A review published in Wire 293
Opening the evening, Satori’s dark Ambient rumblings fittingly provided the spooky aural equivalent of a foyer or waiting room for the mingling crowds. Accompanied by visuals of pale skinned waifs, white haired wolves and other gothic atmospherics, their low bass drones shuddering through the gathering audience were occasionally interesting and unsettling but somehow fell flat in the environs of ULU. Ideally, Satori would have benefited from a smaller and more personal space, their intimate, isolationist music more suited to a home hi-fi, headphones, or anechoic chamber than a student union. Instead, the hypnotic nuances and expansive sonic tectonics evident in their recordings was lost, leaving the sounds to drift along politely as an unresolved soundtrack.
Sutcliffe Jügend’s histrionics provided a flip side to Satori’s relative quietude and creepy stylistics. Acting out a Dionysian impulse, the ecstatic hollering of Kevin Tomkins and Paul Taylor could be more at home in the glossolalic surroundings of a cult than on campus in Bloomsbury. Driven by an idea of transcendent transgression, Sutcliffe Jügend’s unintelligible yelping hit the physical limits of the ULU sound system while also entering them into the realm of the camp. One man needing three microphones made for an hilarious sight, evoking images of bathroom mirror rock god fantasists, but, at the same time there was something genuinely exhilarating about Tomkins’s performance. His rapid alternation between falsetto squeals and baritone yelling, inflected with a mocking and aggressive tone, was also an interesting improvisational riffing between the cartoonish and the antagonistic.
Merzbow straddles the approaches of Satori and Sutcliffe Jügend, managing to jump between two laptops while remaining intensly engaged with his music. His set consisted of a prolonged toxic hiss that maintained a painful and physically intrusive level of volume punctuated by scrapings on a small, electrified contraption that resembled a home made scrap metal mandolin. The ongoing blast of grating noise blew through the crowd, creating a stunned blankness or confusion in some, while others embraced the static. A fellow nearby me sloshing about in a Sufi-like trance, translating the sounds into fits of animalistic gesticulations. I’m not too sure how long the performance lasted, but it was a genuinely harmful experience – not having remembered earplugs as many of my fellow concert-goers had caused me to spend the next day feeling as if I was 12 feet away from the world. But this invasive harm was part of the set: Merzbow’s music found a resonant frequency of the body and forced its way into the flesh, lingering there engram-like, extending the experience long after the event of performance.
