Category Archives: Live

Whitehouse, Vienna Rhiz, 8 May 2008

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Over to the Rhiz for the second night in a row to witness one of the last ever concerts by Whitehouse. If KTL represent one facet of contemporary noise – murky, lowering and insidious – then Whitehouse represent its obverse – seething, ferocious and even celebratory. And if the end of Whitehouse is also the end of the power electronics genre they singlehandedly birthed, then there is no finer way to mark those passings than with the kind of blistering performance they gave last Thursday.

Whitehouse have been an important part of my musical journey for around fifteen years. Unlike some of the other groups I met along the same path, such as Einstürzende Neubauten, Swans and Current 93, I can’t pinpoint exactly how I first made their acquaintance. I do remember going into the old Vinyl Experience shop on Hanway Street sometime in the early ’90s and asking if they had any Whitehouse albums in stock. The assistant reached under the counter and handed me a copy of the Another Crack of the White Whip compilation. Holding my nerve, I bought it and took it home. The furtive manner of this purchase, together with the rather unsettling Trevor Brown cover art and the sinister aura that I realised surrounded Whitehouse, led me to believe that I was now in possession of something unutterably clandestine. I wasn’t, of course; it was just a compilation album. And yet hearing the album for the first time, I found that its boldness and explicitness undermined the surface ugliness and brutality of the music. The music kept calling me back, seduced as I was by the sheer audacity of it and by the realisation that I was caught up in something I only wanted to experience, not to justify or explain.

To a greater or lesser extent, that wish for immersive, unmediated experience has governed much of my personal response to music over the years. In the case of Whitehouse, however, it’s always been the primary impulse. As if to illustrate the dichotomies at work, last week’s concert was frenetic, disorientating and above all highly entertaining. William Bennett spent most of the time staring impassively at his Vaio, a picture of “don’t f*** with me” serenity with his dark glasses and expression of scowling menace. Occasionally he would abandon his workstation to deliver a charged, suggestive lyric, his voice ramped up to peak levels and his microphone lead coiled around his neck like a noose.

The star of the show from a performance point of view, however, was Philip Best. In marked contrast to Bennett, Best seemed to want to spend as little time as possible behind his laptop. His array of movements and gestures was great fun to watch, from pinching his nipples to drenching them with saliva, from salaciously stroking the collaged pages of his lyric book to humping the amps at the back of the stage (which looked in grave danger of toppling over as a result). The overall impression was of a kind of deranged sexuality wholly in keeping with the graphic outpourings of Best’s lyrics. On Bennett’s rare excursions to centre stage, he and Best would interact hilariously, caressing each other and holding their arms aloft in a gleeful posture of rock-star triumphalism.

As for the music, it was exceptionally livid and abrasive. Surging treacherously from the speakers, the layered drones, rhythms and frequencies merged into a sublime totality of noise. What came over most strongly was how carefully orchestrated it all was. No improvisation, no taking chances; Whitehouse know how to manipulate an audience for maximum effect. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any louder and more delirious, they would make the merest adjustment and the whole edifice would become yet more frenzied and euphoric. It’s dangerously addictive stuff, the kind of live experience you don’t want to end. But end it now has, and whatever William Bennett and Philip Best decide to do in the future, music is a duller and more predictable thing now that Whitehouse aren’t around any more.

Photos by David Murobi here.

KTL, Vienna Rhiz, 7 May 2008

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So the Rhiz is ten years old this month. It’s a great achievement to keep going a club/bar/venue (like a few other places in Vienna, the Rhiz never seems entirely sure of which it is, and is all the better for it) devoted for the most part to defiantly uncommercial electronic music, and to make a success of it. Hats off and happy birthday, then, to Herbie Molin, his collaborators and conspirators.

When I first arrived in Vienna I didn’t get to the Rhiz much, but I’ve been making up for it in recent months. There was the Nurse With Wound night last month, at which DJs Walter and Martin span a range of classic NWW sides and Colin Potter played a funereal live set. And now there’s the 10 Years of the Rhiz celebrations, with a slew of gigs taking place in May. The first of these, for me at least, saw the KTL duo of Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley play on a much smaller stage than the last time I saw them at the 2007 Donaufestival. What was so impressive about that concert was the way the group utterly dominated their surroundings, transforming the sterile Krems exhibition hall into a proper concert space through the crushing totality of the noise they produced (and also, it must be said, through the use of huge quantities of fog).

Last week’s concert at the Rhiz was all the more exciting for taking place in such an intimate setting, but was curiously underattended. I’m no authority on O’Malley’s principal project, Sunn O))), but from what I do know (and from the memory of their 2006 concert at the Szene at which Rehberg did a support slot; was that the evening that birthed KTL, I wonder?), I would have thought your average Sunn O))) adherent would have been ecstatic to see O’Malley do his massive drone guitar thing in a venue as small as the Rhiz. It’s not as though Sunn O))) and KTL inhabit dissimilar musical worlds, after all. And yet the place (which holds 100 people, tops) was not at all crowded.

In any event, the set was musically as well as literally blinding (the fog filling the room made the duo only sporadically visible, even from a few feet away). Coiled and hovering with malevolent presence, O’Malley’s agonisingly slow guitar reverberated around the room and invaded the listener’s very marrow. Rehberg, meanwhile, issued deep and obliterating drones from his Mac, forcing O’Malley’s guitar lines outwards in a mounting vortex of pressure. The music seemed to be searching for escape within the tight confines of the room and, finding none, turned in on itself; an afflicting and oppressive infiltration.

Acid Mothers Temple/Ruins/TV Buddhas, Vienna Fluc Wanne, 6 May 2008

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Barely pausing to draw breath between the Donaufestival and the 10 years of Rhiz celebrations, I descended into the Stygian gloom of the Fluc Wanne for an event billed as the ‘Japanese New Music Festival’. This was a rather grandiose description for what was essentially a programme of solo and duo performances by the two Japanese musicians present (Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple and Yoshida Tatsuya of Ruins), with a non-Japanese guest band (TV Buddhas) plonked somewhere in between. The possibility of more varied permutations was scuppered due to the absence through sickness of the third member of the troupe, Tsuyama Atsushi.

Despite the slimmed-down line-up, Kawabata and Tatsuya presented an extremely wide variety of sonic approaches; closing the eyes, one could easily have believed that there were more than just two people onstage. The evening began underwhelmingly, though, with a rather Fluxus duo performance during which the two men used bottles, vegetables and other unconventional “instruments” as sound sources. Clever, I sighed, and waited for the actual music to begin. And begin it did, splendidly so, as Tatsuya performed a solo drums set filled with complex, progressive textures. Don’t ask me how he did it, but the percussion was accompanied by guitar and keyboard sounds, all of which were somehow triggered by the drummer in real time.

Next up, Kawabata took the stage for a solo guitar set. The guitar was initially bowed, offering up clouds of extended drones that shifted and coalesced beautifully into each other. A simple folkish pattern was then sampled and looped, creating a sparkling basis from which Kawabata brought forth dense clusters of electric activity.

The evening then took a somewhat surreal turn. A space in front of the stage was cleared, and TV Buddhas set up their stall in the round, facing down the audience at the same level. A male/female guitar/drums duo, TV Buddhas bore a certain family resemblance to the White Stripes, but it quickly became clear that they were able to reach far deeper into the well of inspiration than that blighted couple. The group’s set hovered adroitly between rock and noise, often teetering on the brink of freeform workouts before being hauled back into the realm of disciplined, focused activity. With the guitarist and drummer both a matter of inches away from the audience, their playing reached out easily and made an immensely favourable impression.

Rounding off the night in fine style, Kawabata and Tatsuya joined forces again for a fast-paced, frenetic and gloriously loud set as Acid Mothers Temple. A brisk walk home from Praterstern and the evening was done.

Tortoise/Naked Lunch, Donaufestival, 3 May 2008

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These pages are backed up because there has been so much going on lately. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Backtracking…

My second and last visit to the 2008 Donaufestival was a far more positive and pleasant experience than the previous one had been. The evening opened at the Minoritenkirche with Universalove, a film by Thomas Woschitz with a live soundtrack by Austrian alt-rockers Naked Lunch (for more on whom, see my March 2007 column).

This event was marvellously engrossing from start to finish. The film was a collection of thematically linked stories focusing on love and relationships, each of them quietly eloquent in its own way. The accompanying music was no mere incidental backdrop, but a series of emotive, quietly devastating songs that informed and commented on the narratives. The main musical impetus came from the percussion, with the two drummers standing centre stage and bashing out beautifully immersive and textural rhythms. The wintry and plaintive vocals, meanwhile, contributed an air of dark melancholy to the film. This highly impressive collaboration was an indication that the somewhat jaded live soundtrack genre still has the potential to mesmerise.

One minor gripe: the seating arrangements in the Minoritenkirche were bizarrely ill thought out. Despite the fact that the event was very well attended, the organisers for some reason decided to lay out only twenty or so rows of seats in front of the stage, leaving the rest of the church as standing room. Having arrived fairly early, I was lucky enough to grab a seat, but it looked to me as though the majority of the audience was left to stand uncomfortably around. Why the entire church couldn’t have been given over to seating is utterly beyond me. This was a film, after all.

Over in the main hall later in the evening, a similar thoughtless disregard for the needs and comfort of the audience saw Tortoise come onstage at the absurdly late hour of 1.30am, by which time I had already been bored stiff by the wearisome sermonising of Ursula Rucker and the stilted meanderings of Xiu Xiu. Anyway, Tortoise were fantastic, insofar as I was able to stay awake and listen to them. Their last record It’s All Around You may have been a tepid approximation of former glories, but onstage the combination of the two drummers (again) with the jazzy guitar and vibes remains as potent and telepathic as ever. Kaleidoscopic, fresh and startlingly original, Tortoise music is pretty damn irresistible; but it would have been good to take it in through eyes and ears that weren’t pleading for some downtime.

Satan Mozart Moratorium, Krems Donaufestival, 1 May 2008

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This year’s Donaufestival was a much more low-key experience for me than the stellar programme that was served up last year (which, lest we forget, included Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Throbbing Gristle, Will Oldham, KTL, Six Organs of Admittance, Larsen, the Boredoms and many others… has there ever been a better festival line-up, anywhere?). There was no way the organisers could have topped that this year, and in fairness they didn’t even try. This year’s festival concentrated heavily on theatre and performance art, with a strong showing of newly commissioned works. Inevitably, therefore, the musical side of the programme took something of a back seat.

In fact, the first show I saw this year was a performance piece, Satan Mozart Moratorium by Jean-Louis Costes and Paul Poet. And I rapidly wished I hadn’t bothered. Like the fool I am, I only ventured to see this effort because of an “article” in the crappy Vienna “newspaper” Heute which described its “scandalous” content in lascivious detail. You pillocks, I thought, it’s only you who think it’s a scandal, no-one else is bothered by it in the least. Anyway, I made the effort to go because I was hopeful of some testing actionist-style engagement from the performers. Boy, was I ever mistaken.

Before the performance began, the audience had to sign a disclaimer. I’m not sure exactly what I was signing, but I do know that it partly involved confirming that I understood I was about to witness a pornographic show and, more worryingly, that no liability would be assumed for any dry cleaning costs incurred as a result of watching the show. That done, we were escorted round the back of the building to an anonymous hall and kitted out with pacamacs, presumably to protect us from all the literal and metaphorical debris we were about to be confronted with.

I have to confess to the reviewer’s cardinal sin here – N. and I left well before the end. But we had seen enough to know when we had backed a loser. This was a loud, arch and orotund show in which the three actors bawled at the tops of their voices in between prancing mostly naked around the performance space, twisting themselves into contortions, throwing grapes at each other and capering pointlessly among the seated and cowering audience. The narrator at one point exhorted us to “f*** your children”, an unnecessarily antagonistic statement even without the knowledge of the horror of Amstetten which emerged the following day. But you didn’t need to be a parent to find this piece tiresomely and tediously one-dimensional. Like many of the audience, we voted with our feet and left early. One of the crew members filmed our departure, probably thinking to himself “ha, another couple of wimps who can’t cope with this fearlessly confrontational, transgressive piece.” But that wasn’t why we left at all. We left because we were bored rigid and we knew we would have a better time at the bar.

Einstürzende Neubauten, Vienna Arena, 18 April 2008

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Talking about this concert with friends on the way home, it became clear to me just how important Einstürzende Neubauten were, and remain, in my musical journey. There’s a parallel of sorts with Throbbing Gristle, whom I was very excited to see in Krems last year; after seeing them, I wrote that “I simply needed to see these four people onstage, and acknowledge the infinitude of their influence on so much I have thought, done, heard and written over the last twenty years of my life.” Which is all well and good, but of course I never saw TG first time around, and there is an inevitable element of nostalgia, of repeating something that’s already been done, about TG’s recent activities. (I felt exactly the same about the Van der Graaf Generator and Dead Can Dance reunions, for all the joy they brought me.)

Neubauten, on the other hand, have never gone away. I remember my first acquaintance with them very well. In early 1984, at the age of 15, I had recently graduated from Smash Hits to NME as my musical reading matter of choice. I read an article by Chris Bohn about their legendary concert at the ICA (yes, I do realise it wasn’t a proper Neubauten gig), the account of which I found impossibly vital and thrilling. Not long after, my late, deeply mourned mother took my brother and me on one of our occasional shopping trips from sleepy Salisbury to the teeming metropolis that was Southampton. Once there, I made a beeline as usual for Virgin Records, which was at that time a dark, slightly intimidating place, nothing at all like the “Megastores” that came later. Somewhat surprisingly, given that there was little in my record collection at the time except for the complete recorded works of Gary Numan and Pink Floyd, I made straight for the ‘E’ section and was awestruck to discover therein the spidery scrawl of Neubauten’s unutterably strange name and the unsettling blankness of their stick man logo flecked with blood. The record was called Strategies Against Architecture Vol.1. I bought it, took it home and played it, and I’ve never felt the same about music since. A full three years before I discovered Swans, who were to become even more important to me, Neubauten showed me that music could be unconventional, atonal and still somehow beautiful.

Of course, Neubauten have changed markedly since that time, but their art remains as fresh and immediate as it has always done. Last Friday’s sold-out concert at the Arena in Vienna was an illustration of how they have matured into a lean and reflective entity. Their music is tremendously focused and directed; it sounds entirely like folk music to me, wholly European in its directness and simplicity. It’s still sonically devastating, though, with Unruh and Moser’s jagged rhythmic arsenal set implacably against Hacke’s wall of bass noise and Arbeit’s shimmering textural guitar. As for Blixa Bargeld, he is a colossal stage presence, whether intoning his trenchant lyrics, using his voice as a pure sound source or even presiding, like a genial game-show host, over a bizarre Cageian chance exercise in which the group members pick cards out of a bag giving them instructions on how to play.

So there we are – Einstürzende Neubauten, after twenty-eight years, as powerful as ever, and now raising smiles as well.

Paul Lebrecque/Primordial Undermind, Vienna Subterrarium, 4 April 2008

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My second concert in as many nights was about as underground as gigs in Vienna get, literally as well as metaphorically. Subterrarium is a cellar accessible only via an unmarked wooden door. Cold, damp and somewhat lacking in the comfort department, the place more than compensates for these deficiencies through the warmth of the welcome it extends and the commitment and dedication of those who perform there. Having played host last December to the reportedly excellent acid folk group Spires That In The Sunset Rise, Friday night saw an appearance by Paul Lebrecque of inspired free folk aggregation Sunburned Hand of the Man, in collaboration with Vienna’s own space rock heroes Primordial Undermind (see last month’s column).

This curtailed evening began with a brief solo spot by Lebrecque. Alternately plucking and bowing his banjo, he was a picture of concentration, lost in rapt contemplation of his instrument. Overtones and half-formed melodies radiated outward from Lebrecque’s playing, forming a strange yet compelling blend of old-time Harry Smith folk and almost raga-like atmospheres.

Almost immediately, Lebrecque picked up his electric guitar and was joined onstage by the PU crew. Together, the six of them started up a loose, flowing improvisation that began quietly and unfolded beautifully. I was unimpressed by PU frontman Eric Arn’s initial fiddling with his acoustic guitar (there’s only one guitarist in the world who should be allowed to hold anything other than a plectrum or slide to a set of guitar strings, and that’s Keith Rowe), but once he quit the tricksiness and actually started to play the thing properly, his contributions were rich and varied. Elsewhere, the combination of slipping slide guitar, tumbling bass, thunderous cello and drums, and spacey electronic effects coalesced into a wild and engrossing whole.

All too soon, it was over. The guerrilla nature of the performance space turned round and bit the group on the backside, as first the drummer was told to keep it down and then the entire group was forced to stop playing at 10pm, due to the disturbance they were causing to the residents upstairs. A great shame, as to these ears they sounded like they were just getting underway. I unfortunately missed the last “proper” Primordial Undermind gig at B72 in March, so have yet to hear them play a full electric set. I suspect it will be worth the wait, but their next gig is also at Subterrarium in June, so I may have to wait a while longer.

Marissa Nadler, Vienna Gasthaus Vorstadt, 3 April 2008

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I’ve written at some length about Marissa Nadler‘s bewitching music before (see here, here and here), so I don’t have a huge amount to add by way of reviewing her first Vienna concert last week. Just to say that the show, in the very pleasant and welcoming surroundings of the Gasthaus Vorstadt, was a stunningly effective performance, giving tangible flesh and blood to the rich and sinister carnality of her songs.

Much of the unearthly power of Nadler’s three LPs comes from the treated, reverb-heavy yet still angelic quality of her voice. I’d expected her to take a starker approach to singing live, but in the event the stage set-up allowed her voice to be treated as on record, since she had three separate microphones lined up in front of her. Presumably each microphone had been calibrated in such a way as to provide different levels of echo and reverb. During the set, Nadler flitted gracefully between them, allowing her to vary the timbre of her voice as the songs required. That voice is a thing of rare beauty, all forlorn radiance and strange, unsettling ululations.

Meanwhile, Nadler’s guitar playing was stunningly fluid and ornate, vivifying the dreamlike cyclicality of her myth-steeped texts. Her choice of cover versions was unerring: as well as Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat”, included on her recently released third LP, she also gave sombre readings of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” and Neil Young’s “Cortez The Killer”. It was a pleasure and a privilege to hear her transform the songs of these three grizzled veterans into anguished expressions of abject purity.

Peter Brötzmann, Vienna Porgy & Bess, 23 March 2008

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Yes, I know that heading does a disservice to the other three fine musicians (for the record, they were Ken Vandermark on reeds, Marino Pliakas on bass and Michael Wertmüller on drums) who shared the Porgy & Bess stage with Brötzmann on Sunday night. But no matter how hard I try, I always end up thinking of Brötzmann’s collaborators as sidemen – the result, no doubt, of the sheer intensity of his playing.

Having said that, it was hard to ignore the contributions of the other three to this concert. Vandermark is a more recognisably post-Ayler saxophonist than Brötzmann is; his playing really swings, and acts as a perfect counterweight to the German’s unbridled ferocity. Pliakas was a mesmerising electric bassist, creating endlessly kaleidoscopic patterns of rhythm and making clever, sparing use of effects. And Wertmüller was a sheer wonder, playing with formidable power and attack. At times, this band sounded more like an avant rock outfit (descendants of Last Exit, perhaps) than anything from the world of jazz.

As for Brötzmann himself, well, the man continues to stun me every time I hear him play. He can be playful, as when he engages in a skittering, stop-start duet with Vandermark. He can be lyrical, as when he stands alone at the side of the stage and delivers a heartbreakingly tender solo. But above all, he is an unstoppable force of nature, kicking up a firestorm with every blast from his mighty lungs.

American Music Club & Lisa Papineau, Vienna WUK, 13 March 2008

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Mark Eitzel keeps getting better and better. Last Thursday’s concert by his group American Music Club was a blissful revelation, filled with the kind of emotionally acute and musically rich songwriting at which he excels. While there were many more people in the audience than attended his last solo appearance in Vienna, the WUK was by no means full, which is a sad state of affairs but also a fair reflection of Eitzel’s approach to his music – worldly, defiant and helplessly uncommercial.

An endearing and occasionally shambolic live performer, Eitzel was in fine mood, prefacing many of the songs with little spoken tableaux and revelling in musical exchanges with guitarist Vudi (whose own extempore blues number, delivered while Eitzel was attending to an unco-operative guitar, was a joy). Vudi’s playing was shimmering and potent, but Eitzel is no slouch on guitar either, and the two men’s vivid sparring was crucial to the sustaining of the wide-screen AMC sound. Nowhere was this filmic quality more apparent than on the emotional highwire of ‘Johnny Mathis’s Feet’, where Eitzel’s rich and dark voice gave epic weight to the lyric’s tortured self-questioning.

It was wonderful to see Eitzel so obviously touched by the extent and warmth of the audience’s appreciation, which generated three richly deserved encores. The final acoustic reading of ‘Firefly’, delivered in generous response to a deranged fan’s pleading (it was me, I confess), was as gleaming and evanescent as the fireflies themselves: “They don’t live too long, just a flash and then they’re gone…”

Those who arrived early had the pleasure of seeing a fine support set from American singer and musician Lisa Papineau and her band. Papineau’s songs are like miniature expressionist dramas, delivered via winning electronic textures and a percussive attack that perfectly holds the line between intricacy and clout. Strikingly attired in a stylish black dress, Papineau has a strong bluesy voice and a compelling onstage presence. Stabbing insistently away at her keyboard, she performed jerky dance moves that mirrored the spiky, uncompromising nature of her songs. “I’m not a very good dancer,” she told the audience ruefully, but there was something twisted and melancholy about her movements that gripped the attention utterly. Partway through the set, Eitzel joined her for a rich, sensitive duet, their voices entwined in seductive interplay. Here’s hoping she returns to Vienna for a show of her own soon.