Clock DVA / Ramleh (live at Signature Brew)

London
28 November 2025

We arrived a little dishevelled, having taken a few stressful wrong turns in getting to the venue, meaning we only caught the last ten minutes of Ramleh’s set — and what a glorious set it must have been, as we quickly acclimatised to the full-on clawing guitar / effect soup they were plying.

A glory that effectively drowned out those pummelling drums in an impressive insurrection. The white of the drummer’s eyes hard-staring the distant ceiling like he was possessed, his body hunched over and slamming in ultra hard circles. An intensity suddenly torn into a fraying syrup of cooling sparks, after which Gary Mundy offered his heartfelt thanks.

You can quote industrial that, post-punk this, but Clock DVA feel like they’ve evolved on their own terms, mutated into something more interesting. The clinical harshness of those beats raspberry-rippled in spidering dark matter, atmospheric accents, Adi Newton’s broody delivery cherrying that all-important attitude. So glad we got there in time to witness in full.

Ever since Man-Amplified or maybe before that even, visuals were an important part of Clock DVA’s mystique and tonight’s projections onto a screen of semi-transparent silky cloth in front of them elevate that already excellent sound into something extraordinary. They felt more like apparitions, floating between audience and performers than mere projections, fractures of which were caught on the other screen behind them.

A stunning flicker-fest of swirling sci-fi and spiro-graph goodness that hooks into the music, takes you deeper into what makes them (now DVA duo of Adi Newton and Maurizio ‘TeZ’ Martinucci) tick. A splattered pharmacopoeia of richness that nourishes those atmospheric arcs, that arterial pulse.

Live it’s more physical — in your face. The songs unravel differently, seem to slant with more urgency as that adrenalinised thump is tethered in a fragmenting freefall of images and expanding geometrics. Doesn’t feel like a show of separate songs, but an ever-evolving spectacle that takes in the Buried Dreams album and other more recent creations.

I catch the words “Through a starless sky, my heart is black” of the “ACT” to large eyes and blurred faces, folding into a Bridget Riley cuckoo of overlapping shapes and compressed intersects. That strange whirling saucer of the sonics knuckling the kinetics and vice versa. The vitality is rich, expanding, a haemorrhaging nebula that eats into the chemical spillage of possibly “Neoteric”? That star-clustering sway of what I think was “Return To Blue”, its slumbering BPM and raspy piano distortion bathed in a moody Picasso-blue soaked screen as the freckles on a girl’s face atomise into an explosion of petals that dusted the screen in dappled greys.

Intersecting patterns everywhere; Brion Gysin’s dream machine, saturated, serrated on teethy triangles and uncoiling data points that created amputated hands and spinning MRI scans neuron-mapping to sweet infinity and the slippery sinisters of “Hide”. That dub-like jostle of “Drive The Exotic Non-essentials” (a recent unearthing on their Second Sight comp) really gets the crowd swaying and me too, losing objectivity to a satisfying low-gravity shuffling dance. This was superb… razoring… ultra bright.

When “Sound Mirror” hits, it’s cheered! Adi Newton’s funnelling voice… that morse-milled-codex… Tez filtering in sharp scimitars and glinting keystrokes as the taut trance-like frame hurtles hot. There’s a falling spaceman on screen and you feel the helplessness in the sonic tumble of those sharpened melodics rush on over you. A life-affirming experience that ends on an updated version of “The Hacker” that mauls supernova, stuttering in harshly beaten majesty, rough-cut keys and an urgent thrust of images that pile upon your retina in stark black’n’white.

And when the job was done, it was done, a decision no amount of synchronised screaming for “more” could resurrect an encore to. If I get the chance to see them again I’m going to take it. Utterly mind-blowing.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-