The Scarabeusdream, Vienna WUK, 7 July 2009

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Two gigs in three days, from the cavernous expanse of the Happel Stadium to an intimate space in the WUK arts and performance centre. Woot, as I believe the young people would say.

The Scarabeusdream were a name new to me, but I somehow think I’ll be seeing them again. This was originally supposed to be an open-air event in the WUK’s courtyard, but the inclement weather forced them to relocate upstairs. And I’m very glad they did, since the duo of electric pianist Bernd Supper and drummer Hannes Moser were immensely powerful and watchable in the Projektraum, the sheer physicality of their performance often threatening to bust the walls. By the end there was a very tidy audience in the room. Some of them were no doubt Scarabeusdream fans, some may have been sheltering from the rain, some may have heard the group’s angular noise blasting out across the courtyard and come over to investigate, and some may have been bored refugees from the Joe Jackson concert over in the main hall.

If anyone did indeed make their way across from the Jackson show, they would have seen a keyboardist whose playing was light years distant from the beanpole’s tasteful stylings. Bernd Supper’s approach to the piano was physical, daring and frequently electrifying. Hammering down on the keys, often standing up and seemingly engaged in a wrestling match with the instrument and with his piano stool, Supper at times resembled a deranged Peter Hammill – the only other musician I’ve seen whose relationship with the piano is so laden with tension and aggression. His singing too, while lacking Hammill’s majesty and gravitas, certainly had something of the Van der Graaf Generator man’s blood-curdling intensity.

Sitting directly across the stage from Supper, Hannes Moser was a thunderously effective and relentless drummer. Even more so than the pianist, Moser was driven to physical engagement with the space – perching precariously on his kit and launching attacks on anything that came to hand. The two men were clearly feeding off each other’s energy and commitment as they drove themselves to ever greater heights of Sturm und Drang.

With its restless quiet/loud dynamics and sense of urgency bordering on desperation, this music had something of the flavour of Radiohead and Silver Mt Zion, blended with a progressive-style complexity. And yet with its limited tonal range and clusters of notes that stubbornly refused to resolve into melodies, the duo often seemed like they were caught in some zone of mathematical entrapment from which they were struggling to escape. Screaming “Are you alive or are you just a reflection?” at the top of his voice, a livid and dangerous glint in his eye, Moser was clearly in a place that you wouldn’t want to hang around in for too long.

There’s a great set of photos of the evening by David Murobi here.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Vienna Ernst Happel Stadium, 5 July 2009

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My first, and hopefully last, concert at the Happel – not the most conducive venue for live music, and I really can’t imagine anyone else who would get me there other than Bruce Springsteen. More than the vast scale of the thing, what I objected to most was the atrocious sound quality; from where I was sitting, at least, the acoustics were tinny, distorted and just horrible. Maybe they were better down in the pit, but that would have brought its own set of challenges.

Anyway, this show was a blazing success and a glorious encapsulation of all the things I love about Springsteen – the drama, commitment and passion, the unstoppable energy and, most of all, the way he connects with every single person in an audience of 50,000 as surely as if it were one of fifty. Charging tirelessly about the stage for a full three hours, he’s out to ensure that everyone’s having as great a time as he’s obviously having himself – laughing, joking, signalling, touching and always communicating.

Let’s be clear on this: there’s absolutely nothing corny, sentimental or clichéd about Springsteen. His art reaches deep into American history, iconography and myth, emerging with a profoundly moving sense of lived human experience. And, remarkably, it does all of these things through songs that are quite irresistible in their drama, impact and melodic verve. Whether hurtling through the outlaw landscape of “Badlands”, swinging around the exhilarating “The Promised Land” or threading through the desperately moving evanescence that weighs down “The River”, Springsteen connects with you – lives inside you – in ways that no other artist has ever done.

The now legendary “Jersey Girl” moment deserves a special mention. As I wrote in my review of the Live 1975-1985 box set, this song perfectly encapsulates Springsteen’s emotional concerns even though it was written by Tom Waits. I’ve returned to that live recording time and time again, enthralled by the audience’s rapturous reaction to this most affecting of love songs. And although I didn’t know it at the time, Springsteen had never played it in Europe until last Sunday, when a girl near the front of the audience, wearing an orange T-shirt with “Jersey Girl” written on it, climbed onto someone’s shoulders and removed the T-shirt to reveal the not displeasing sight of a red bra underneath. When Springsteen caught sight of this vision, he had little choice but to play the song, which he did with great sensitivity and tenderness. But that was just one of the countless fine moments offered up by this extraordinary concert.

Ether column, June 2009

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For the first and probably last time, I’m going to recommend in this column a concert at the enormous Ernst Happel Stadion in the Prater – the kind of venue that normally makes a mockery of everything that is enjoyable about going to see live music. But if there’s one performer who can stand onstage in a cavernous football field and make it seem like he’s playing to you and you alone, it’s Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen is an utterly mesmerising live performer, straining every fibre of his body in relentless pursuit of the unshakeable conviction that it’s his responsibility to give the audience the night of their lives. Unfairly dismissed by many as a hokey and clichéd songwriter, Springsteen’s magic actually consists in a tender and heartfelt exploration of emotions that resonate so powerfully with lived human experience that they take on qualities of the pure and sacred. Rich in drama and sure in characterisation, the songs take inspiration from the deep American mythos of the car, the girl and the open road – all of which are seen as routes out of no-hope, dead-end jobs and communities steadily losing their humanity under the baleful influence of the military-industrial complex. Often overlooked and misunderstood, indeed, is the burning sense of rage and social injustice in Springsteen’s work – “Born in the USA”, for example, is emphatically not a patriotic song – but the songs never preach, instead telling grounded stories of hardship and loss. Thanks to the glorious orchestrations of the E Street Band, moreover, the music is far from being generic American rock; its swelling organ and saxophone riffs, and Springsteen’s own scything guitar work, form the perfect accompaniment to the emotional humanity at the core of the man’s worldview. In concert Springsteen is funny, warm, likeable and generous: an inspirational phenomenon everyone should witness at least once.

Ättestupa & Tar…Feathers, Vienna Rhiz, 30 June 2009

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A fine gig at the Rhiz last night with a double bill of groups from Sweden. I actually went along purely to catch the support group Ättestupa, whose début album I’ve been living with for a while now. It’s a bleak and uncanny piece of work, with dark and lowering drones folded into eerie half-melodies and distant, unresolved vocals. Sounding like the offspring of Popol Vuh and :zoviet*france:, the record also boasts some of the most distinctive artwork I’ve seen: a series of stark black-and-white photos taken in 19th century Sweden, which summon up a very real sense of hardship and tragedy.

Playing live in Vienna for the first time, Ättestupa cut loose a little more than they do on that record. The skeletal organ lines evoked another excellent (and, I’m delighted to say, now reformed) Swedish export, Sagor & Swing, albeit with Eric Malmberg’s joyful melodic inventiveness replaced by an atmosphere of chill and foreboding. For the final piece of their too-short set, the vocals (sung in Swedish, not that one could tell) hung menacingly in the air while the group’s rhythm section locked into a fearsome mantric repetition. We have certainly not heard the last of Ättestupa.

The night’s headliners Tar…Feathers were more conventionally enjoyable, although no less striking. Carrying hints of early Cure and Joy Division sonics, their songs were built around neat and tidy guitar riffs and busy, creative percussion. Like Ättestupa’s vocalist, Tar…Feathers’ Marcus Nyke didn’t much care to foreground his singing, which remained defiantly murky and unresolved throughout. But since he was in any case singing in Swedish, this was hardly a problem. Rather, it added to the sense of dislocation and disquiet that prevailed in all their songs.

David Murobi took some fine photos of the concert which can be seen here.

In memory of G.E., 1 February 1931–30 June 2003

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Six years ago today, my mother flew away.

I just want to reproduce the text from the Book of Ecclesiastes that I read at her funeral. I first came across this text on Current 93’s “Hitler as Kalki” EP, at the end of which there is a recording of David Tibet’s father reading it.

“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;

While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:

In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened,

And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low;

Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

Jarboe, Budapest Vörös Yuk, 8 June 2009

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Since Jarboe’s planned concert in Vienna was cancelled in murky circumstances, it was a no-brainer for me to make the trip to the nearest place she was playing, which turned out to be Budapest. This is no trainspotters’ blog, but I do feel obliged to mention the excellent ÖBB Railjet service which whisked me from Westbahnhof to Budapest in exactly three hours, in remarkable comfort and to-the-minute punctuality. British trains, I do not miss you at all.

I wrote a short reminiscence of Swans under the guise of a review of Michael Gira’s concert in Vienna last November, which touched on the kindness and generosity Jarboe showed me in the early days of my friendship with her. Ironically, while Gira has for the most part opened up his muse to softer and more acoustic elements since ending Swans, Jarboe’s own post-Swans work has recently been heading in the other direction, towards the theatricality and brute force of black metal. But this really shouldn’t be seen as too much of a surprise. Intensely aware of gods, demons and other spectral presences, Jarboe’s music has always revolved around the kind of incantatory invocations that the BM scene also relishes.

What makes Jarboe extraordinary, though, is the sense of humility and abasement that she brings to her on-stage persona. For at least half of this concert, she came down from the stage and sang while standing amongst the (almost exclusively male) audience, her long blonde hair shrouding her face, her voice howling and trembling in supplication. This was no mere theatrical diversion, but a deliberate strategy on Jarboe’s part to place herself in a position of utter abjection. The resulting cauldron of lamentation was both sexually charged and unbearably moving.

Jarboe’s songs are protean; they refuse to take on the properties of songs, sounding instead like hectoring blasts of black energy. The guitar, bass and drums pulsate menacingly, as though calling up apparitions given voice by Jarboe’s sepulchral keening. The performance resonates with an elegiac, mystical beauty.

Michael Gira has indicated that he may resurrect the Swans name for a new album and tour, a move which (needless to say) I would wholeheartedly welcome. Jarboe, sadly, is unlikely to be a part of any such endeavour; but on the evidence of this show, Gira will have to go some to match the level of draining intensity reached by his erstwhile bandmate.

Sunn O))) & Pita, Vienna Arena, 3 June 2009

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An overwhelmingly loud and brutal concert from the metal band it’s OK to like (and certainly the only one I like). In fact this evening was more akin to a test of physical endurance than possibly any other I have seen. Here were Sunn O))) as they should be heard – just the two men on guitar, with no extraneous vocals or instrumentation. Playing – or, more accurately, improvising off – their 1999 début The Grimmrobe Demos, the duo issued a full 90 minutes of nothing but malevolent guitar drones and sub-bass frequencies monstrous enough to make your entire body quake.

There’s a lot of talk about Sunn O))) having a deadpan humour to their work, a certain quality of sending themselves up, but I can’t see it when the outcome is as relentlessly tortured and funereal as this. With their cowled selves only ever partially revealed through the impenetrable curtain of fog, their agonisingly slow onstage movements and their uncanny, somehow menacing salutes, O’Malley and Anderson seem less concerned with acknowledging a sense of the ridiculous than with presenting a coherent and disturbing vision of Hell.

Those who arrived early had the pleasure of seeing local laptop hero, and head honcho of Editions Mego, Pita aka Peter Rehberg, who forms one half of KTL with O’Malley. More or less reprising his April set at the Rhiz, Rehberg took full advantage of the much larger PA to generate ferocious coils of sound from his two Macbooks. That haunting and fevered third track from Get Out loomed particularly large again, sounding like a deranged part-animal/part-machine as it swooped and seethed about the place.

Ether column, May 2009

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When I was 13 years old and just getting into “proper” music for the first time, most of the kids at my school were huge followers of heavy metal, in particular the short-lived phenomenon known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. As a quieter and more bookish type (don’t laugh), I was the only person I knew of that age who worshipped instead at the altar of electronic music, in particular the German group Kraftwerk. I’m tempted to say I had the last laugh, for while the NWOBHM quickly floundered, Kraftwerk are still a formidable proposition. It’s unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable, that their rare concert in Austria this month takes place at a dance music festival, since Kraftwerk are still more often thought of in terms of their supposed “influence” on hip-hop and techno than their own music itself. Kraftwerk music is possessed of a shimmering, crystalline beauty, the simplicity and urgency of their melodies utterly beguiling. Although founder member Ralf Hütter is the only one left from the classic Kraftwerk line-up, in this case it hardly matters, since the individual personalities were long ago subsumed into a group identity that represents itself onstage in a stunning multimedia show including, at one point, the appearance of the legendary Kraftwerk robots. Impossibly dry and funny, at times sinister yet strangely hopeful and touching, Kraftwerk are the sound of the future turning back in on itself.

Just sneaking in under the wire this month is a welcome return to these shores by experimental drone metallers Sunn O))). Although the duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson have played with a bewildering variety of other artists, their strongest music undeniably emerges from their work together as Sunn O))), a group originally conceived as a tribute to Earth, another band in this field. Yet in recent years Sunn O))) have outstripped Earth with their dark, mysterious and resonant music, which consists of deep, agonisingly slow guitar lines played amid a welter of feedback and the occasional anguished vocal. Live, they present an intriguing spectacle, playing at deafening volume, dressed in long, hooded robes and filling the room with industrial quantities of fog that add to the ritualistic aspect of the performance. Arrive early to catch the support slot from Vienna laptop maestro Peter Rehberg aka Pita, who plays with O’Malley as KTL.

Finally, I could hardly end this column without mentioning another Vienna concert by the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, this time performing with his celebrated Chicago Tentet in the elegant surroundings of Porgy & Bess. This awesomely talented and expressive big band is now at the height of its powers, merging the delights of way-out jazz and free improvisation into an extended and delirious whole. Not to be missed.

Kraftwerk, Wiesen 29 May 2009

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I love Kraftwerk. When I was 12 years old and the most fanatical Gary Numan fan in Salisbury, I would study interviews with Numan in Smash Hits in which he would expound at length on his many “influences”. After Bowie (whom I have never really “got” to this day, to tell the truth) and John Foxx-era Ultravox! (whom I have very much “got” in recent years), the third often-cited Numan influence was Kraftwerk, a name that sounded impossibly mysterious and glamorous to me at the time.

On one of my occasional visits to Southampton (for an account of a later one, and another initial encounter with a German group, see here), I shelled out my pocket money on what was then still the most recent Kraftwerk LP, The Man Machine. The cover, of course, reinforced the sense of mystery and glamour that had so seduced me in the group’s name: these four white-faced men of indeterminate age, neatly dressed in matching red shirts and black ties, gazed to the right in a pose of strength and heroism, while the bold and multilingual lettering conjured an equally beguiling image of Soviet-era iconography. The music, meanwhile, was like nothing I had ever heard before. Glistening, precise and oddly moving, it put Numan’s more popwise constructions firmly in their place.

The following year, Kraftwerk emerged with a new LP, Computer World, a highly appropriate release given that the first home computers were then making inroads into people’s lives. And the group toured the album, even coming to the Southampton Gaumont, but sadly I was too young to attend. I recall Smash Hits explaining how rare and special Kraftwerk concerts were, since the group were effectively dismantling their Kling Klang studio and bringing it on tour with them. As a meagre consolation prize, I was in Threshold Records in Andover one day (a record shop, I am now astonished to learn, that was owned by the Moody Blues – a fact which would account for the fact that their picture was prominently displayed on the shop’s bags) and walked out with reams and reams of fake, promotional green and white computer printer paper with the Computer World logo on it, which I plastered all over my bedroom wall.

It would be another ten years before I did finally pin Kraftwerk down live, at the Brixton Academy on the Mix tour. A few years ago I caught them again at the Royal Festival Hall, by which time they had pared down their stage set considerably, with the banks of keyboards replaced by a very minimal laptop-based setup. Last week’s concert at Wiesen (part of a dance music festival so shoddy and unpleasant that I refuse even to mention it by name) was more or less a shortened version of that Minimum-Maximum set, with the music enriched by a stunningly effective multimedia show. Stunning in its simplicity, that is, since Kraftwerk instinctively realise the power of straightforward and unadorned imagery as an accompaniment to the steely beauty of this music.

For beauty is what Kraftwerk music aspires to and reaches. The vocals and melodies are precise, clipped and serene; they go exactly where they need to go, and no further. There’s a strangely haunting, sinister quality to a song like “Radioactivity”, the stately tune of which sounds like a romantic paean to the slow death of mankind. There’s an uncanny humour to much of the set – case in point: “The Robots”, with the delightful and laugh-out-loud funny appearance of the titular androids. And Kraftwerk are, of course, utterly thrilled by the idea of motion. Whether serenading the autobahn, the express train or the bicycle, there’s an ongoing fascination with the liberating possibilities of travel. Uniting past, current and future technologies in their tender embrace, Kraftwerk sing of worlds we know and worlds we wish we knew.

Psychic TV, Vienna Rhiz, 25 May 2009

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By some way the worst concert I’ve attended in a long while, this evening confirmed that whatever Genesis P-Orridge’s gifts may include, music isn’t one of them. As a performance artist, ideas man and prankster, he’s second to none; but stick him on a stage and ask him to come up with an evening of interesting sounds, and he will inevitably struggle. Fair enough, he’s never claimed to be a musician, but in the past at least he had the nous to surround himself with people who were able to give musical shape to his crazed visions and insights. In TG it was primarily Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson who came up with the music, while on the early Psychic TV sides Christopherson was joined by Alex Fergusson and others. Psychic TV have been through many incarnations since then, of course; but none of them have come close to recapturing the stark, uneasy beauty of those first two PTV records, and it certainly wasn’t recaptured on Monday night. Someone described the group as sounding like the worst parts of the Velvet Underground combined with the worst parts of Spacemen 3, which neatly summed it up for me.

What the paying audience was presented with was a group that basically consisted of a plodding, fuzzed-out guitarist, a flailing and approximate bassist, a drummer of stunning ineptitude and P-Orridge’s disagreeable caterwauling over the top. The lyrics, insofar as they could be discerned, were trite and drenched in bathos. There was nothing at all to hold the attention, and this, combined with the steadily rising temperature inside the Rhiz, made a sojourn outside in the fresh air outside not only desirable but practically essential.

David Murobi paid much greater attention than I did, and his fine photos of the evening can be seen here.