Ice Bird Spiralling

Like the Sex Pistols show in Manchester, people will say they were here; a gathering of utterly lost tribes: Sunburned Hand of The Man fans, Dubsteppers, Idiot's from the blogs...

Ice Bird Spiral are playing their first gig in the lonely backwater of The Croft. It's dark in there and it needs to be.

Things stopstart at first... the pause is the passion; the Heath Robinson assemblage of toys and stylophones and broken keyboards won't easily give up the ghost - it takes a short, heartstopping, while, full of slowly frantic fumbling, gestures from dead-eyes (the masks are a work of genius - funny and scary in alternating glimpses - they look like the residue of Cernunnos just after a damn fine melting at the hands of the Crewkerne Doughboy Blowtorch crew) before the ElPh-like buzzes and seesaws start to really get going: this is music at a stretch but it needs channelling, no way the little fellah is going to appear without a fair amount of seam-stitching and gesticulation.

But come the music does, spiralling is quite appropriate - echo is everywhere, filling people's personal space... down the front Gutter is grinning like a newly tossed saveloy, lost in this spastic dub, this crawling ... me and Doppelganger are awe-struck, not sure where the boys are going next... in just half an hour the soundguy going to be cutting his head off trying to tell the Ice Birds that their time is up but there's no way those masks will let enough light through...

...Kek is ratting with a knife on an amplified thumb piano, stretching Congotronics out of the jungle and back to the West Country scrubland, back to the woods. Cloudboy is exploring the guitar on his lap like he's never seen one before - this is music for Autistics, for one armed avant folk guitarists, for people who understand that a toy whale (complete with red light and authentic whale noises) scraped across a guitar pickup and shoved through a dozen echo chambers will make things all right, will make it seem like Sven Vath never happened...

Catch them before they catch up with you.