Boys Noize & Simian Mobile Disco – The Warehouse Project, Manchester – 3/10/09
4/5
By: Alex Hibbert
Returning for its fourth year, now in its third beneath Piccadilly station, Manchester’s Warehouse Project is a strange enterprise. Welcomed by giddy anticipation as “for twelve weeks the city is ours” posters flick up around the city’s notched spaces, it’s a night that’ll be described by some as the best in Manchester, and looked on with a puzzled bemusement by others. Sure, there’s a propensity for large crowds of endless grins making firm four second friendships and queues for the toilets the likes of which can end in very visible disasters, but the Warehouse is Manchester; its resonance felt throughout the city’s underground and pulsing up into its more airy spaces.
This year’s no different, it’s never gonna label itself anything but bigger and better, but really it’s ethos seems to be settling into a constant strive to book the newest best, to improve the small inconsistencies in the venue – this year more toilets, slightly more accessible layout – and constantly challenge other clubs in Manchester to raise their game. The crowd filtering through the red velveteen entrance tonight know why there here, as Store Street plays host to a raft of talent that be of an ilk that thrive on fist f**king beats that tear through you at a regurgitory pace.
First up Simian Mobile Disco, who have recently had us scratching our heads as to the band they really want to be: that of the dark, claustrophobic beats of Attack Decay Sustain Release, or a more empowered outfit, who aren’t afraid to mix superlatives in amongst the corrosive nature of electro’s pulse, a la Temporary Pleasures. In fact what tonight proves is they can do both, as the crowd swelter below the disharmonious racket of wires that tower above. They start off all niceties, but as the stage darkens and lights fly into the former air raid shelters gloomy recesses, soon it’s gloves off. By the time ‘Hustler’s stuttering clenches the knots even tighter in the stomach, Ford and co. Depart, leaving the appetite sated, but still longing, just as it should be.
What Alex Ridha – aka Boys Noize – seems to have learnt since Oi Oi Oi’s bewildering fist pump, is that sometimes less is most certainly more. What he does tonight is bridge the gap from minimal to maximal, swinging between noise that stealthily pummels, and noise that overpowers with a deft touch. ‘Jeffer’s’ possibly the greatest rave tune that’s almost impossible to rave too, the cloying crowd pushing limbs awkwardly into each other, rather than into discernible dance moves, and ‘Kontact Me’ builds and builds and builds, the climatic automation decimating new sonic patterns into Warehouse’s brick and mortar. Empowered by the success of new album Power, the Hamburg DJ’s set’s a cursory reminder of just how far he’s come, and back lit in one of Manchester’s finest spaces, a stark reminder of just how far he could go.
Artists in this article: Boys Noize, Simian Mobile Disco
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