Well, (lovely to meet you Dan by the way) Ship Canal is shitting it; it's his first gig, his first play out (play seems very apt for this kind of gig; Ableton Live being the toy of choice, the machine of a thousand voices, the churning dreadnaut in software form, sending boys and girls into whirls and paroxyms...)
I meet him about two hours before he's due on, staring at wine, wishing it glugged, knowing it can't be... his set works really well, works great with the chugging visuals... this crowd is a good crowd, a benevolent mass of chin-strokers and music lovers... Everyone's telling him it'll be fine, it's fine... he opens the evening really well... interlacing loops and samples of the other artists on show tonight, sending heads nodding when the beats kick in... great stuff; keep playing, keep playing...
By the end he's smiling.
He doesn't stop smiling.
Kemper Norton is also looking a little scared though he's played before, just never in this big city, where things might smoke, where the worry (we all have this worry) is that the London crowd is over-used, over-indulged in weird sounds, doesn't have to go too far to look for new weird sounds, can just glance and then dismiss...
I meet him pre-set and he's looking at wires and wondering... attempting to get mini drunk, drunkette... I buy a few cocktails, just to wind him up... I volunteer some breakdancing, to help distract the crowd... I know he's gonna be great and he knows it too but... there's always doubt, especially since he's just confessed that he's going to, er, sing something tonight...
Sing? Jesus, Dave. You're going to sing?
Jonny Mugwump describes Kemper Norton's set as "like a weird cafe" and he's got that right... all the tables and the candles do make it seem like that, maybe that cafe you finally find at 4 AM in Glastonbury Festival, somewhere up beyondf the stones, in the odd streetlit back-alleys of Shangri-La... at times, it's a kind of odd, lilting Cabaret (Voltaire - in the Swiss Dada sense, in the writer sense... Kemper would make a great soundtrack to Candide). It's haphazard at times, and he sometimes looks at his instruments as if they are about to punish him for some terrible sin, but it's also unique and affecting...
I've talked about Kemper Norton's music many times on here before, though this set is decidedly more slurred and urfolky and less beat-driven than a lot of his stuff and, despite the fact that he interrupts his flow by stop-starting in the middle (some people stopped watching here, which seems to mean stopped listening), by the end of the set, people are captured again. He takes a while to build up towards the song but, when it comes, it's...
It's...
People are listening again.
The song. The song. The slightly broken voice that might be a part of the accompanying wheezing ghostbox harmonium (harmony and radium) comes out.. a gentle folk song, gender benderingly untouched by Kemper hands... love, loss, sex and maidenhood despoiled... you can hear breath; Kemper's, the audience.
An odd magic.
Next, Time Attendant starts fuzzing with Coil synth trails; beginning more or less beatless and building swarms... a little bit reminds me vaguely of the Time Machines Coil stuff... especially the Queens Of The Circulating Library clamshell disc... a little later he starts up beats, cranks them and we get brittle headbutts of sound... audience heads nod (this isn't the place to dance but, people could dance, if they had a head full of belladonna, if they'd forgotten how)
and then came Philip Jeck; dance(ette) music for the already half gone... Jeck is as close to truly religious music as most of these people ever get and he seemed almost ghostly, a presence at the back of the room, watching the other bands, sucking in their sounds and getting ready to regurgitate his own. Jeck is the master regurgitator, taking what's not his, stealing as genius (the quotes go on into eternal regression)... what he's stealing tonight is thunder, or attempting to... that seems to be the message here, the underlying narrative... here comes Philip Jeck to blow these lil fuckers out the water (I'm sure he doesn't think this but I overheard a few conversations); people are quite crazy excited about him playing...
Butm in truth, while the sounds he coaxes wax and wane and certainly pulse it's way through this crowd, his set doesn't blow the other, younger, bands away... (The Liminal seems to disagree), he's not coaxing truly unheard sounds from his decks... I might be drunk as buggery by the time he's on but he looks even a little...disinterested, despite the eager audience...
I'm being harsh. He is a master at what he does; his set spins together in a way it really shouldn't and I like a lot of his records and find the time to play them more than almost any other artist of this type but I felt this wasn't transportive enough tonight. I dunno, there'd been a lot of drone out there, maybe you can fill up on drone, maybe there's a fucking limit...
Still, this evening was wonderful. I met up with some lovely people I've only ever chatted to online before and met some old friends who I've missed a lot this past year. It was also cool to put a face to Andrew and Chris Bailiff and, of course lovely to see Jonny again...
The Vortex remains an unique event in an unique place (and outside The Vortex is like a little slice of London life that looks scripted by Richard Curtis; very surreal and very beautiful); if you haven't been yet (anyone who reads this not been yet?) you need to. People will be talking about these events, one day. You'll need to go once, just to pretend you've always been there.
2 comments:
Really like the pictures you took for some reason.
It was a bloody pleasure to meet you too mate, thanks so much for this review.
Here's hoping our paths shall cross again in the future.
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