February 2018
Green Door Store

LeCabLe

So LeCabLe are set up at the back, they have a long trestle table full to overflowing with gear, a couple of synthesisers, a pedal steel, big old cassette player 4 track thing, pedal steel guitar and more delay pedals than you can shake several sticks at. So Daniel Dickel gets us started with a slow Carpenter synth booming across the room while Paul does indeed get to shake his sticks at the steel guitar. After this unfolds for a while we get another sequence stepping a bit more lightly across the room while Paul layers thin ambiences through it, the occasional thunder roll, or thin digital squeal, or one of the delays bounces something around. The cassette slowly washes this out while Paul works on some more improvvy sounding clicks and scrapes and the synths get muddled up in there, sloshing and whishing about. They end up on some fast detuned bubbling sequence that reminds me of that track on Dark Side of the Moon, with some voices and that’s it.

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Blister Pack

Blister Pack are reduced to a two piece as drummer Graham has cracked some ribs, so in front of a slideshow of him, they have their synths racked up. They start loud as hell with a blast of HNW, full throttle that does briefly manage to get even louder. There are some subtleties in there but by and large it manages to alienate a number of folk straight off to the bar. After a few minutes this unpleasantness eases off into a pretty tonal modulating wall of synth which clears slowly before a beat emerges from the gloom. Which in turn winds down to a synth pattern, radio noises, odd sounds, electronic hums and finally whispers out. In many ways it’s a completely reversed set starting as it does with the climax, but it’s an interesting idea and the second half of their set is certainly the most interesting with some nice exposed circuit boards being jabbed with sweaty fingers and right peculiar sounds and devices being moved around.

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Jo Thomas

Jo Thomas finishes off the evening, she has a rolling distorted film, that may be a loop or the view out of a bus window in the country. She has on her table a clear box electronic noise machine that occupies her attention for the first half of her set, big old fashioned rotary knobs on the top, while she croaks into a head mic. The machine buzzes, modulates, glitches digital ducks and clanks at us. There are pretty evil low beating bumps and reckless alien swoops. It gets into a gabba pumping beat interspersed with some tones that get right into my tinnitus, before it swoops away somewhere else. There are some empty lumpy rhythms, and machine scrapers, with steam driven motors. For the final section she brings her laptop on, which provides some extra-dimensional qualities. Odd boops, and digitally frayed elements, which morph into shimmered digital sheets of rotary saw atmospherics, organ train specialities and finally a massive drone off between the different layers.

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