Kevin Drumm, Prurient, Beach Fuzz & Cheapmachines – Barden’s Boudoir, London – 29/1/08
4/5
By: Charlie Potter
On my merry way to Barden's for what promised to be yet another great show from the folk behind Upset The Rhythm, I managed to arrive at Old Street tube with half an hour to get up the Kingsland Road, so I decided to walk. This is not a mistake I will make again. I got there in good time, but had a terrifying journey on my way there, yet all was good in the end as I managed to arrive just in time for Cheapmachines, without sustaining but one stab wound.
Cheapmachines (****) start out with your standard power electronics intro, at which point I'm nonchalantly thinking 'here we go...', but after a suitable duration of mind pummelling, the noise subsides into a pleasant fuzzy drone which acts as a suitable warm up to Kevin Drumm's headline set, sounding almost exactly like the intro to Mr. Drumm's 2003 Album Land of Lurches. The set goes on to be a good, subtle, well considered short laptop noise set, which settles me in to the night just right.
Next up are Beach Fuzz (**), which compared to the efforts of Cheapmachines before them come across as more of your standard noise show warm up act - lots of people bent over double fiddling with guitar pedals. There is nothing wrong with this set, but we've seen it a million times before is all - if you took any three arty sound lovers and put them in a room with some instruments and not much planning, they'll invariably turn out something similar to this.
Call me Al - no, call me a square - but more and more these days I find myself going to noise shows thinking, 'God I hope I can get home with my ears intact'. It's not the loudness that bothers me, it's the frequencies used. I've seen plenty of noise stalwarts in my time, including Merzbow, John Wiese and Aaron Dilloway, and left with my ears thoroughly intact. It's not these people I fear, as all of these people are highly sonically intelligent - they understand the need for very full, abstract sound, but also understand that if you do your ears in this will impair further enjoyment of this experience. No, the people I fear are the macho idiots who don't understand that there are plenty of frequencies that you can and can't hear that will damage your ears.
There are a few minutes at the beginning of Prurient's (****) set where the audience are submitted to some very high pitched noise, but gladly this ends in time to make it the kind of mildly masochistic experience that is character building. After this there is some interesting layered up fuzzy sounds that sound like there's some sampling of some kind of weird protest march emanating from the end of time. After a while of being pleasantly submerged in this dirge, Prurient launches into this tremendously intense onslaught, and I must say that I am incredibly impressed. After seeing a disappointing performance at ATP a year or so ago, I understood that his craft probably worked better in a small venue, but this was a million miles better than his ATP performance. Rather than the straight forward shouting over power noise, Prurient here demonstrates a far more considered and interesting approach. Whereas you still have the magical shouting performance, which I will come back to, there is some incredible synth-driven intensity that almost forms a melody growing over the crusted pounding. Then, over the top of this, his voice - swamped in reverb - virtually drags his guts out onto the stage. I imagine a barbaric, eternal planetoid that drives his one true love to death, wrought with the loneliness of a monster. Prurient really gives it all here, and for that I am impressed - the set wanders through various landscapes until it ends quite suddenly.
Unfortunately it becomes apparent that a lot of the audience is there for Prurient, and leaves. Those who do stay seem to be so wrapped in how wonderfully tortured Prurient was to notice that Kevin Drumm (****) is actually playing. I'd been looking forward to this set all night, and am furious when five mere minutes into Drumm's set there are still loads of people talking. Usually my standpoint is that if you go somewhere where there is a bar, you are going to have to expect some talking - after all, the silence is one of the major things you are paying for when you go to the Barbican - but this is ridiculous. Virtually half the people in the room are talking over one of the most subtle, considered noise makers of forever. For me, this ruins the long subtle intro, and people only start to shut up when it gets quite loud. There are some more mind blowing, mesmerizing, textured sounds before the set ends, and overall it is an incredible set, but it doesn't last long, and Mr. Drumm himself looks really disappointed. As you might guess I put this down to the idiots that have ruined something that I'd been looking forward to for at least a month. Yet if he comes back this way again I'll jump at the chance to attend - my faith in him as an artist with enormous integrity still stands, and I now intend to embark on some of the more distant regions of his back catalogue.
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