HISTORY PAINTING
shows, music, words & pictures / historypainting@hotmail.comArchive for WARP
‘Speechless like…’, Antipop Consortium at Cargo, London
Fluorescent Black – the mysterious recording that’s been spoken about ever since the first whispers of an Anti Pop Consortium reformation.
Let me rewind a touch. Anti Pop Consortium are an IMPORTANT group. All caps. No doubt. Two Warp records releases under their collective belt, a break from the group (at the height of their notoriety) and numerous releases and side projects later, they are back, this time with the mighty Big Dada. Tonight’s show at Cargo is spellbinding. The sheer energy being exchanged between APC & the crowd is phenomenal. The mix is good… vocals well audible, beats crisp, synths stabs alternately warm analogue and cold digi. Pure bliss. ”We’ll never fake moves” exclaimed Earl Blaise as they teased the crowd with the only piece of retrospective work performed that night… beginning as Ghostlawns the way we all know it, but not even a bar in, everything but vocals dropped out. Acapella. So yeah – that’s Ghostlawns acapella. Kick yourself if you weren’t there.
All the new material sounds totally amazing – both the skewed instrumentals and blistering vocal tracks. Awaiting Autumn and the APC’s new dawn. They had better be coming back to London! Volcano.
‘If dancefloors could dream’, Flying Lotus at FWD, Plastic People
*picture (from a Stateside show) by Ian Mayer ripped from The Fader
A random myspace bulletin check on a Sunday night train bore juicy fruit last night. After missing out on tickets for the Vauxhall show, I found that Flying Lotus would be playing London again in an hour or so at Plastic People. Heading into the dark box was a pretty different story to Theo Parrish the night before. Where for Theo, there was a nice amount of space & air to compliment his breezy show, tonight, FWD was a proper pit – a mass of twitching frames & shuffling feet. Kode 9 played an alien breed of rhythms to coax human muscles into new forms, then after a number of rewinds, passed over to homme du jour, Flying Lotus. If dancefloors could dream, it would sound something like this. Echoes of dubs past, left floating in dusty, stagnant echo chambers were called upon to drift and shuffle past each other, their ragged frames mutated through the sheer velocity of their travel, leaving searing, acidic traces behind of their own particular strain of low frequency radiation. Condensed hardcore continuum history lesson. Lotus on Fire. Check the mp3…http://dubstep.lv/forum/viewtopic.php?t=719&sid=eafdd7d0811168fbc1a557b8ffedd90f
BTW… at the start of the FlyLo set, where it all stops and the MC is all like, “We’ve got some technicals… I thought that was the tune” Well, to me, that shit sounded pretty good too. More ‘technicals’ please.
BTW part 2… 42 minutes in – Kode 9. Pitch shifting, mangled, C21, attention deficit version of early 90s house. If you know what that tune’s called & where I can buy it. Comment and let me know.
BTW part 3… essential reading – Kode 9 & Derek Walmsley unedited Wire magazine interview transcript. http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/2439/?pageno=1
‘Don’t Look Now’ – Broadcast live soundtrack improv at Shunt Lounge, London
Tonight Trunk Records and Ghost Box got together and took over the Shunt Lounge to throw a party. Shunt proved to be the perfectly disorientating setting for the strange esoteric films and music being shown during the evening.
After leaving the outside world behind in London Bridge Tube station, and following the echoing sounds into the heart of the somehow very British brick vaults, I was greeted by the sound of ‘Tanzmusik’ from Ralf & Florian blasting out to accompany a quick drink. That was as sweet a moment as you can expect to have thirty seconds into arriving at any venue. After a little milling around, it came to light that there was a screening room set up showing back-to-back TV drama & public information films, which ranged from really quite sublimely beautiful, to funny, unsettling & scary, all the way to pretty silly – sometimes within the space of a minute or so of one film!
Disorientation seemed to be the order of the night, as a strange mixture of squat party, ancient castle, and underground cult youth club started to set in as the place filled up, sonics from the films and DJ sets spilling forth into the jet black corners.
Back in the screening room, as a film came to a close, in (un)matching red and blue anoraks, James Cargill and Trish Keenan (Broadcast) took to the stage to perform a live soundtrack to Julian House’s short film. Eager fans squeezed in to find a spot as the electronics began to whir around the space & the video sprang into motion. The first live performance in London by Broadcast for quite some time was pretty special. See/hear for yourself:
