December 2025
The Rossi Bar
I’ve been kinda putting off reviewing this one. We squeezed in four sets, two of which were performances by Henry Collins and Chase Coley that bookended the night. Both of these were very visual, multi-media and are going to be a bit tricky to describe….
So we started the evening with Hyacinth Bucket and the magical testicle filled with thousands of bumble bees and the essence of creation. There is onstage a huge magical testicle, pink, a film starts with the back story and then Hyacinth Bucket herself appears onscreen and narrates the tale. Chase enacts the part of the shepherd and wanders around the room. And then approaches the magical testicle, and enters, skronking and plonking ensues. The testicle throbs. About ten minutes in The Bumble Bees are summoned. After a little longer angelic voices and a nearly naked Chase covered in magical symbols emerges from the testicle followed by Henry in a red dress coat and they gaze adoringly at the heavens.
Next up, with the tricky task of following that we had Meljoann set up at the side of the stage where she usually VJs. starting with a 4 to the floor kick, and quickly morphing through a variety of beats with a monster boinging kick sound, repetitive vocalisation stabs Meljoann goes for the extreme opposite of HBATMT.. Repetition, minimalism, looping back and forth, then dropping out down to a tiny pinging riff, and then she drops massive explosions onto it before bringing in some kind of truncated D’n’B drum track. Then a fidgeting bassline clambers all over that, before the rhythm track drop back to something possibly a little more techno, thickening up briefly into some kind of gurgly soup before a weird R’n’B drop takes into a pulverising one beat then something that I can only describe as doo-wop – which is a massive misdirection – reminiscent of the heady days when hardcore could go in all directions and often did. A fidgety drum track takes us out under some Prince-like synth drones to end.
Then we had Luuma, a beast of a modular setup, with a laptop and some other devices. It starts with a thick buzzing drone and some feedback whistling. A wind of distortion threads through, there’s a hint of a scraping sound cycling away in the background, the drone starts to blister and bubble. The drone drops away into sustained balloon squeaking, its evil stuff, that starts to burble away until it drops into some kind of square wave LFO thing. That speeds and slows and gets into a bit of squelchy territory before morphing into a different more aeroplane-y drone. This continues for a while before upending in a squall of nasty electronic sounds that skitter about in a radiophonic manner before filtering down to a murky storm. Some giants start arguing over a didgeridoo in a room in the distance. Chris has a big wooden home-made drone instrument, this looks like a didge, but has a single string and some electronics. He rasps at it with a bow (in another life Chris is a talented cellist) setting up layers of harmonics and buzzing before getting into some free improv scratching. It feels like the giants are in torment now. Then he starts some sustained bowing getting thick heavy drones, before thinning it out into streamers of sustained tone based around harmonic standing waves on the string, then thickens this right up into a tasty storm to end.
And to end the night its Chase and Henry again, filling the stage with clutter – old CRT portable TV, tables, home-made bits and pieces, cassette player, cymbal, TV aerial… whatever. This was the dangerous end of the evening.
The set started with a fat drone, sourced by pressing an electric screwdriver chassis into the stage making it resonate. Chase enters the stage barefoot and starts getting white noise out of the radio. I can hear the wind coming from somewhere. Henry comes onstage also barefoot and opens a big pot of drawing pins and slowly sprinkles onto a contact miked piece of metal. Chase needs to move and realises that the stage is now very effectively booby-trapped. He picks up the waterphone and tiptoeing across the stage starts bowing it, wrenching high pitched drones, Henry starts scrumpling a cellophane octopus. Chase gets a reverb-y warbling undertone out of the waterphone. He gongs it as well. Henry seems to dismantle the octopus and gets the active noisy element out and continues with the crumpling as Chase gets back onto the radio. Henry gets into a fight with a Middle Eastern horn. Chase starts bowing a big square sheet of steel, while Henry starts rummaging drumsticks on and then around a large steel bin. This sheets more vigorous drumsticks flying around the stage, until the large steel tape measure comes out – Henry reels out about 5 feet of it and starts whipping it about the stage – it’s a nice white source of static bursts, but a little terrifying as zooms around the stage – especially when reversed and the tape holder starts clobbering the objects littering the stage. And getting further afield, Chase gets the screwdriver back to work. The tape measure holder is by now whirling around above the audience’s heads. Chase starts droning the metal bin building up to gong-like crescendos and Henry winds down into cymballic pings off something. Henry leads the audience into a slow plodding stamp that slowly fades out to end.