(idm) Orbital and Plaid (live)

From Mark Stevens
Sent Sun, Mar 28th 1999, 03:49

Hello.

Orbital & Plaid
Brixton Academy, London, UK
Saturday, 27th March 1999

Plaid wandered on stage just after 20:30, when the venue was only half
full. I'd already been there over an hour and I'd already sussed that
this wasn't really an IDM crowd, so about 70% of the audience just
carried on chatting and guzzling beer throughout their forty minute
set. The remaining 30% seemed to be "in the know" and cheered at all
the recognisable tunes.

Well, perhaps "tune" singular. The only track I recognised was a
heavily modified 'Scoobs'. They didn't play one single cut from 'Not
For Threes', 'Android', 'Undoneson' or 'Peel Session'. I haven't heard
much of 'Mbuki', so I don't know if they played anything from there.

Despite that most of the tracks were probably new, the style was very
much like their Bytes-era Black Dog stuff -- in fact I swear I heard a
few snippets of old Black Dog tracks in there. Lots of analogue
mayhem, pulsing basslines and punchy rhythms. I think the engineers at
the venue were giving the bass a bit too much bias, because I could
just about hear a few melodies straining to be heard in the mix above
the head-spinning bass.

Overall, a solid performance, but nothing outstanding. The highlight
was definitely the final track of their set, a really energetic
acid-techno work out with squawking basses, 808/909 percussion and
lots of raw analogue drones and meldoies.

The Hartnoll brothers arrived on stage just after 21:30, to deafening
cheers. Gone were the trademark 'torch goggles'... in their place were
fucking huge (and powerful) car headlamp goggles! Phil Hartnoll's
beams were piercing right through the smoke and hitting the back walls
of the Academy.

To sum up their set in two words -- fucking awesome. They were on
stage for two hours (yep, two!) and played all of the new 'Middle of
Nowhere' album, spinning in various classics (Chime, Satan, Halycon,
Impact and The Box) along the way.

If the crowd were a bit nonchalant during Plaid's set, then they
underwent a complete change once Orbital arrived. Now, at most gigs of
this sort, you tend to get the dancing types right down the front,
whilst the beard-stroking sit-down types sit at the back. Not so with
this crowd. Every single person in the building was jumping around
like crazy. I've never seen anything like it. I had an excellent
vantage point -- a clear view of the stage (including the excellent
projected visuals) and the mass of people. *NO-ONE* was standing
still.

What was also amazing that people were mostly getting off on the new
material. Again, at your average gig it's the new material that stops
everyone in their tracks, but the new tracks went down a storm. And
with good reason too -- they were amazing. I sincerely hope they're a
good representation of the album's feel, because it means we'll get
the pace and energy of 'Brown', the sophistication of 'Snivilisation',
the production trickery of 'In Sides' and the huge fun factor of
'Green'. Don't worry if you were a bit disappointed with 'Style' --
the other tracks will knock you for six.

It's hard to pick out individual highlights. As far as the old stuff's
concerned -- the new version of 'Impact (The Earth is Burning)' was
amazing; snippets of Belinda Carlisle and Bon Jovi were effortlessly
woven into 'Halcyon'; their reworking of the Doctor Who theme was
fall-down funny (and much better than KLF's). As for the new stuff,
well it was all excellent. 

I only wish I'd booked another set of tickets for the extra Brixton
show on Sunday. Ah well, only two months to go until Lamb (drool).


--
/\/)ark

headspin - http://www.sonance.demon.co.uk/