October 2014
Green Door Store

Nicholas Langley and Hassni Malik

Ah, we’re well into autumn now. Rain and all that. Nicholas Langley and Hassni Malik have built a big cube in the middle of the floor at the Green Door Store and wrapped it in cling film. With the house lights down its just possible to see them moving around inside – torches and synth lights moving around on the ground. They start all beeps and clicks before being overtaken by tonal drones and voices turn replaced by arpeggios before dropping back down into a lengthy space drift and then eventually powering off into space for an epic encounter with a gas giant before dropping back down to minimal whirrs and building back to a finally that seemed to explore the deeper reaches of cold interstellar space.

Supercell

Quickly before you can say boo, the cube is denuded of cling film and fresh tightly wrapped in white ready for Supercell and Bartosz’s orthogonal twin projector visuals. Caleb Madden starts the set with a blistering wail of pure distortion: loud and primal, breaking tones and roaring unstructured fuzz, lovely. Then bang! It drops to four to the floor for at least 16 bars before a reverberant field recording wells slowly around it. It’s an age before further percussion slowly joins and finally some swooping old style hardcore bass buzz. The breakdown sees this noise up into a relentless techno jam before rubber band analogue starts to flip. And then back into noise and bass drum pulses and before you know it, it’s done. I listened to quite a bit of the set from inside the cube surrounded by Bartosz’s Blocks of Red/Black/White/Grey geometra sliding around me. Recommended.

Aigon DAAC

The cube is gone before the final act are ready (on the stage, no less, I doubt they’d think of themselves as orthodox, but there you go). Aigon DAAC start with slowly buzzing double bass drones murking with electronic washes, occasionally shimmering into identifiable synth tones, but often blending seamlessly between the bass and deft cassette manipulation – I can’t say I’ve ever seen such an adept handling of the tapes, proper listening and exact contributions in a quiet very concentrated improvising environment. And as with the best improv hard to describe… There were moments of rich bowed bass, small clicks and sustained quiet feedback; dissonant screeching and at one point the distinct feeling of having a Shuggoth come hurtling at you only to dissipate in mist once it reached the open air. Remarkable.