Dirty Projectors @ Clwb
WORDS & PIC: Sam Easterbrook (Sprout Editorial Group)
It was always going to be an eccentric evening, but I wasn't expecting to walk into Clwb Ifor Bach and find a man in drainpipe jeans and a bowl-cut doing yoga on stage.
In the middle of the floor, away from the eyes of the Health And Safety Executive, was a laptop, a mixer and a tangle of fat wires like jelly worms connected to an embarrassment of sticks and stones and gizmos.
Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons completed his yoga and sat on the floor with his back to the audience, coercing drones and washes of sound that brought to mind Mira Calix's twitchy nocturnal soundscapes.?
Sarah Rara, the other half of Lucky Dragons, was MIA.
As he started shaking sticks and using echo effects and loops, the audience drifted from either hushed curiosity or nonchalance to being more actively intrigued and drifted around to see what was occurring.?
He turned to face the majority of the audience and in doing so the tone and feel of the performance switched and Lucky Dragons started enticing audience members to partake.?
There was no break in the music just an evolution of sound, things slowly falling out of syncopation similar to Basic Channel's tech-dub opuses.?
Snatches of bird-like sounds drifted in and out and I felt more and more like David Attenborough scribbling in my notebook, as Lucky Dragons' movements and non-verbal communication with the audience had a primitive feel, which juxtaposed with the technology he was using.?
It felt like trance music, true trance music rather than the Ian Van Dahl take.?
After some examples of classic British reserve he had ten of so members of the audience in a circle shaking miced-up sticks and waving pebbles over a kind of theremin, the different shapes of the stones producing different sounds.?
With bell loops and shimmers of electronic waves crashing against digital beaches, the music felt Oriental, channelling Japan in the clash between ancient forms and technological possibilities.?
Lucky Dragons then introduced wires that when held together produced a technicolour screech. The wires did not have to touch directly to produce a sound, as holding one in each hand allowed the current (I assume) to pass through the body and alter the sound accordingly.?
A circle was formed and hands were held in different combinations creating new sounds, and the self constructed walls between strangers slowly crumbled.
This primal connection with the primal meditative effect of the music and the sheer basic curiosity in sound was startling, a remarkable performance and one that will stick in the mind for a long time.
Contrary to the assumed billing,?Dirty Projectors took to the stage next. Seeing the usual instruments of indie-rock, I eased back into the comfort zone, assuming the surprises to be over? silly boy.
Not one song stood still, drenched in a frantic energy, skipping between time signatures, swimming in a maelstrom of ideas.?
Dirty Projectors have a Talking Heads?edge to them, both in look (especially main guy Dave Longstreth) and the jerky spurts of guitar, but without the inherent angular white funk.?
Saying that, one song had a wonderous Darkchild manner, a splintered R'n'B feel to the beat and the vocals.?
Oh, and the vocals! Dirty Projectors utilise three female vocalists who are in such close harmony it is staggering.?Multi-octave, multi-layered, chamber-like in closeness and playfulness.
They all came together twisting and turning and tossing around like a ship in stormy seas, far from the safety of port. Louise, my plus one who knows far more about music than I do, was astounded and noted the Celtic note progressions they were using.?
Think Enya, but a lot better. I'm struggling to do them justice.
In other people's hands, what Dirty Projectors do could sound like an awful mess, hiding behind technique and using multiple ideas to hide the fact that they don’t have strong enough material to stay afloat. But this is not the case.
If I may stretch another metaphor [make it snappy ? ed], what Dirty Projectors do is take a piece of Ikea furniture (indie-rock) and construct it without regard for the instructions.?
You can still tell the furniture came from Ikea, but that it is different; altered as the result of a creative mind rather than ineptitude. They fashion an individual brilliance out of a mass produced form while it performs its function incredibly.
Last to take the stage were Polar Bears. This was jazz. I have a fear of jazz. I of course have Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue and John Coltrane's A Love Supreme as there the obligatory jazz albums in every Top 100 Albums EVER list composed by rock critics. But that is as far as I delve.
But, after what went before this evening, my mind was receptive to all things new and was willing to except another challenge.?
Polar Bear did not fail, starting off with a new untitled number the room was filled with a mariachi funeral march, full of intensity and grit and intrigue. Then ? BOOM ? a screeching cacophony of saxophones and nimble double bass, electric guitar and tumbling drums, swaying, tittering on the edge but harnessed in just enough time.?
The music when at full throttle was thrilling. Seb Rochford, a cuddly jazz bear with a huge mane of hair, casually threw out drum breaks, bordering on drum'n'bass but somehow keeping a serene air about him.?
There were times though, during the quiet segments, where it seemed they were holding an inter-instrument farting competition. It bordered on the ridiculous as the guitarist, when he wasn't doing the electronics with an X-Box controller, whipped out a pink heart shaped balloon and played it into the microphone.?
Whether this was playful inventiveness, or a statement of mockery of traditional jazz forms, it somehow worked.
Polar Bear's set was a fusion of cop show funk, drum'n'bass, avant garde jazz, Brazilian samba, acid and blues and a fitting end to an utterly bizarre evening of experimentation and invention.?
