A rainy thursday night in Stockholm and I go to two gigs by myself. The promoter is Gavin Maycroft. A wonderful positive force in the Stockholm underground. Gavin is always amplifying the odd, illuminating the noiserdden dark and poking old farts like me in the chest saying the way I view music is stale, dead and with very little hope of surviving this spring. We all need that from time to time.
So to the first gig of the night....
A wonderfully abrasive loopyness emanates from the table packed with cables and stompboxes. Detuning sirens and freeform ambulances slither over stitched together rhythms. And it sounds amazing. Collagey but with a strong force forward. The music is rhythmic but often collapses over deconstructed barlines. People in the audience bobbing their heads as if the was the grooviest funkmachine exploding and in a weird way it is. The audience consists mostly of younger men but there are a handful women as well.
Due to the rhythms it has some weird leanings towards messy deranged Hip Hop. But as a recipient I realize my limitations...without the intelligent drums and rhythms I would find this almost unlistenable but with rhythms now it becomes quite attractive, multilayered with a dynamic sense of tempo and texture.
Horatio Pollard looks like a mix between a member of Steve Zissous crew and a hungover Icelandic fisherman. Which oddly enough is exactly how his vocals sounds. Slightly mumbly and with loads of echo the lyrics seems to consist of mainly two words. Erm and Aom.
But dont get me wrong...both erm and aom are sung with confidence and gusto into buckets of dubby delays. Im just worried that if god by chance decided to talk thru Horatio Pollard on this rainy February night I might have missed the message. Come again? Come again?
The films shown behind him are collagey. Stockfootage of german pensioneers and paratroopers practising. B-movie aliens and model trains. Pollards music both amplifies and detracts. I find films during gigs difficult. Wether you like it or not its hard to not watch. Is it random or super thought out? Is it supposed to sync? Are the old people in the movie a symbol of decay in our moral values and the fact that I need to pick up orange juice on my way home? Sometimes its hard to tell.
As usual at gigs in 2014 its hard to tell how much was prerecorded. Ive never been a fan of the whole two monkeys and a apple scenario so I took the chance and asked Horatio about his setup. I was happy that I did.
There are no apples involved at all. Hooray! The heart of his setup is Korg DDD-1 drummachine and it triggers samples and all the weirdness. There are several outputs running thru delays and stompboxes. The small cut up horn samples are played from the DDD-1. Knowing this changed my whole impression of the gig to the better. All of a sudden it felt like a organic performance instead of someone pressing spacebar 19.45 to start the music and then one more time 20.15 to turn it off.
Now playing: Tom Petty - You dont know how it feels
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