cohered entity, but anybody with a passing interest in digital dance music should find something to make the fiver tag acceptable, not least the efforts from the curators of the project: We Are Ugly (But We Have The Music) offers a simple little chugger that sounds like it could have been made by a schoolchild on their Amga (not necessarily a bad thing), and Space Heroes Of The People’s “Kosmoceratops”, an insistent spiral of buzzing synths that’s like being harangued by Jean-Michel Jarre at a political rally.
There’s a fair variety of styles on offer, from Left Outer Join’s crusty trance that brings back king Rizla memories of Astralasia, to icy Biosphere tones from The Keyboard Choir, and Sikorski’s chest-thumping synth rock (which we don’t really like, because it sounds like Big Country doing Eurovision, but it makes a change). “Winter Sounds 4” by King Of Beggars isn’t the arctic techno we were expecting, but rather a portentous grid of synthesised harp with a bleak vocal direct from early OMD, and it’s rather great. Meanwhile, The Manacles Of Acid live up to their name by producing straightforward acid house with samples about, err, acid house; it’s almost criminally unoriginal, but if like us, you find any vestige of critical opinion evaporating in the face of a 303, you’ll agree it’s bloody brilliant. Tiger Mendoza and Cez can also hold their heads high.
But we end with the best. Coloureds have made a track called “Tennis”, which is logical, because listening to its relentless chopped vocal fragments feels like spending four minutes as the ball in a game of Pong. It also sounds like it’s going to break into Orbital’s “Chime”, which is obviously fantastic. Perhaps not a perfect LP, but one well worth getting hold of...unless you’re one of those people who thinks that electronic isn’t real music, in which case just go stick your head in a bucket of elephant dung. I bet even the bucket is plastic. Can’t even get a proper tin bucket nowadays. Poor you. Yes, yes, we know: hell in a handcart.
Showing posts with label We Are Ugly But We Have The Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label We Are Ugly But We Have The Music. Show all posts
Sunday, 29 May 2011
Monday, 17 January 2011
Dis Figures
This was supposed ot be a double super review that carried on with the four acts at The Cellar. Well, I only only managed 2 and a half before I went to bed, because I've got the old winter chill, and I don't like gigs that go on till two in the bleeding morning.
For the record, The Cellar broke down like this: Coloureds, wonderful as ever; P-45 had nice varied ideas but it was a long an uneven set; Shitmat just seemed to be DJing some old Aphex tracks and things, not making his excellent breakcore live, which was fine but not what I hoped for; bed, very nice indeed.
WE ARE UGLY BUT WE HAVE THE MUSIC/ SPACE HEROES OF THE PEOPLE/ KINETIC WARDROBE, Psychotechnic League, Wheatsheaf 15/1/11
OK, it’s not snowing. But the other two major disasters that can hit a small time promoter have befallen the Psychotechnic League’s inaugural gig, namely the loss of two thirds of the lineup a few days before the event, and the presence of a similar, but more upscale event within jacking distance of the venue, in the shape of Audioscope’s Andrea Parker and Shitmat booking at The Cellar. It’s a tribute to promoting virgin Fred Toon that he not only managed to keep his gig afloat , but managed to draw in a decent, if not earth-shattering huddle of punters who were clearly enjoying the evening.
And as such, it would be harsh to be too critical of Kinetic Wardrobe, one of the stand in acts, left playing unusually early to encourage an attendance at both the Wheatsheaf and the Cellar, and certainly his late 90s, post-Orbient down-tempo techno set is full of well-turned moments, but some of the sampled gobbets (as The History Boys’ Mr Irwin might have put it, were he an aging raver) that stitch the set together are beyond hackneyed. What’s that? Fear & Loathing? Be still my beating heart. But in fairness, it’s a solid set, with some surprisingly approachable grooves, a couple of tracks with scratchy guitar parts sounding like lost De La Soul remixes.
Whatever you might expect from a band called Space Heroes Of The People, you probably don’t expect poise and delicacy, but this is exactly what the superlative duo delivers. Yes, the music is built on an insistent club thump, and Tim looks like he’s dressed as a day-glo swimming instructor, but the music is crisp, intricately thought out, and delivered with a surprising lightness of touch. That the fascinating Soviet animations projected behind the band are often perfectly in sync shows that the bad have thought carefully about the onstage presentation, but they still manage to retain a whiff of that old live magic, peppering the music with realtime drumfills, double bass and Wii remote waggles. Neither brainlessly retro nor obsessed by dance sub-genre novelty, neither gimcrack cabaret performers nor wheyfaced techno dullards, Space Heroes are purveyors of a polished, elegant electro you never knew you craved, an oasis between endless torrents of bedroom boredom low rate MP3s and Dadstep dance revivalists. Weirdly, with their tight quality control and the nouse to make classically simple music feel new with subtle arrangements, the local band Space Heroes most resemble is Little Fish. But Space Heroes are better.
We Are Ugly But We Have The Music, the promoter’s laptop acid project, in some ways retreads the drawbacks of Kinetic Wardrobe (such as a fucking stupid name, for starters), offering solid, but unsurprising dance throwbacks delivered by an awkward looking man with a laptop. But, whether it’s because the set is slightly more uptempo, whether it’s because Fred’s drum sounds are that little bit crunchier, or whether it’s because he has a smiley T-shirt and a big old strobe, the We Are Ugly set is more satisfying. It’s true that he hasn’t really worked out a reason to hear this rave-robbing music live, rather than on record, but somebody shamelessly reliving their youth is rarely this entertaining. Having made some strong music, and salvaged a gig that looked likely to collapse, Fred must have finished the evening with a self-congratulatory grin, even if most of the assembled finished their evening at The Cellar.
For the record, The Cellar broke down like this: Coloureds, wonderful as ever; P-45 had nice varied ideas but it was a long an uneven set; Shitmat just seemed to be DJing some old Aphex tracks and things, not making his excellent breakcore live, which was fine but not what I hoped for; bed, very nice indeed.
WE ARE UGLY BUT WE HAVE THE MUSIC/ SPACE HEROES OF THE PEOPLE/ KINETIC WARDROBE, Psychotechnic League, Wheatsheaf 15/1/11
OK, it’s not snowing. But the other two major disasters that can hit a small time promoter have befallen the Psychotechnic League’s inaugural gig, namely the loss of two thirds of the lineup a few days before the event, and the presence of a similar, but more upscale event within jacking distance of the venue, in the shape of Audioscope’s Andrea Parker and Shitmat booking at The Cellar. It’s a tribute to promoting virgin Fred Toon that he not only managed to keep his gig afloat , but managed to draw in a decent, if not earth-shattering huddle of punters who were clearly enjoying the evening.
And as such, it would be harsh to be too critical of Kinetic Wardrobe, one of the stand in acts, left playing unusually early to encourage an attendance at both the Wheatsheaf and the Cellar, and certainly his late 90s, post-Orbient down-tempo techno set is full of well-turned moments, but some of the sampled gobbets (as The History Boys’ Mr Irwin might have put it, were he an aging raver) that stitch the set together are beyond hackneyed. What’s that? Fear & Loathing? Be still my beating heart. But in fairness, it’s a solid set, with some surprisingly approachable grooves, a couple of tracks with scratchy guitar parts sounding like lost De La Soul remixes.
Whatever you might expect from a band called Space Heroes Of The People, you probably don’t expect poise and delicacy, but this is exactly what the superlative duo delivers. Yes, the music is built on an insistent club thump, and Tim looks like he’s dressed as a day-glo swimming instructor, but the music is crisp, intricately thought out, and delivered with a surprising lightness of touch. That the fascinating Soviet animations projected behind the band are often perfectly in sync shows that the bad have thought carefully about the onstage presentation, but they still manage to retain a whiff of that old live magic, peppering the music with realtime drumfills, double bass and Wii remote waggles. Neither brainlessly retro nor obsessed by dance sub-genre novelty, neither gimcrack cabaret performers nor wheyfaced techno dullards, Space Heroes are purveyors of a polished, elegant electro you never knew you craved, an oasis between endless torrents of bedroom boredom low rate MP3s and Dadstep dance revivalists. Weirdly, with their tight quality control and the nouse to make classically simple music feel new with subtle arrangements, the local band Space Heroes most resemble is Little Fish. But Space Heroes are better.
We Are Ugly But We Have The Music, the promoter’s laptop acid project, in some ways retreads the drawbacks of Kinetic Wardrobe (such as a fucking stupid name, for starters), offering solid, but unsurprising dance throwbacks delivered by an awkward looking man with a laptop. But, whether it’s because the set is slightly more uptempo, whether it’s because Fred’s drum sounds are that little bit crunchier, or whether it’s because he has a smiley T-shirt and a big old strobe, the We Are Ugly set is more satisfying. It’s true that he hasn’t really worked out a reason to hear this rave-robbing music live, rather than on record, but somebody shamelessly reliving their youth is rarely this entertaining. Having made some strong music, and salvaged a gig that looked likely to collapse, Fred must have finished the evening with a self-congratulatory grin, even if most of the assembled finished their evening at The Cellar.
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