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.