Hacker Farm @ Worlds Unknown

The boys are back in town.

Taunton shivers.

I'm a bit late and a woman in the audience already has both hands over her ears; she looks bewitched, maybe feeling those old ghosts come back to haunt her. Dark planetary voices digging at her bones. I take a few photos but then get told off by the woman on the door, herself a haunted replicant, a pink pearled twin set of malign benevolence...

The Steve Engineered video backdrop works perfectly in this context, this blackened cube of the Brewhouse's Studio; music and video morph and break apart; that could be a cow but it might be a Green Man, perhaps the Green Man...

Odd things are moving on screen. Things that shouldn't move.

I've seen these guys play out a few times now and each time there's wonders. They work in a kind of odd harmony, with potential chaos and crackle that should fall apart but doesn't. It's a minor miracle that this collection of wire and plastic and homemade petrol can synths (noisy little fellah) doesn't tip over into mere drone. Steve's (Farmer Glitch) a calm beat technician, dragging remarkable grooves (yes) from his machines; Kek's (the Kidshirt) an almost elemental wraith, hovering on the brink of suggestibility and small (mushroom) t trance, no more so than when playing his strange sawn off baby vuvuvela and winding tendrils around the room.

Real
Music
Comes
Out

And in their second set, playing with the guy who arranged this evening (playing clainet - i think, and toy thigh bone, a mini bullroarer and saxophone) there's a long slow beautiful track that sounds exactly like a lost Coil song from the New Orleans sessions. Lovely piece of music; I hope they've recorded it.






The collaboration worked well; an album as H(acker) Bilk Farm can't be far away...

In fact, Hacker Farm's music would work with most other genres and musicians because it's sponge-like. It's almost phagocytotic, engulfing but not disarming. It's music that can build a quiet storm around other music without denying or destroying. People should be queuing to collaborate with these guys. Hacker Farm music, despite the 'junkshop shaman' press and it's implications of cider-quaked West Country hermeticism/solipsism, seems a resolutely social music...

Which kind of makes it ironic that I had to dash off. Would've loved to stay for drinks. But...Sick baby syndrome at home. RT calling. Great to see you both again. We'll catch up later.

From The Wytch Machine...