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 Checked out a jolly good wee gig last night. It was in a church, everyone just lounging in the oh so comfy wooden pews. This default-OE-location-bollocks city, normally called "London", turned out a beautiful clear and warm night, so you got sunlight shimmering through the huge stain glass windows above the stage right through til about 10. Nice. Matmos and Labradford are pretty damn irrelevant to the world of dance music, but are just great. Matmos do a lot of found sound crazy shit (when I arrived one of the guys was at the mic making noises like Morph, which were then bouncing about through his laptop), but with some pretty solid rhythms at times. They had one guy with a CD mixer playing original stuff, the guy with the toys and the laptop, and another guy with a sampling keyboard, who seemed to be snatching things out of the mix and playing with them live. Lots of pitch-bendy scratching type noises. When I first turned up I had to laugh, because it pretty much fulfilled every cliche of "experimental music", but when they brought in the beats I started to really get into it. Unfortunately the only Matmos I ever found in NZ (apart from their great remixes of Bjork's 'Alarm Call' :-) was one tune off their first album, on that 'Altered States of America' compilation. Still a good score from the $10 rack at Flipside. :! -) Labradford more people might know - they do that super mellow Sunday evening kind of twanging guitars and heavily reverbed piano stuff... A beautiful wash of sound, but not too different live from on a CD, so I actually flagged and went home. Lo, it started to rain, replete with lightning and shit. :-) Super. Pole, now, I'd expect at least a few people to know. He does huge dub workouts, but just happens to not have any drums in his tracks, and instead uses lots of pops and crackles. Live he was fantastic, and I was really blown away by how majorly dancefloor he was. In the right setting, he'd definitely have people boogying. The one downside was that I came away thinking how it sucked that he'd never get a look in in NZ. I've heard him played out once, by Cyrus at the Matterhorn during one of the 'Une Petite' nights.. mind you Matt C has suggested to me that in Auckland that kind of stuff does get played out as part of techno sets. The NZ scene really is pants, IMO, but then, I guess it's just a matter of scale. Welli's, what, about 40 times smaller than London, so if there can be a really amazing gig at the latter every week or two, there should only be 1 or 2 _really_ good gigs a year in Welli. Hmm... DJ Vadim? That's about it for me for 98, so maybe it works. Likewise, if you're into house, there's probably 6 or 7 big names a week here, and that translates to Welli quite nicely.. a good one maybe every 2 or 3 weeks. I accept that this is just a moan based on my (not so popular) tastes, but, well, fuck you all! |:=) <-- Mandrill Man!! Michael |