St Pancras Parish Church provided a fitting backdrop for this evening’s artists; its towering ceilings and marble columns, offset by the closeness of its mezzanine galleries, combined to create a space that imparted an imposing Georgian grandeur, yet with a sense of intimacy and warmth.
First up were Old Apparatus, recent additions to Mala’s Deep Medi label, who gave a remarkably assured performance in what was only their third ever live show.
Moving effortlessly between sonic themes with subtlety and poise, sounds would emerge, shift ground, and then recombine to coalesce into something new. Distant rumbles, clicks and whirs, sinister hollow waves. The listener would at points become suddenly aware that they had with been transported from a hazy dronescape, into a track with a powerful two-step beat, without quite knowing how, like a child being lifted from a car whilst asleep.
Despite a scarcity of explicit drum loops or bass lines, the audience’s active attention was held constantly by an innate sense of musicality, a pervading sense of rhythm and sonic cohesion. In this way, Old Apparatus managed to pick out a delicate path between all-out asbtract drone, and something more akin to dubstep; by carving out this space predominantly through the interweaving and development of different textures, the possibility of melody seemed almost crass.
One of the most interesting points in set was when a cacophony of unimagined factory assembly-lines emerge, with enough rhythm to satisfy rather than jar, but with enough robot complexity to make it tantalisingly difficult for the listener to pin down whether or not it forms exactly a ‘beat’.
The music was tied together by visual projections, which were controlled live onstage. But this was not the drab Winamp-skin wallpaper that is familiar to so many electronic artists - rather, it was deployed as an extra instrument. Harsh arrays of sounds - metallic clacks, hisses, howls and clangs - suddenly swing sharply into cognitive focus, when imagery is introduced containing pistons, crank-shafts, jets of steam.
And while this example may read on paper as a rather obvious juxtaposition, its effect is powerful. This is particularly so in the case of the piston episode, because of the introduction of the image after the musical scene has already been set. It feels somewhat like a naming of your extant but unspoken thought, in the same way that Doris Lessing describes the seductive potential of your character being ‘named’ by a suitor: pinning down a vague sense that you had already been incubating but not assigned a category to, and haven’t even realised you have been incubating until this revelatory point.
These hauntological motifs of Old Apparatus operate in the same territory as a Magnus Mills creation, or the creature in Wallace and Gromit’s ‘Grand Day Out’ – the figure is unknown, does not belong to an identifiable category, yet speaks to a half-understood aesthetic sensibility that sits just on the tip of the tongue; a semi-formed childhood memory; an itch that cannot be located. Mark Fisher has described this unattainability as “The sonic equivalent of the 'corner of the retina' effect that the best ghost stories have famously achieved”. Quatermass groans emanate from the boiler room of a Ballardian nightmare; a Cronenberg photocopier stalks Jacob Epstein shadows across the derelict corridors of a Victorian workhouse.
Philip Jeck contrasted the previous set with warm analogue tones, like butter melting on crumpets, his sound constructed entirely from live vinyl sampling and effects.
This was a more stately affair than the previous act, Jeck allowing himself time to linger over passages, savouring smooth trains of sound that extended over periods of several minutes, their momentum carried along by only the most delicate of tweaks.
As well as a suspicion that this is something that arrives with the confidence and comfortableness that arrives with age, there is an element of the sonic output here that arises from the physical apparatus of his methods. While it may smack of generalisation and nostalgia, there is something intuitively calming about seeking out suitable records, homing in on just a few seconds-worth of material, and expanding on them for extended periods, experimenting to bring new perspectives the fore. In the dexterity and care required to manipulate the vinyl, imperceptibly adjusting dials to hone their form like a woodturner, slowly yielding a pulsating seascape of sound.
This suggestion could seem to be merely a fetishisation of ‘retro’ technology. It is also tempting to dismiss the ‘calmness’ notion by pointing to flaring among turntablists. We could also argue that vinyl sampling was merely a precursor to the ‘shuffle button’ generation, flitting through Youtube amputations like ADHD butterflies.
But Jeck’s approach is surely the antithesis of Youtube surfing. Because, whereas Simon Reynolds writes about the effects of the proliferation of the world’s music at the click of a mouse making for commodification and ephemerality, Jeck’s music takes a small, carefully selected nugget and considers it, examines it, and (crucially) prolongs it over time – swimming against the current of the attenuation of our collective attention spans.
Christian Fennesz began his set in the well-trodden territory of effects-laden guitar loops. It was pleasant; but for all the fuzz and delay, he never managed to lift this element of his performance above the prosaic, and the set really stepped up a notch when he put down the guitar and picked up the laptop, and began to work from a broader palette.
The performance contained extensive passages of sublime mastery of his material, with overlapping themes sculpted and embellished upon. His peak moment was when he stripped away all of the layers to zoom in on a single tone, which he then manipulated for several minutes, exploring its possibilities in detail, before re-expanding the scene by re-building the structure from the ground up.
But, lacking the assured consistency of Jeck’s work, Fennesz hopped between sounds too readily, with an uneven, plum-pudding assortment of tricks. Like the Robert Green of drone, you could never tell when he would rudely intrude upon your reverie with a too-obvious transition, or a pre-heated Ikea synth line.
Fennesz established an even keel in the final third of the set though, with floating, glassy waves that approached something of a digital Jeck. This was a thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the evening, as we were enveloped by a luxuriantly textured fog; a modernist lullaby; a cold, yet soothing ambience that moulded perfectly to the flagstones and oak of our surroundings.
