Were you holed up in Hackney and happened to be scouring the streets for some spick-and-spanned haunt in which to conjure papier mâché masks and the like, Apiary Studios would seem a fairly safe bet. Tonight however it's been overhauled by Dollop as impromptu bars are erected in abandoned back rooms and an unorthodox dancefloor is engineered next door. Spotlights set to an irredeemably satanic shade of sanguine, opening act
o F F Love provides a comparably damnable experience: his face (perhaps appositely) obfuscated by cloth embellished with yins and yangs and his torso tattooed in love bites, he comes across as oOoOO (who coincidentally has reworked CloseToU) fronted by a peculiarly throaty Abel Tesfaye with vox Auto-Tuned excruciatingly through pedals and laptop processing. In flagrant desperation to prove subversive, the masked Max Martin swoops into every unassuming, if patently unamused face and, inclusive of Backstreet Boys reworks, it's a set that comprises the bad bits of every aforementioned reference point. Intriguingly from an aspectual stance, Toby Ridler (or
Becoming Real for purposes musical)
looks forever more like Edward Leeson prior to the panning of time and The Pan I Am whilst sonically his set is laced with jittery menace that jumps from jungle to techno with a single click of the MacBook. From a table cluttered with significantly less advanced technology meanwhile,
Kwes. then spins a track or two with Wings' inherently surreal Let 'Em In strangely restoring some sanity to an otherwise quite inconceivably outré eve. He drops lgoyh, a pulsating, previously unheard track from forthcoming EP and Warp debut Meantime and it indubitably represents a test drive that races away from anything else heard thus far. And so with dusk long since done, the time for
Sunless '97 to rise is nigh...
Leeson quite evidently still attracts staunch devotees as glaring flashes illuminate his tuning of Mustang; swigging of Red Stripe; twiddling with gadgetry and, as gurning jaws seem as though they may be ground back down into the powdered form from whence they came, Edward, Alice and Matthew usher all into an altogether ecstatic state. Whether or not attentions still stem from his essentiality to the scraggiest of ska-suffused indie bands ever to grace the NME index is arguably detrimental yet ultimately irrelevant for the oneiric manner in which he and they now move is utterly transporting. Operating on the fringes of dream pop, pure pop, electronica, synth hop and even R'n'B (the sultry lethargy of Heaven Below tonight tears into an hallucinatory clarity of its own), although their influences may be esoteric and Eno-indebted the airy anthemia of Wicked Gravity is openly accesible and therefore tangible a tutti. Amidst the gasps and exhalations of a portable dry ice machine and with the lights dimmed down low things visually turn – to jog the memory – a little
SALEM although in closing on an irradiate, cello-infused take on
Illuminations they set the trajectory skyward to drift up and away from even the faintest of parallels with said Michigan wastrels. The future's brighter than these four begrimed walls...
