Right, this is the review I've been promising to various people for some
time (Teep!). Thanks to Ben for the bits of inside info. Sorry if it's a
bit long. I've tried to keep it fairly entertaining. I hope.
Date : 02/04/94
Venue: The Orbit, Morley, Leeds.
Time : 20:00 -> 02:00
Cost : 10 quid
Flyered lineup:
Aphex Twin, Kosmik Kommando
Live: mu-ziq, Kinesthesia
Comments:
This was a night I was really fired up for, one of the UKs best techno
labels in one of the Uks best techno clubs. Orbit's New Years Eve event had
been an absolute cracker and I couldn't see how it could be topped. In
the event, it was and it wasn't.
The amazing thing about the Orbit is that despite the fact it is in the
middle of nowhere, it still packs in a crowd, I duely arrived at 19:30 and
still joined a 50 strong queue.
Inside I was greeted by the usual Orbit decor, kind of camaflage netting
over the 2 level 'theatre' type arrangement. They already had some scary
visuals going but that was about it for effects. NO lasers tonight. The DJ
at that point was some guy covered in little red LED lights. I later
learned that this was Grant, in his drn designed shirt. And I don't think
he needs to give up his day job as record label owner :) His mixing,
whilst fairly competant, was nothing overly special; tho he spun a few
favorite tunes of mine (including some earlyish Plus8 stuff and 'Jesus
loves the Acid'- Ecstasy Club.
Far more interesting than Grant's mixing, was the sight of the Rephlex
posse sprawled over the stage behind the decks and the interesting pile
expensive looking keyboards and electronics scattered amongst them. On
the left hand side of the stage was what looked like a mini-studio. Three
big keyboards (No; I have no idea what they were, a Yamaha and a Roland
something), an Atari ST & monitor and a box which might have been a
sampler or a drum machine. This was the only equipment I could see so I
began to wonder if we were only going to see one live performance after
all. I was not to be disappointed.
Quite a few of the Rephlex crew were wearing those cool 303 design
T-shirts. The man like Richard D. James was up there too, in a neat Tamphex
t-shirt. He spent most of the night either chatting to (presumably) his
bird or looking half asleep.
By the time I'd kinda figured everything out, Grant had finished his set
and handed over to another guy, who I think was Kosmik Kommando, anyway
he's called Graham (and his friend Kelly is the one of the maddest dancers
I've ever seen, he apparently used to dance for Baby Ford and he is just
something else. Non stop. Must have carbon fibre legs, something
artificial any way :) The crowd had built up and the dance floor was
filling with the usual clued up Orbit crew.
At this point I thought 'ah ha' here's where the night really gets going,
I figured KK has to be a pretty good DJ and we were going to be in for a
mad techno workout. Well again, yes and no and this was my biggest problem
with the night. KK *was* a reasonable DJ, certainly better than Grant :),
but I thought he played a lousy selection of tunes. In fact a downright
wierd collection of tunes. Not really hard techno, not really house or
trance, not dubby, certainly not jungle (thank god :) it was a strange
mixture. The crowd certainly seemed to pick up on this and although lots
of people were dancing, I think they were all a bit confused. The Orbit
crew like their music hard, fast and acidy. This it was not. His mixing
was fine, not really in the Big Name DJ class but I wasn't expecting this.
Maybe everyone else was, I don't know. He kept fiddling with the EQ too,
which was dead annoying.
KK had been on for about an hour, maybe more, when there started to be some
activity around the keyboards. This immediately caught my interest!
I get into a good spot to see what was going on (a couple of metres away
from the equipment, exactly where I had been to watch CJ Bolland do his
stuff live a few months before). A tall, thin, long haired, bespectacled
guy with a 303 tshirt has installed himself behind the ST and keyboards.
At this point I have no idea who he is. After a few nervous scratchings
with a mouse and a couple of prods at various bits of equipment he's
off. Within a few milliseconds I identify him as mu-ziq. A whole hour
later he was simply God. Absofuckinglutely brilliant.
This guy played live. Really live. There were mistakes, but nobody noticed
or cared. I'll say now I'm still not totally certain of which tracks he
played, I was so involved I didn't really notice. Which is a bit odd really.
Any how, I think he started with _tango 'n vectif_ which sounded a bit
different to the album version, but then all the tracks did. This *was*
live. What I thought was really amazing is that he played a lot of the
keyboard chords live, which really added to the emotion of it all.
At one point he was playing these beautiful stringy chords with one hand,
blind, whilst frantically thrashing about with the mouse, looking at the
monitor screen (presumably to sequence other bits and bobs (?) AND
fiddling with this other unidentifed drum machine thing. All the time
wearing this slightly manic nervous look and constant wincing when things
were just slightly 'out'. Stunningly involved performance. Other stuff I
recognised in that far to short hour were _swan vesta_ _Burnt sienna_
_iesope_ _phi* 1700_ and i think _auqeam_ and _Phragmal synthesis part 3_.
AND of course he played _mu-ziq theme_ which was a high point in a whole
set of highs.
The only critism I have, is that he didn't play any of the stuff with those
stunning sub bass lines or Die Zweite Heimat or Sonic Fox. But you can't
have everything. He did play quite a bit of stuff I didn't recognise, so
there was some new material. All excellent naturally. I noticed that RDJ
seemed to perk up out of his semi slumber during this set. I guess he thinks
it's good stuff too :)
The dancer for all of this lot appeared to Paul of AFX fame; certainly
stripped to the waist and with the same crazed 'hand as blades fighting some
unseen monster' type dance he looked similar.
I was kind of surprised the crowd got into it too because it certainly
isn't thump thump dancey stuff. One guy was obviously a bit too into it
(or out of it) and spent most of the set clinging to a speaker stack
going "shouting oh my god the bass". Hmmmm.
mu-ziq finished and on came KK again. I heard one E'd up monster pull him
over and say "really fucking bang it hard now mate". To which he got a
polite smile and a nod in true DJ style. Unfortunately KK didn't really
thump it, tho it did get a bit harder. After maybe 30 mins on came Chris
Jeffs AKA Kinesthesia. For those of you who haven't heard Jeffs' EP; well
he comes in two varieties (a bit like RDJ, tho' he doesn't sound like him)
either total mind fuck bangin' oh_my_god_we're_going_to_die stuff or nice
mellow floaty stuff.
He turned out to have a slightly smaller pile of equipment on the other
side of the (small) stage. He played sat down RDJ stylee and also like RDJ
didn't appear to do much. But what the fuck, it all sounded good and I
couldn't see to well from my side of the stage any way. In fact he spent
alot of the time sat back, grinning like a Cheshire cat. What he did 'do'
involved big mixing board with lots of channels that he occasionally
whipped up and down. At this point I'll had you over to Ben...
quoted 10 lines Chris sets up his set beforehand (he practiced it about 3 times a day
> Chris sets up his set beforehand (he practiced it about 3 times a day
> for over a week)... his stuff is a bit more difficult to sequence so
> easily than [u-ziq] ([u-ziq] only ever uses his sampler for one track and
> he can choose what tracks to play real time...) in this sense, chris's is
> like a dat set without the dat... plus some human touch (keeping both
> samplers loaded and his little sequencer is a bit of a hassle)... he could
> have played church of pain off dat... but otherwise he would have had to
> bring 2 other keyboards with him... and you should have seen the size of
> out mini-bus (17 people and all of mike [mu-ziq] and chris's gear... nasty
> squeeze)...