From simonc Sent Mon, Jun 14th 1999, 16:34
From simonc Sent Mon, Jun 14th 1999, 16:34
hi all, as promised, thought i'd wander through my impressions of the Rephlex All-Stars show on Friday in London. Guess a few of the other list members were there, so maybe they can add comments if they agree/disagree.. Firstly, it should be mentioned that Mr. Richard D. James was due to play in the upstairs bar from 9.00-11.30 but, unless he was crouching in the ceiling tiles laughing at us, we didn't see him. The decks were unmanned and there was some seriously weird background music playing. The out-in-force trainspotters were disappointed, needless to say - geek quotient can often be measured by T-shirts, and we even spotted a "Revenge Of The Jedi" one there. Phew, that's, like, one step below maximum geek level, a "Blue Harvest" one :P But actually the crowd wasn't that beardy - there were quite a few relatively 'normal' braindancers out for a good time too :) Getting the upstairs bar out of the way, Luke Vibert played after the non-existent Aphex, and I'm kinda sad I missed his set - word was he spun "Everybody In The Place" by The Prodigy and when I turned up for the end of his set he was playing "We Are IE" by Lennie De Ice - so some serious oldskool going down there. :) After that Rephlex posse member K-Rock started doing some weird scratchy stuff, which I'm sure was pretty worthy, so we wandered off back downstairs. The entrance-level bar, meanwhile, had Grant (Rephlex Master Control, label-boss), DJ-ing some of the time with Maf, another Rephlex employee, and some other people I couldn't place - they wandered through some nice hard techno/electro/acid in a typical Rephlex style, and we even persuaded them to put on some Squarepusher towards the end so we could dance spasmodically 0:) But the main room was the main attraction.. here's who was on and when: First we had Mike Dred doing a DJ set, right at the start of the evening - he was clanging through some inspired electro breaks and managed to pull out an excellent set even though people were only just arriving. Next up (and here's the interesting one) was Ovuca, who Cylob announced as Rephlex's new signing from Finland. Well.. it could just have been the live atmosphere and Ovuca's over-enthusiastic manner, but his stuff sounded absolutely inspired. Very much Aphex and 'Pusher inspired (one track was 'let's see how far we can cut up the Amen break', which I always enjoy), he also managed to mix in some oldskool rave chords, some unearthly laughing and screaming noises, and some _really_ good twisty breaks, cut-ups, weird noises. It'll be very interesting to see what his records sound like, but from where I was standing he sounded like the Aphex/Squarepusher approach one step down the line. The best act of the night, I thought.. he played by playing a DAT/Minidisc and occasionally shouting stuff and laughing into a microphone, btw :) He also jumped around the stage a LOT and even ran through the audience a few times like a little kid. Wicked :) Next up was Cylob, who I guess was playing off some kind of small mixing desk - atleast, he seemed to be able to twiddle knobs and change stuff :) He played "Rewind" to start, heh, then onto a great "Rewind"-clone with the full vocoder/robotvoice/electro stylings called "Living In The 80s" - maybe he's been getting lessons from the DMX Krew in cheesiness, but it still rocks :) Then I guess he went on to some Kinaesthesia-type harder stuff which vaguely interested me, but seemed a bit of a jarring style-change. I think he only played 5 songs before stopping. Next up - DMX Krew. He was tapping out samples on some kind of sample trigger device he was using, plus he had a microphone, Janet Jackson-style, that he was speaking into every now and again. I think he was also miming to some of the vocoder stuff, which is interesting :) He started with an electro version of the Knight Rider Theme (mm, cheese!), which was pretty much the highlight, and then wandered on into some pretty funky but fairly repetitive electro. Finally, D'Arcangelo, who were using a PC onstage with a mouse perched on top of their PC box, heh, and were just crouched behind it all the time, making the show a little static compared to the stuff that had gone before. They also had some technical problems to start with, and by the time they got into their stuff interest had waned a bit. It sounded pretty cool, tho, but by this time it was about 2.30am and a lot of people were leaving, heh. I'm afraid I left then too and missed the final act, Bogdan Raczynski. Anyone see him? What was he like? :) phew, ok, mammoth gig review over. regards, h0l/simon. ps - autechre, hey? i respect 'em, but boy are they humourless :)