electronica
Joe Muggs
There are occasional days when the Royal Festival Hall really feels like the people's palace it was always meant to be – and yesterday, with its free concert of live improvisation mixed with dubstep and electronica in the RFH bar, was absolutely one of them. Rave kids, pensioners, parents with babes in arms and some particularly energetic school-age children all proved that given the right context music the border between “challenging” music and entertainment is more porous than some might like to believe.
And it was rather impressive how challenging the curators of the event were willing Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Londoners, we know, can be spoilt. Certainly the crowd, predominantly of nerds in rare and expensive trainers, at the Lightbox last night didn't seem to be overly bubbling with enthusiasm despite an exciting lineup of talent and astonishing surroundings. The main dancefloor area of Lightbox lives up to the club's name, being an arched space with the entire wall/ceiling surface covered in colour-changing LED lights that allow pictures and patterns to dance across the room. But the nerds – and a very few women, mainly in equally modernist trainers – seemed almost oblivious to the fabulous Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Browsing through various past reviews of The xx, two adjectives which occur time and again are “fragile” and “tentative”. These are wrong – but understandable. Certainly the young south-west London band (the members have all turned 20 in recent months), habitually clad entirely in black and quietly spoken if they speak at all, give the superficial impression of diffidence – and the construction of their music is skeletal to say the least, never more so than last night playing as a three-piece with keyboard/guitar player Baria Qureshi absent (whether temporarily or permanently was not made Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It comes to something when the logic of a German act calling themselves “Gas” is the least troubling element of a perfomance. Not that Wolfgang Voigt's ambient music, or the slowly-evolving digital art of Petra Hollenbach projected on the Barbican's cinema screen, contained any obvious shock tactics – but the whole 80 minutes created just about as unsettling an experience as one could imagine from abstracted sound and image.As a club music producer and as one of the co-founders of Cologne's Kompakt label, Voigt has been responsible for some of the most emotive and lastingly affective techno Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Orbital occupy a singular position in the pantheon of Nineties dance live acts that made it to arena-show status. Paul and Phil Hartnoll's trademark shaved heads and specs-with-headlights gave them a massively spoddy image that belied an everyman quality to their music, but although their early releases unquestionably helped form the distinctively British sounds of rave and hardcore, they never quite became part of those scenes.On the other hand, if their insistence on remaining vocalist-free meant they couldn't match the Chemical Brothers, Underworld or The Prodigy for hit singles after the Read more ...