It is an interesting spectacle, because although the crowd knows to look forward to two forty-five minute sets and a short intermission, what those two sets might entail is anyone's guess. The air of anticipation is further heightened by the lack of a support slot, so nothing interferes with the trio's planned or unplanned journeys.
Strange Brew
15 posts
Strange angels pouring into the on-screen fractal shapes and patterned orbits. Jarboe silhouetted, long hair flowing over her face, upturned hands to her solemnly pointed words, occasionally raising them in alter-like reverence to the intensity
They don’t let the intensity dip; they just hurl themselves at their instruments and search for each others’ groove. They find it, and then they keep going. We want them to. People in the audience are finding their inner head-banger.
It is cosmic and dusty, like a long road across a desert. It is windblown music, or rather music than rides into the storm until, disorientated and windblown, you find yourself in the eye. It feels like big country music.
With four red lights and plenty of dry ice, the group in their sharp suits and nonchalant swagger looked like a dissolute Rat Pack, each member moving in time with the music, already caught up in the atmosphere... Definitely a night to remember, like a snapshot in time reflected into the future.
That all-important hypnotic unison that each attentively drives towards until the density manifests, literally just appears and things lock into a gristled repeat full of vaporising trajectories. In this case it’s almost industrial -- a buzzing solid wasping your head with its cavorting sibilance. A miraged montage, where you’re not sure who’s doing what, all reverberating in delicious tribal splashes.
A show of shimmery frets and arrowed harmonics carpeted in the subtle ebb of swirling effects. The bayoneted brilliance of Tom Greenwood’s words hazily biting that drumless flow.
Massive drums, double bass and a shiny grand piano meant The Necks were crammed into what remained of the stage. A physically crowded space that suited the band’s intimate interlock.
Man, the energy was insane — breathtakingly direct, leading to me totally losing it (maybe to the gritty pump of “Devoción”?), my body all salvo-daggered, head-flinging abandon as the electronics twerked and tasered. My kinda dance music for sure ...
Bristol 20 September 2024 Well this is a real trip down memory lane. Not only are Seefeel on the road (the last time I saw them was 1995) with the first new material in thirteen years, but they have brought AR Kane along with them to a sold-out Strange Brew. This relatively new venue is really beginning to find its feet in the city, putting on a whole […]
I must admit, I was expecting more of the soundtrack stuff, so to see him front and centre, really living the songs and acting the parts was quite a revelation with his lovely black and white Airline guitar part of the scene. In front of him was a small electronic device which contained backing elements, but really it was about the interaction of the trio that made the show pop.
Oh, a festival of ugly music - how could I refuse? Quite a varied line up too, the action split between two rooms -- the main stage and a cellar-like space further into the venue.
Bristol 16 June 2022 Unfortunately got to the venue a little late, but luckily managed to pick up Stereocilia’s set somewhere at the midway point. Fresh from his support slot for William Basinski at St George’s, that guitar of his was ace, caught in a filigree of looped frets, melodically across a series of brooding landscapes. A textually torn building up of layers full of dramatic swings and […]
Bristol 10 March 2022 The acoustic charms of Stroud-based Maja Lena are first up, a songbird sweetness of voice attached to a fingerpicking deftness, that ’60s Yamaha neck dwarfing her fingers, her vocals skipping like wind-blown grass to gentle tonal shifts, then leaping unexpectedly in joyous abandon. The slumbering reflections of her Christmas-themed song reverbing to those silent quilted fields, the matted mulch of morning leaves.
Bristol, 21 January 2022 This is a pairing of contrasting acts, both enterprising bastions of electronica, one coming from a cinematic sensibility, the other skewing the dance equation.