December 2017
Green Door Store
Capzilla 20s
The evening started with Capzilla 20s, two SH101s linked up on a table in front of the stage facing each other, me and Caleb in large white mouse-ish masks with long horns. Which meant I couldn’t see much…. We set up drones and started detuning and setting up beat frequencies and standing waves at heavy bass frequencies. After a while a slowly revolving sequence started and we started tweaking the filters and such, before upping the noise. At some stage a couple of other people came in shouting through megaphones and a manifesto cut up into small strips.
Chemical Bbrench
Second on the bill was Chemical Bbrench, set up on the floor of the stage, a two piece, guitars, one detuned down quite a bit. Lots of effects. Vast amounts of feedback. Monster levels of bass drone and wash. Felix obviously had one new string which wouldn’t stay in tune so spent a deal of the set winding up the tuning peg. They play just one show a year, the 2018 show will be in January. I recommend catching it if you missed this one.
Futuro De Hierro
Finally we had Futuro De Hierro from Barcelona. Standing at one of the oil drum tables, some electronics, a stretched cassette tape, feedback and vocals. Keeping the bass levels at fairly excessive levels with brutal distorted kick drums, buzzing basslines and thick layers of distortion. He played some tracks from his new album, ‘Paso en el Vacío’, and a couple of older tracks.
Gus Garside started the evening with an introduction, and then a piece by James Tenney called “The Beast” which was a complex microtonal piece from a visual score, all bowed often two strings sounding, long notes , very technical and about 6 minutes long “it’s called ‘The Beast’ because it IS a beast”. I should coco.
The second act of the evening was Franck Barriac, over from France for the Himmel massed organs show at Cafe Oto. He was sitting at the back of the room with a quadrophonic setup, the usual Caroline PA behind us and two extra channels at the back, in front of us. Franc’s set was a soundscape piece based around urban field recordings and tones. It’s amazing how unused we are to this surrounding kind of performance, especially with the artist in front of us, sounds from behind (even after the introduction telling us it would happen) seem really disconcerting. Anyway a really nicely structured piece, partly pre arranged and partly improvised, I gather from talking to him.
Finally it was Futuro De Hierro from Spain. We utilised the extra speakers to boost up the sound – which was handy as it happened, as a few minutes into his set the main PA seemed to glitch out, although those of us sat at the back didn’t notice as we were immersed in the joyous racket lurking up behind us. A quick work around the cabling and it all seemed OK again, but Viktor seemed a little subdued. Still some excellent beats and bursts of noise, and some really interesting kit to look at. We must get him back for a full throttle set at The Green Door Store.