Sunday 31 March 2013

Squarepusher @ The Roundhouse


My head is fuzzy today, so I'm going to keep this brief.

All I really have to say about this bloody fantastic show is that I thought it was a helluva lot better than Amon Tobin's. It may be unfair, but the two shows are linked in my mind because a) they were both electronic music shows that used massive visual displays as a big part of their appeal and b) they happened within a few weeks of each other, duh.

For me, Squarepusher succeeded where Tobin failed because he got the audio/visual balance right. Tobin was musically weak and boring, and the contrast between the tame audio and the flashy visuals emphasised that lameness. Whereas Squarepusher was musically badass, and so the visuals and audio reinforced each other, as they're supposed to.

Even leaving aside the quality of the music, I actually enjoyed Squarepusher's visuals more than Tobin's despite them probably being (I'm guessing) less technologically advanced, creative, and labour-intensive. They were simpler, but more effective.

I've seen Squarepusher live at least three times now, the other two occasions I can definitely remember being at the Royal Festival Hall a few years back and as part of some ATP thing about 18 months ago. The Festival Hall show was fantastic, whereas I can hardly remember the ATP one - my mate had to remind me of it last night, and apparently we weren't impressed, as my memory failure attests. Anyway, my point is only that I don't have a  Squarepusher bias: even he has to put a shift in to impress, and last night he did.

The Roundhouse itself was also a great venue for the event. I think I'm right in saying that the stage was positioned more towards the centre of the room than normal, and with the room being circular, that meant that the stage could be wider than if it had been further back, and therefore so could the visuals. Presumably the capacity was reduced as a result, so hats off to the Roundhouse for doing it: it was an excellent decision.

Finally, we discovered that the downstairs restaurant bar sells bottles of Delirium Tremens, so we were able to enjoy some of Belgium's (and lets face it, that means the world's) finest while watching the show - an unexpected delight that explains why today my head feels like someone has asked me to solve the world financial crisis while juggling cats. Just don't go spreading it around: if too many people find out there won't be enough for me next time.

Mmm, Delirium.


Wednesday 20 March 2013

Parquet Courts and The Men at The Garage

People turned out in force for Parquet Courts and The Men last night - The Garage was about 50% busier than I've ever seen it. This could have been due to the bands themselves, but I like to think it's because The Garage has ditched its Carlsberg-or-Tuborg-or-nothing beer selection, probably as a result of HMV's dire straights. Every cloud and all that...

Gig Buddy tells me Parquet Courts got equal billing with The Men for this gig. How can I illustrate how unjustified that would be?

Imagine watching the film of your life story, and finding out the director has given equal amounts of time to the day some guy turned up to read your gas meter, and the day that escort knocked on your door wearing nothing but a trench coat and lingerie, having mistaken your flat for Mr Lawrence's, whose wife was staying with her sister for the weekend. That should give you an idea.

Apparently, The Quietus and Pitchfork were in agreement on how good Parquet Courts' album is. In fairness, so is Gig Buddy, who insisted on giving me one of his download codes. I haven't used it yet, so I can talk about is seeing the band live, which was like watching librarians agreeing to color-code their clipboards and thermoses taupe this year instead of mauve. Not thrilling.

The Men, on the other hand, exploded out of the blocks as if intent on expunging all traces of their predecessors from memory – and, aside from what little I've recounted above, they succeeded.

I can't recall ever having seen a band give it so much for such a sustained period before. It was like they'd just found out they were all to be executed at dawn, and so they'd come out one last time in order to fuck the universe dry before shaking hands with destiny. The impressive buggers.

P.S.
I've just realised The Men were the first band I blogged about, just over a year ago. Aww.

Friday 8 March 2013

Actress and Amon Tobin's Isam Live 2.0 at Hammersmith Apollo

I attended this more by chance than design. My mate let me know that he and his missus had tickets about 2 months ago, and he asked me if I was up for it. Fortunately I had the foresight to ask whether they'd gone for stalls standing, and it turned out they hadn't - they'd got seats, hence there was no chance of my sitting near them, hence I declined.

However, my mate's missus' sister then bought them tickets for Sigur Ros on the same night, and as they couldn't do both, suddenly I was back in the game.

My mate was very excited about Actress, who was already in full flow when we arrived. To be honest, I don't think we missed much. In fact, my mate felt sorry for the dude. All he had was a tiny setup in front of a massive white sheet labelled "safety curtain", which firmly seperated him from the main event. "Safety curtain", indeed - it was a "safety blind" if ever I've seen one...

Anyway, the lack of imagination/effort devoted to staging his set meant that the audience was as detached from Actress as he himself was from whatever was hidden away behind him. Nobody was really moving, nobody was paying that much attention... He may as well have been muzak.

Inexplicably, about 40 minutes passed between Actress and Tobin. Building the anticiption I suppose. But that was ok, we were fortunate enough to have seats backing onto an aisle, so all we had to do to go piss or buy more booze was contort ourselves accordingly, not bother the poor souls either side of us. And vice versa.

Eventually the main event began. The "safety curtain" curtain rose. And there it was. The highly anticipated getup. Picture a slightly 3D version of Tetris tipped onto its side and plonked on a stage and you have a very good idea of what it looked like. I'm sure there are phtos somewhere online by now. It looked like Sports Direct just before opening.

Then the graphics kicked in. Now picture Cartoon Network being projected onto that Tetris-like stack of boxes, only someone has cleverly mapped the pictures to the contours. Drifting blobs, electric fingers, pistons, fireballs... It was a bit techy, it was a bit futuristic, it was a bit Star Wars and Alien ... but mostly it was a bit .... eh. 

It's not that it wasn't state-of-the-art. I'm sure it was. After all, this was a sell-out show, and it wasn't cheap. But it was progressively underwhelming. Amon himself was housed in a cube at the center of the display, and his first reveal was undoubtedly thrilling. But all he did was the usual electtronica flipping of swtiches and nodding of head, and as the show went on you realised that each new segment of graphics and each new reveal of the man at the centre of it all would be pretty much the same as the last.

The music took very much a secondary role to the visuals, which is weird for a musician, but regardless of where most of the effort went, neither the music nor the visuals were good enough. Part of the problem, I think, was in the choice of venue, or else the venue setup. To be transportive, something that isn't locomotive must be immersive, and at the scales involved here, Isam 2.0 simply wasn't. Had the same show been put on in a medium-sized club, 6 feet from my face, filling 90% of my visual field, I've no doubt it would have been absolutely amazing. But from 60 feet away, occupying 15% of my visual field, it all felt a bit 2005. It was like a half-hour break in an expo, where they stick something on just to keep you entertained before the next talk about the energy efficiency of thatched roofs or the transformative power of networking. The whole thing was just too puny to be affecting.

You might think our seats were to blame, and I'm sure those in the stalls had a better time of it, but actually we had a pretty decent spot. We were about 7 rows back from the front of the balcony, which meant we were about 43 rows front of the back of the room. There were certainly a hell of a lot of people further away from the show than we were. I couldn't help but think that I'd been better transported and engaged by far less gimmickry, like the simple pleasures of good music, or the laser show at Fire, or any electronica event that provided enough space for a bit of a dance.

I have a feeling that this is an early adoption problem. OK, Amon Tobin is probably supplying the best visual effects on offer right now. But how good will things be in 2, 3, or 5 years' time? Frankly, I fear for the 20-somethings of tomorrow. When visual effects like this find their right environment in conjuction with the requisite drugs, the combination is going to deliver people from their stupid earth-bound selves into some wonderous land the likes of which you and I have only glimpsed, and the harsh reality of those people's seated, sedate, drug-free 30s is going to crush them like paper cranes under a falling asteroid. The poor, lucky buggers.

Us? We'll have to make do with good music.