After staring at the various equipment set up on stage for several minutes,
and then realising that among them was a kettle and a typewriter, Matthew
Herbet comes on wearing a red raincoat while holding a can of Coke plucking
at the ring pull impatiently. He then opens the can to the microphone and
it becomes the first sample. This was my first experience of Matt live and
it was extremely entertaining in all departments. He had some sort of
template prepared for each of the five or so tracks but key samples were
created in real-time from the can as it was destroyed, a kettle, spray can,
plastic bag and typewriter. This guy has a fantastic live set, no doubt there.
Next up was the Mego collective and I'm dying to know who the first guy
was. His track consisted of some wonderfully dynamic and syncopated rhythms
and while at times it was ....difficult.... I am dying to hear it again.
The next track was from a group of 3 who had some excellent
sound-responsive visuals. This long piece also had its difficult moments to
my and it seems a few others ears, which i guess is all part of that mego
thing, but some of them which consisted of some geniously algorithmic high
end parts combined with ear-wax shifting subsonics were very, very
pleasant. It's SO good to hear this through such a nice sound-system turned
up damn loud. I have to say that it was fennesz who excelled in this area
of sound system testing (assuming he was the last mego act? any
confirmation?). The duo after the trio were a little less diverse and
provided a slow shifting sonic environment. Was this general magic? It's
hard to digest this music when I normally take several listens :-(. But it
sounds SO good on a pukka system :-).
After the last mego act (fennesz?) had completed his several excellent
tracks and the stage was re-arranged, the headlining Morton Subotnick
provided an intriguing perfomance. The sonics, to my ears, were far less
gripping than the mego stuff but there was a very interesting shockwave
program controlling both audio and visuals that relied on cues from
subotnick's mouse and occasional changes of audio pallet (?) from the keyboard.
Ed
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