...I generally prefer a zip, meself
Fuck Buttons. Brixton Windmill. 02jun07.
A table purloined politely, cleared of drinks, flyers and stray lighters, and placed not on stage, but in front of. Four legs good on this dancefloor; a half-nod to kindred spirits Lightning Bolt and their corner-of-the-room billet. The size of the table at first seems a bit much for a duo. In fact it is utterly necessary, soon cluttered with suitcases full of equipment; various sized keyboards dotted amongst the lap-tops and mixing consoles like de-mobbed Russian dolls screwing with the conventional curvature of the ascent of man.
In fact, the thickness of the table’s wood is a decent metaphor for the impenetrable span of Fuck Buttons’ caustic lustre. It is the sound of men who may well have experienced some pretty tough love; their pieces like a torn-out-journal-entry-from-weeks-of-tortuous-capture reappropriated as postcard: “All around us is white noise and gunfire. Nothing but white noise and gunfire, following day following night. The radiator shackles allow exercise to a ten-foot radius. Wish you were here!”
Tonight they relive their cuff-lock holiday, not through slideshow, but sonic re-creation, with gathering punters symbolically acting as the wall which they seek to break down. Andrew Hung jumps into the wall whilst unleashing his feral screams; a visceral bellow that he lives, wide-eyed and unhinged, challenging the front-row, toe-to-toe/nose-to-nose, while Ben Power sporadically unfurls his arms from his keyboard-wrangling hunch to clatter at a single drum.
Opening piece ‘Sweet Love For Planet Earth’ combines brooding menace with an ambient twinkle, and while their set might seem to be merely sheet noise as endurance test, there are layers to their work. However, the gleeful glint in their four eyes suggests that for all their malfunction-as-function artistry, they feed mostly from their fractious, challenging bent. If this music can be described as ‘moving’, it is only in the sense that the vibrations of a floor trying to cope with their corrosive, tumultuous drones will invariably cause their audiences to involuntarily judder a few inches backward.
By the end of their forty minutes, their audience-as-wall is half broken down, shorn of its outer-layers. Whilst Fuck Buttons clearly crave and deserve respect, I do wonder whether an un-cleared room does feel a little, to them, like defeat.
Fuck Buttons @ MySpace
A table purloined politely, cleared of drinks, flyers and stray lighters, and placed not on stage, but in front of. Four legs good on this dancefloor; a half-nod to kindred spirits Lightning Bolt and their corner-of-the-room billet. The size of the table at first seems a bit much for a duo. In fact it is utterly necessary, soon cluttered with suitcases full of equipment; various sized keyboards dotted amongst the lap-tops and mixing consoles like de-mobbed Russian dolls screwing with the conventional curvature of the ascent of man.
In fact, the thickness of the table’s wood is a decent metaphor for the impenetrable span of Fuck Buttons’ caustic lustre. It is the sound of men who may well have experienced some pretty tough love; their pieces like a torn-out-journal-entry-from-weeks-of-tortuous-capture reappropriated as postcard: “All around us is white noise and gunfire. Nothing but white noise and gunfire, following day following night. The radiator shackles allow exercise to a ten-foot radius. Wish you were here!”
Tonight they relive their cuff-lock holiday, not through slideshow, but sonic re-creation, with gathering punters symbolically acting as the wall which they seek to break down. Andrew Hung jumps into the wall whilst unleashing his feral screams; a visceral bellow that he lives, wide-eyed and unhinged, challenging the front-row, toe-to-toe/nose-to-nose, while Ben Power sporadically unfurls his arms from his keyboard-wrangling hunch to clatter at a single drum.
Opening piece ‘Sweet Love For Planet Earth’ combines brooding menace with an ambient twinkle, and while their set might seem to be merely sheet noise as endurance test, there are layers to their work. However, the gleeful glint in their four eyes suggests that for all their malfunction-as-function artistry, they feed mostly from their fractious, challenging bent. If this music can be described as ‘moving’, it is only in the sense that the vibrations of a floor trying to cope with their corrosive, tumultuous drones will invariably cause their audiences to involuntarily judder a few inches backward.
By the end of their forty minutes, their audience-as-wall is half broken down, shorn of its outer-layers. Whilst Fuck Buttons clearly crave and deserve respect, I do wonder whether an un-cleared room does feel a little, to them, like defeat.
Fuck Buttons @ MySpace
Labels: review
posted by skif at 2:38 pm
1 Comments:
Nice last line there, Skif. I'll almost definitely be seeing this lot at Supersonic in Brum next month - and might take the opportunity to catch them in Oxford in a couple of weeks time too...
Post a Comment
<< Home