All Tomorrow’s Parties – Easy To Swallow, Curated By Russell Haswell – SeOne Club, London, 2/6/05
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
It's rare that you come to trust a concert promoter in the same way you come to unconditionally admire the output of a certain record label, artist or producer. But with ATP, even if you're never certain of euphoria, you can always be confident of an eye-catching, ear-abusing treat. So, a drill'n bass master flanked by some reportedly unlistenable clamour and a number of names we can't pronounce? For the bloke in the street - no chance. For All Tomorrow's Parties, we're there.
The soundtrack to our cautious entrance into the oppressive arches of the SeOne club is Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, a Swedish noise artist capable of instilling both fear and wonder with a single guttural analogue drone. Whether this is his intention or not is unclear, but here's how it appeared to us - wander around the room and the sound merges to and from different emotions depending on where you're experiencing it: towards the back of the room, the top-end twiddles are a comforting birdsong amidst this dark emporium; near the front, they're scratching on your lobes; the bass to the side of the room develops a certain regularity which sooths; whilst the same rattle across the floor seems to be shaking you by the ribcage. Carl stands motionless in the middle of the stage, studying each and every reaction. It's something that can be perceived differently not only from varying emotional states, but also fluctuates between purely physical vantage points. Really rather intriguing.
Yasunao Tone is a man whose 33-year dedication towards improvisational and downright barmy sound-sculpting shows no signs of slowing down. Combine him with live with the freeform kindred spirit named Hecker and shove them in front of a couple of laptops and the resulting concoction was never about to be something simple. 'Easy To Swallow', they titled the evening. Whatever, lads. This is tough, but worth it - impossible to decipher and cumbersome to digest, the enjoyment comes in the sheer unpredictability of everything, the bleeps and pops of it all seemingly coming as randomly to the audience as they are to the partners on the stage. Some people try to dance, and look thoroughly bizarre. At a guess, it's Hecker who's in control of those low, directionless rumbles and Mr Tone masterful over the clicking, buzzing, small explosions of bleeping noise that fly above our heads. Overall effect - we're battered. General consensus - flippin' heck, what was that?
Following that with anything more indecipherable would actually be physically impossible, and neither Mark Stewart nor his Mafia put in an attempt to do anything of the sort. It starts with an inescapable groove, very low, very funky and quite deft with some sleaze. Stewart, leather jacked clad and with an unnerving, intense gaze fixed firmly in his eyes works the stage by punching, pulling and throwing his frame around hypnotically, but whilst its quite a sight and rather something of a sound, the problem is that the aforementioned groove that kicks things off neither goes anywhere nor reaches a level where it's all encompassing. Between the bizarre nature of what preceded it and the difficult to predict (and all the more exciting for it) character of what will follow, it passes over many, not reaching the legendary heights of Stewarts past nor creating the new ones it could quite easily have done with a little less focus on the dead funk, and a little more attention to the urgency of the moment.
Aphex Twin, contrastingly, gets stuck right in there. Kicking off in an entirely different style to his last ATP associated performance, whereby a good hour or so of rather beautiful ambient meanderings acted as a precursor to the banging dance offs that followed, here our Richard D James (or at least that's who we presume it is, after all, that silhouette who takes over from the between-band DJs without even a second of silence and sits covered in smoke and hidden behind a laptop could actually be anyone) cuts straight to the chase. Shorter set time means the build up is replaced with a no nonsense, beat filled, crowd rocking selection of rather cracking dance music, possibly the most easy to swallow thing on the entire bill. Whilst it does lose something in having to kick straight in with the good time Aphex, once you've caught up with the ridiculous pace of it there's little to do but let your limbs follow suit. Dance music, unlike anything largely reliant on a guitar, is probably the area of music where there is the most room for experimentation, and in the hands of the Twin, most chance of success at doing just that. It's not dead - it's just so many light years ahead of what we're used to, that just like with the pace of this set, it'll take us time to catch up.
Lordy, and I thought Wolf Eyes were noisy. Whitehouse take it to another, largely more electronic, screeching level. Beyond the din, it's easy to see that the duo encompassing this vile, enchanting spectacle are incredibly angry, but what they're angry at is a complete mystery. You deduce they're probably vitriolic against everything. 'F**king sick of it! You hear me? We're F**KING SICK OF IT!' That rant is repeated so often it becomes something of a catchphrase, a diatribe designed to be adopted as a weapon against anything anyone in the crowd might be feeling unwholesome thoughts towards at the time. Is it political or mindlessly nihilistic? Most people here are clueless, some even angered by the sheer anger of the set, running to the front to shout abuse and throw bottles - something which the band seem to feel right at home with. It suddenly dawns on you - these people are performers. As such, they must be doing this because they enjoy it. The fury is only delivered so forcefully because there's a real desire to screech and shout and make hideous electronic noise louder than anyone else ever has. And with that suspicious glint in the eye and grin on the mouth, it becomes both something all the more devilish and progressively more entertaining.
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