roar, scree, chatter & play

Wednesday. A warm enough evening. Inside Kraak thick and heavy. Curiously quiet. A discerning (heh!) audience gathered for some great noise makers.

Infinite Gaah, Aulos' First Reed* (aka Kelly and Pascal of Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides), Usurper, Blood Stereo, and Pengo. A tour working south to north. Close to the end tonight I think. Told it might be a tired night. But there's no sign of it.

Play. A key to the night, to (aspects of) the performers. Infinite Gaah vignetting before other performances clues you in. Tiny bells, solo of cleaning teeth, stylophone, jabber and mutter. Apparently off the cuff. Exploring sounds, exploring possibilities.

And so Kelly and Pascal. Always fascinating, the kinds of things I really love about sound art and similar practices. Quite aside from musicianship it's the approach to instruments and noise-making. Coming to them anew. Not through notation, not through polite expectations of how an instrument should behave. Less 'what sounds are commonly made' and more 'what happens when I do this?'

What happens this time are rumbles, roars and howls at first. Then other sounds: chattering, skittering, chimes, scratches, blowing, skrawks. Noise ebbs and flows, builds, gets swallowed by feedback, then recedes again. A giant seashell that scoops you up, pumps your head full of sound and disgorges you out.

The tide, your own blood pumping, the after-echoes roar on. Splinters in your socks, in your teeth, in your hair. Beautiful.

More from Infinite Gaah. These great, sly, casual jugglings of sound and introductions to the acts. Acts, horrible word, too showbiz. What then? Bands? No, too conventional, it reeks of sincerity, of indie, that desperate combination of ingratiation and posturing. Artists, maybe.

Usurper then. Play. Most definitely. Structured and loose. Performed but not in the obvious attention-grabbing way. Guest vocals and interventions from Karen and Dylan of Blood Stereo's kid.

Usurper sit either end of a table littered with all kinds of shit. Anything that makes a noise: heavy balls, rulers, door handles, christ knows what else. They exchange phrases and play straight faced with their accumulated junk. I think the table's contact mic-ed either end.

It's a conversation of Beckettian repetitions. It's open-ended but bears the shape of something structured. It's noises almost at random. Almost like the talk is the music, and the clatters, boings, scrapes and shrieks are the interventions of a mechanical Mark E Smith spitting non-verbal non-sequiturs.

Blood Stereo back in Manchester only a few months after the last time. It starts with voice, sibilants, then generated wails and groans, tape sounds periodically muttering underneath. Although it doesn't start with language the jabber, rumble and squee eventually devolve into a repeated and varied phrase. Passed back and forth, out of synch, matching up, simultaneously emptied of meaning and filled back up again. Then they're done. Play, sound making, language (again, there's a lot of it about tonight), focus.

It starts familiar then bends out of shape. There's a kind of telepathy. Almost extends to the audience. You start out standing on a slope that little by little slips away from you, until you're lying on your back with thoughts circling.

More play from Infinite Gaah. Then Pengo. Honestly although they're described as legendary I haven't heard of them before. But that's my problem, my ignorance. The closest thing to conventional music tonight. But don't let that put you off.

Synth ticks, vaporous high pitched guitar skitter, tape tones through delay pedal, peripatetic recorder scrawls. Then more sustained synth sounds, guitar as a weightless veil in the background, delayed vocal drones, saxophone.

Nobody slacked off tonight, and everyone was compelling, drilling into the possibilities of sound from different angles, but there's a different energy about Pengo. Surprisingly refreshing for late in a tour in a hot summer at the end of a sweaty night when music and language have been pulled apart and picked over.

And that's all. Great night. Not enough people there if I'm honest, but the possibilities! The sounds! It makes you wanna run home and start bashing out your own experiments. So do it. Forget what you know. Start with your ears and every object open to messing with.

So next time then.

*Corrected from Aulos' Last Reed. Apologies, was writing on my phone from obviously fallible memory.