Showing posts with label Mint Lounge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mint Lounge. Show all posts
Thursday, 17 October 2013
Review: Gentleman’s Dub Club – FOURtyFOUR (Ranking Records)
After another summer playing some of Europe’s more adventurous festivals, Gentleman’s Dub Club have polished and released their debut LP, FOURtyFOUR.
From the start, GDC’s gigs always brought an energy and vitality that demonstrated not only gifted ability but also a true enjoyment for performing to lively crowds. Two well-received EPs later, the debut LP shows a confidence and swagger that, when combined with slicker production, has delivered a fine piece of work to back up an outstanding live repertoire.
Opening track ‘Give It Away’ will feel familiar to those who have seen the nine-piece ska-fuelled, dub-driven band before. This is upbeat dub brought bang up to date. Showing variety, ‘More Than Words’ explores some different tempos and delicate vocals that calm before the storm of heavyweight dub tracks ‘Forward’ and the epic ‘Riot’. The dark moodiness of ‘Please Don’t Wait’ adds atmosphere and flirts with techy, house beats.
‘Riot’ not only offers an excellent dub track but also has a well worked visual accompaniment, with videos shot for the track by director Paul Bryan. The same goes for ‘Give It Away’, another video collaboration that adds to the enjoyment of a track, again by the same clearly gifted director.
This is a debut studio album on the back of years of live touring that have laid solid foundations. The raw swagger of earlier material remains and as a unit they continue to mature as connoisseurs and masters of their art. Although this is definitely an album to enjoy and savour, the band’s live shows are still the driving force, so do not miss them.
Words: Danny Doyle.
Gentleman’s Dub Club will perform at Mint Lounge on Monday 21st October.
Monday, 28 March 2011
Hit&Run presents: Submotion Orchestra @ Mint Lounge, Monday 14th March 2011
After rumours of a gig in Manchester last December failed to materialise I’m like a kid before Christmas for this one. With two sold out shows before arriving in Manchester, you know that this is going to be worth the Tuesday morning hangover.
On arrival, the queue into Mint Lounge is like a bank vault giveaway with the masses scrambling to get in. The madness outside the club is no mask for inside where the place is packed as Submotion Orchestra are just getting into their set (yes, I missed the start thanks to the carnage outside).
For those unfortunate enough not to have encountered this septet formed in Leeds, tonight’s gig is the perfect introduction. Under the Ranking Records label, which has also released material by Gentleman’s Dub Club and Quark, Submotion consists of talented individuals who come together to work even better as a collective.
Self-described as “progressive live dubstep,” they wow a student-heavy crowd with Ruby Wood’s exquisite lyrical tones backed up by sharp synchronicity from drums, guitar, keyboards, percussion and trumpet. The band’s enjoyment radiates out to a crowd crammed into the club and literally hanging from the walls for a view. In particular, new single ‘All Yours’ (released last week through Exceptional) and the piercing, yet enchanting, vocals of ‘Finest Hour’ go down a storm. All of which is too much for one punter to contain, turning as he does to the nearest life form, which happens to be your humble narrator, and exclaiming his disbelief at the high quality on show.
Following the band's set, the invisible seventh piece to the Submotion jigsaw, DJ and producer Ruckspin, occupies the decks to supply an injection of urgent bass to soundtrack the early hours of Tuesday.
In part due to the selection of songs played, the dancefloor just doesn’t stop moving, which is something drummer Tommy Evans alludes to after the gig. He tells Now Then Manchester that they were expecting an audience more suited to uptempo drum’n’bass due to the Hit&Run modus operandi, so were wary of keeping it lively. Visibly pleased with the reception from the crowd, Evans is already looking forward to returning to Manchester with the current Ranking Records roster's other live act Gentleman’s Dub Club, who are touring the UK throughout May.
For now, Submotion have finished their UK tour, but I urge you to track them down at one of their yet to be announced summer festival dates. High praise from Gilles Peterson, and myself, is not dished out to any old rabble and this lot are of the highest calibre.
Words: Danny Doyle
Images: Gary Brown (GB Multimedia)
On arrival, the queue into Mint Lounge is like a bank vault giveaway with the masses scrambling to get in. The madness outside the club is no mask for inside where the place is packed as Submotion Orchestra are just getting into their set (yes, I missed the start thanks to the carnage outside).For those unfortunate enough not to have encountered this septet formed in Leeds, tonight’s gig is the perfect introduction. Under the Ranking Records label, which has also released material by Gentleman’s Dub Club and Quark, Submotion consists of talented individuals who come together to work even better as a collective.
Self-described as “progressive live dubstep,” they wow a student-heavy crowd with Ruby Wood’s exquisite lyrical tones backed up by sharp synchronicity from drums, guitar, keyboards, percussion and trumpet. The band’s enjoyment radiates out to a crowd crammed into the club and literally hanging from the walls for a view. In particular, new single ‘All Yours’ (released last week through Exceptional) and the piercing, yet enchanting, vocals of ‘Finest Hour’ go down a storm. All of which is too much for one punter to contain, turning as he does to the nearest life form, which happens to be your humble narrator, and exclaiming his disbelief at the high quality on show.Following the band's set, the invisible seventh piece to the Submotion jigsaw, DJ and producer Ruckspin, occupies the decks to supply an injection of urgent bass to soundtrack the early hours of Tuesday.
In part due to the selection of songs played, the dancefloor just doesn’t stop moving, which is something drummer Tommy Evans alludes to after the gig. He tells Now Then Manchester that they were expecting an audience more suited to uptempo drum’n’bass due to the Hit&Run modus operandi, so were wary of keeping it lively. Visibly pleased with the reception from the crowd, Evans is already looking forward to returning to Manchester with the current Ranking Records roster's other live act Gentleman’s Dub Club, who are touring the UK throughout May.
For now, Submotion have finished their UK tour, but I urge you to track them down at one of their yet to be announced summer festival dates. High praise from Gilles Peterson, and myself, is not dished out to any old rabble and this lot are of the highest calibre.Words: Danny Doyle
Images: Gary Brown (GB Multimedia)
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
Danny Perez & Animal Collective present: ODDSAC
In Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange music is wrongly considered by Alex’s captors to be nothing more than “a useful emotional heightener.” During the experimental Ludovico Technique, the soundtrack to the disturbing images that they show Alex in conjunction with their cocktail of passion-numbing drugs is a mere afterthought. Testament to the power of audio-visual synchronicity, however, is the consequent sickness Alex feels towards the soundtrack’s 'Ludwig van', whom he previously worships. In short, the point is that film and music are inextricably linked.
The difference is that, seated in the Mint Lounge back in May, there’s never the suggestion that OH Productions have coerced the gathered audience into attending, nor are they using (or do they require) arcane tools to keep eyes fixated on the screen. And it’s not a given that pictures should fit snugly with the sound (or silence) of the same moment, but music can certainly conjure emotions and images in the mind’s eye. Add swirling, hypnotic visuals and you have an idea of elements of ODDSAC, a collaborative project between filmmaker Danny Perez and the New York-based buzz band Animal Collective, whose 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion has been gazed upon by an approving public eye; affording them considerably more attention than a previously cult following.
But the project might not have happened at all if it weren’t for the rapport between Perez and the band, who’re still as camera-shy as ever but were looking for a way to incorporate their music into film without falling into the trap of predictability and mild, watered-down enlightenment that can be the rockumentary. Animal Collective’s Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) elaborates: “as a band we’re not very comfortable having cameras around, but we’re comfortable hanging out with Danny and we’d done some videos with him, and we liked the stuff he’d done with Black Dice. So we just started throwing around ideas, such as, um, a vampire rowing on water...! Like what we talk about when we’re writing music – everything kind of comes from mutual ideas anyway, so it’s just nice to take that into a further realm.”
There’s the clear succinctness of shared listening and viewing habits, with Animal Collective providing the score to suit a film specialising in moments of surreal peril. Indeed it is the often improvised acting and abstract storyboard that sets the tempo, as Avey Tare explains, “we didn’t write any of the music until we’d watched the footage, so it was all kind of inspired by the live action stuff at first, then some of the more effective stuff came after that.”
Persuading actors to take on challenging, conceptual roles that range from ‘woman struggling to fend off a tarry wall’ to ‘family choking on expanding marshmallows’ and ‘cultish face-painted pelican people’ isn’t necessarily the easiest of tasks. But the loose, improvised vibe allows for individual interpretation, and there are even select cameo appearances from the US independent music scene, with Animal Collective’s own Noah ‘Panda Bear’ Lennox and Tickley Feather’s Annie Sachs testing their theatricality.
Danny Perez: “Annie Sachs, yeah this is a little bit of ODDSAC’s trivia – she’s a friend of ours in Philadelphia. There were four girls but you’ll notice that one of them I virtually cut out... It’s like, really – I couldn’t work with her; her performance is too bad! You just see her arms every now and then – there were four people and you hardly ever see the fourth person’s face... but two of them were actors and two of them were just friends from our neighbourhood and that woman [Annie Sachs], who I didn’t know too well at the time actually. I thought she had a good look, I thought she had a natural, dancing girl type of quality...”
Perez laughs off the alienation his techniques may bring and puts any differences down to experience: “it was difficult, it was really bottom of the barrel as far as the talent, I mean I’m happy with the performances, but the audition process was really ridiculous, like, ‘you want me to do what with the marshmallow?!’ So, I’d say... two thirds of the people I work with who’re put in ridiculous scenarios stay in touch and the other third never talk to me again!”
The film has had an effect through early viewings, one way or another. There are a couple of shock-inducing edits, exaggerated by added sharpness to the score and the presence of menacing characters, the influence for which is pinpointed by Danny Perez: “we had talks about the vampire. At one point they wanted me to go for the more traditional, widow’s peak type vampire and I wanted to go for a more Nosferatu, Herzog style vampire. His robes are like the religious robes that the clergy wear, but I think there’s a lot of influences – I was certainly influenced by a lot of old German expressionist films. There was definitely a nod to that...”
Portner adds that, “there was one fan who said they had nightmares for a week after!”
“There was one girl in Chicago who told me she was diagnosed as a lucid dreamer when she was younger,” Perez reveals. “She said it brought back a lot of the things that had, like, entered her brain... I mean, yeah, the way it moves, the way it’s formatted – it sort of follows a dream logic and that was certainly intentional.”
There’s a painstaking precision to much of the score, and Portner cites influences such as John Carpenter and Frank Zappa’s Burnt Weeny Sandwich film when composing, but the soundtrack remains undeniably Animal Collective in its strata of feedback, distorted harmonies and psychedelic operatics.
“Well, for the more abstract stuff, we pretty much had to watch the footage as we cut it,” Portner recalls. “Like the long ambient one before the kaleidoscope thing – we actually took a long time with Danny in the studio to just watch it and make some changes; take that there, pull that there because the sounds really get messed up, you know? It was a lot about letting the structure and the scenes shape the way the songs are formed – even the more song-y ones, like the first song was kind of structured that way around the visuals because the way I wrote the original melody it was way too long, you know, we didn’t want it to go on for that long so we ended up cutting all these different parts together in the studio rather than a song that we would normally play together live... None of it was played live – it was all completed in the studio.”
It is a project that’s been four years in the pipeline, but will still be one met with a raised eyebrow by a post-Merriweather fanbase. There are moments of the more palatable chorals synonymous with that latest LP, but it would be more surprising for Animal Collective to ride on the wave of their newfound mainstream recognition, than to continue with their own unique vision as seems to be the case. Reminders of the older, sketchier feedback distortions are frequent, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable. Whatever the response to ODDSAC, they’re certainly not following the Ludovico Technique’s lead by coercing an audience into the auditorium. There may be more than a fair share of disturbing scenes and tension-building music to match, but nobody’s stopping you from hiding behind your sofa, and the side-effects that A Clockwork Orange’s Alex (and the lucid-dreaming girl from Chicago) faced are hardly representative of an engaging end product.
Portner is certainly comfortable with their sound, even if others haven’t been over the years: “well I think we’re pretty used to it by now, we’ve been dealing with it for 10 years or so! It’s, um, difficult in terms of our own tastes and different people’s taste, but I enjoy a lot of feedback and all the sounds you can get from that really leap out and get into your ears. With one of our records in particular, we took it to a label and they were like ‘this record’s broken, man! There’s this loud piercing sound on the first track with these dogs running around the room...’ and we were like, ‘really, it’s kinda supposed to sound like that!’”
Avey Tare does see it as a one-off for the band, though, and lowers expectations of future additions to their live repertoire: “we like playing live because of the freedom and I think we’d have to listen too intently to each track; we’d have too many cues because someone would be synced up and it just wouldn’t be very fun for us! It is what it is – we created it to be this thing and not to play along live to it, so I don’t think there’s any point really for us. But that’s not to say we wouldn’t play the songs live...”
ODDSAC is released on DVD in the UK on 16th August.
Words: Ian Pennington
Pictures: Courtesy of In House Press
The difference is that, seated in the Mint Lounge back in May, there’s never the suggestion that OH Productions have coerced the gathered audience into attending, nor are they using (or do they require) arcane tools to keep eyes fixated on the screen. And it’s not a given that pictures should fit snugly with the sound (or silence) of the same moment, but music can certainly conjure emotions and images in the mind’s eye. Add swirling, hypnotic visuals and you have an idea of elements of ODDSAC, a collaborative project between filmmaker Danny Perez and the New York-based buzz band Animal Collective, whose 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion has been gazed upon by an approving public eye; affording them considerably more attention than a previously cult following.
But the project might not have happened at all if it weren’t for the rapport between Perez and the band, who’re still as camera-shy as ever but were looking for a way to incorporate their music into film without falling into the trap of predictability and mild, watered-down enlightenment that can be the rockumentary. Animal Collective’s Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) elaborates: “as a band we’re not very comfortable having cameras around, but we’re comfortable hanging out with Danny and we’d done some videos with him, and we liked the stuff he’d done with Black Dice. So we just started throwing around ideas, such as, um, a vampire rowing on water...! Like what we talk about when we’re writing music – everything kind of comes from mutual ideas anyway, so it’s just nice to take that into a further realm.”
There’s the clear succinctness of shared listening and viewing habits, with Animal Collective providing the score to suit a film specialising in moments of surreal peril. Indeed it is the often improvised acting and abstract storyboard that sets the tempo, as Avey Tare explains, “we didn’t write any of the music until we’d watched the footage, so it was all kind of inspired by the live action stuff at first, then some of the more effective stuff came after that.”
Persuading actors to take on challenging, conceptual roles that range from ‘woman struggling to fend off a tarry wall’ to ‘family choking on expanding marshmallows’ and ‘cultish face-painted pelican people’ isn’t necessarily the easiest of tasks. But the loose, improvised vibe allows for individual interpretation, and there are even select cameo appearances from the US independent music scene, with Animal Collective’s own Noah ‘Panda Bear’ Lennox and Tickley Feather’s Annie Sachs testing their theatricality.
Danny Perez: “Annie Sachs, yeah this is a little bit of ODDSAC’s trivia – she’s a friend of ours in Philadelphia. There were four girls but you’ll notice that one of them I virtually cut out... It’s like, really – I couldn’t work with her; her performance is too bad! You just see her arms every now and then – there were four people and you hardly ever see the fourth person’s face... but two of them were actors and two of them were just friends from our neighbourhood and that woman [Annie Sachs], who I didn’t know too well at the time actually. I thought she had a good look, I thought she had a natural, dancing girl type of quality...”
Perez laughs off the alienation his techniques may bring and puts any differences down to experience: “it was difficult, it was really bottom of the barrel as far as the talent, I mean I’m happy with the performances, but the audition process was really ridiculous, like, ‘you want me to do what with the marshmallow?!’ So, I’d say... two thirds of the people I work with who’re put in ridiculous scenarios stay in touch and the other third never talk to me again!”
The film has had an effect through early viewings, one way or another. There are a couple of shock-inducing edits, exaggerated by added sharpness to the score and the presence of menacing characters, the influence for which is pinpointed by Danny Perez: “we had talks about the vampire. At one point they wanted me to go for the more traditional, widow’s peak type vampire and I wanted to go for a more Nosferatu, Herzog style vampire. His robes are like the religious robes that the clergy wear, but I think there’s a lot of influences – I was certainly influenced by a lot of old German expressionist films. There was definitely a nod to that...”
Portner adds that, “there was one fan who said they had nightmares for a week after!”
“There was one girl in Chicago who told me she was diagnosed as a lucid dreamer when she was younger,” Perez reveals. “She said it brought back a lot of the things that had, like, entered her brain... I mean, yeah, the way it moves, the way it’s formatted – it sort of follows a dream logic and that was certainly intentional.”
There’s a painstaking precision to much of the score, and Portner cites influences such as John Carpenter and Frank Zappa’s Burnt Weeny Sandwich film when composing, but the soundtrack remains undeniably Animal Collective in its strata of feedback, distorted harmonies and psychedelic operatics.
“Well, for the more abstract stuff, we pretty much had to watch the footage as we cut it,” Portner recalls. “Like the long ambient one before the kaleidoscope thing – we actually took a long time with Danny in the studio to just watch it and make some changes; take that there, pull that there because the sounds really get messed up, you know? It was a lot about letting the structure and the scenes shape the way the songs are formed – even the more song-y ones, like the first song was kind of structured that way around the visuals because the way I wrote the original melody it was way too long, you know, we didn’t want it to go on for that long so we ended up cutting all these different parts together in the studio rather than a song that we would normally play together live... None of it was played live – it was all completed in the studio.”
It is a project that’s been four years in the pipeline, but will still be one met with a raised eyebrow by a post-Merriweather fanbase. There are moments of the more palatable chorals synonymous with that latest LP, but it would be more surprising for Animal Collective to ride on the wave of their newfound mainstream recognition, than to continue with their own unique vision as seems to be the case. Reminders of the older, sketchier feedback distortions are frequent, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable. Whatever the response to ODDSAC, they’re certainly not following the Ludovico Technique’s lead by coercing an audience into the auditorium. There may be more than a fair share of disturbing scenes and tension-building music to match, but nobody’s stopping you from hiding behind your sofa, and the side-effects that A Clockwork Orange’s Alex (and the lucid-dreaming girl from Chicago) faced are hardly representative of an engaging end product.
Portner is certainly comfortable with their sound, even if others haven’t been over the years: “well I think we’re pretty used to it by now, we’ve been dealing with it for 10 years or so! It’s, um, difficult in terms of our own tastes and different people’s taste, but I enjoy a lot of feedback and all the sounds you can get from that really leap out and get into your ears. With one of our records in particular, we took it to a label and they were like ‘this record’s broken, man! There’s this loud piercing sound on the first track with these dogs running around the room...’ and we were like, ‘really, it’s kinda supposed to sound like that!’”
Avey Tare does see it as a one-off for the band, though, and lowers expectations of future additions to their live repertoire: “we like playing live because of the freedom and I think we’d have to listen too intently to each track; we’d have too many cues because someone would be synced up and it just wouldn’t be very fun for us! It is what it is – we created it to be this thing and not to play along live to it, so I don’t think there’s any point really for us. But that’s not to say we wouldn’t play the songs live...”
ODDSAC is released on DVD in the UK on 16th August.
Words: Ian Pennington
Pictures: Courtesy of In House Press
Saturday, 20 February 2010
Format presents: Rustie & Youngsta @ Mint Lounge, Wednesday 17th February, 2010
“Dubstep, is that the music that you like?” the seemingly omnipresent and ever exuberant MC Chunky asks the Format crowd. “Yes, yes it is,” they reply, in slightly drunker fashion. “Not really,” I say in my head.
I'll level with you, I'm not a fan of dubstep. 'Wub wub wub, wibble wibble, pass the ketamine, wub wub wub' pretty much sums up my experience of it thus far, like drum n bass that’s lost its drum.
Anyway, I've come expecting to have my eyes opened by the scene’s up and coming talent, London's Youngsta and Glasgow's Rustie. Resident Sitra gets the student heavy crowd bobbing along with Chunky's confident MCing leading the way, teasing the crowd with lines from We Will Rock You and getting a Mexican wave going. The dancefloor's filled up by the time Youngsta gets going and the crowd are enthusiastic, but I'm not impressed. It’s pretty dark and atmospheric, sure, and it becomes more beat-heavy towards the end of his set, but it’s all just a bit... dull.
Rustie, however, is a different proposition entirely. Giving the dancefloor a much needed 2am shot in the arm, he's more upbeat. Like fellow Glaswegian Hudson Mohawke, he's been influenced by mash-up, with snatches of samples popping up before being hammered back into place by sheer bass power and surging synths. At times his sound even verges on cosmic, trance and, dare I say it, euphoric, shimmering and twisting but always underlaid with driving dubstep and hip hop rhythms. It's a genuinely exciting experience and there's so much going on in his sound that even Chunky has to take a back seat for a while and content himself with a bit of octopus dancing. By the time Rustie comes to the end of his set, he's pushing the limits of the not inconsiderable Mint Lounge soundsystem with the sheer density of his sound, signing off with the towering ‘Cry Flames’.
I can't say I'm a convert yet but Rustie is certainly taking the genre in an interesting and new direction – moving it away from music for people with a taste for horse tranquilisers, which is undoubtedly a good thing for the rest of us.
Words & Pictures: Barney Guiton
I'll level with you, I'm not a fan of dubstep. 'Wub wub wub, wibble wibble, pass the ketamine, wub wub wub' pretty much sums up my experience of it thus far, like drum n bass that’s lost its drum.
Anyway, I've come expecting to have my eyes opened by the scene’s up and coming talent, London's Youngsta and Glasgow's Rustie. Resident Sitra gets the student heavy crowd bobbing along with Chunky's confident MCing leading the way, teasing the crowd with lines from We Will Rock You and getting a Mexican wave going. The dancefloor's filled up by the time Youngsta gets going and the crowd are enthusiastic, but I'm not impressed. It’s pretty dark and atmospheric, sure, and it becomes more beat-heavy towards the end of his set, but it’s all just a bit... dull.
Rustie, however, is a different proposition entirely. Giving the dancefloor a much needed 2am shot in the arm, he's more upbeat. Like fellow Glaswegian Hudson Mohawke, he's been influenced by mash-up, with snatches of samples popping up before being hammered back into place by sheer bass power and surging synths. At times his sound even verges on cosmic, trance and, dare I say it, euphoric, shimmering and twisting but always underlaid with driving dubstep and hip hop rhythms. It's a genuinely exciting experience and there's so much going on in his sound that even Chunky has to take a back seat for a while and content himself with a bit of octopus dancing. By the time Rustie comes to the end of his set, he's pushing the limits of the not inconsiderable Mint Lounge soundsystem with the sheer density of his sound, signing off with the towering ‘Cry Flames’.
I can't say I'm a convert yet but Rustie is certainly taking the genre in an interesting and new direction – moving it away from music for people with a taste for horse tranquilisers, which is undoubtedly a good thing for the rest of us.
Words & Pictures: Barney Guiton
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