From Hary Walsh Sent Mon, Jul 6th 1998, 11:36
From Hary Walsh Sent Mon, Jul 6th 1998, 11:36
What a dissapointment. Skipping out on a party I had commited to weeks ago to go see Autechre play live in Dublin was a tough decision for me. Not tough to make, but tough to justify to my friends. Arriving in Dublin made me feel a whole lot better. I was going to see Autechre live, and nothing else mattered. We turned up at the redbox really early, queueing before the doors openened. We arrived in to one of the Slam DJs playing deep house grooves. I really enjoyed his set. He did some wonderful things with the mixer, coming really smoothly out of a house track into a really melodic drum and bass track which gained tempo and funk growing to a tremendous break which he smoothly fell back out of into a really funky house track. It really got the crowds attention. Next up was invisible armies. I really enjoyed listening to them. They performed well enough, though a little rough around the edges. It'll be interesting to see what they do and how they develop in the next year or so. The second slam DJ bored me to tears, but that's probably because by this stage we had heard that Autechre weren't going to play live. My heart nearly broke when I first heard it. We waited patiently for the roadies to start dismantling IAs gear, and it didn't happen. A friend approached a sound engineer to try to gleam the truth. Yes Autechre weren't playing live, a very important piece of equipment had dissapeared in transit or something. Shit. They're going to try to do a DJ set. Cool. But they don't have any records with them? Huh? When they did come on they played two tracks off of Anvil Vapre, and two tracks of Cichli Suite. Credit where credit is due, they did make the best of a bad situation. I did enjoy hearing Second Bad Vibel on such an awesome soundsystem. And the crowd seemed totally confused. I don't know why, it just seemed sort of funny. All these people off their heads, dancing and yelling to Autechre, sort of half expecting the distortion to build up or something. I won't even bother describing weatherhall. I didn't really care at that stage, my night had been ruined, by some accident that nobody is really responsible for. What really pissed me off, and the more I think of it the more irrate I get, is that the RedBox didn't let us know before hand. It was a non ticketed event, so all those who had turned up for Autechre could have decided not to waste their money. I missed Wu Tang Clan and a trick set by DJ Noise( 1996 DMC champion ). -- hjw