First let me say, shouts to the people who read the entire London email, and let me know. A surprising amount. Including Mum and Dad, cheers you two! 😀
Also Niamh (an actual proper writer, go check out her substack Not Music Journalism), who really encouraged me to write more, so here you go:
7pm until 4am… hmmm… it sounds loooong. Too long!
That was me considering whether to buy a ticket to a gig last Friday: Saskia/Ben Vince/Manisdron at Strange Brew. It was 7pm-10pm and I already had a ticket to the 11pm-4am gig at the same venue, Probe with Carrier and Lynne, which started at 11pm and went on till way, way, waaay after bedtime.
The late gig was promoted by my friend Jay Galligan, fellow Bristol-based Dubliner who EVERYBODY knows, a techno DJ and now: promoter! I hadn’t heard of either act but Jay played me some Carrier (real name Guy Brewer) who makes music kind of in between techno and drum’n’bass. It sounded really good so I got an early release ticket around 2 months ago.
Remember in the London thing I wrote a couple of weeks ago I mentioned meeting Dion at the Planet Mu event? Well, Dion is another fellow Irish person based in Bristol now, he is one of the bookers for the Open Ear festival on Sherkin Island, and like Jay, everyone knows Dion. He also goes to around 100 gigs a year, partly because he’s looking for acts to book for the festival and partly because he’s a mad raver. He also makes sick tunes as Belacqua.
Anyway, the last thing he said to me at the Planet Mu gig was “You HAVE to go to Saskia/Ben Vince/Manisdron at Strange Brew!”
So with Dion’s words ringing in my ear, I did purchase a ticket to that early gig even though I’d only heard of one of those acts – Ben Vince. Ben is a saxophonist who has played on a lot of great techno and bass records, like Joy Orbison on Hessle Audio, and with Jay Duncan on Phantasy Sound and a bunch of other stuff you probably never heard of.
So on Friday night I headed out for the long, long haul. I got to Strange Brew around 7.50pm. As I approached the venue I saw Dion outside chatting to a few people. One was Trish aka K Means who Dion introduced as one of the best DJs in Bristol. A lovely friendly person she is!
I headed into the venue to the minimal bass and modular tweaked sound of Saskia, a Japanese artist now resident in Bristol. She was played live with a Doepfer Dark Time (modular nerdy stuff – it’s a sequencer!) and couple other bits. It was warm and pleasant, bass and kick drums resounding through the club in the main front room space. I love the décor and colours of Strange Brew’s front room, it’s kind of cyberpunk and dark but with fluorescent bits here and there, kind of Disney-world-ride overtones peeking through the grimey rave-hole foundations.
The gig was not super full, (it’s a big room) but it was cordoned off to make a smaller space which was smart. Maybe 40 people stood around listening. I think I caught the second half of the set. I enjoyed it but in the end there was not quite enough happening in the music to appease my information-starved brain. It’s hard to keep my attention these days! The crowd however loved it judging by the very long applause when she finished.
Dion was busy talking to loads of people so I kind of wandered around like an introvert. I drank a glass of water. I went over here. I went over there. I wished the next set would start. Sometimes I’m not the best at striking up a conversation with a stranger, so I didn’t.
Luckily I didn’t have to wait too long, Ben Vince got started up after tapping his mic a few times (no sound) and looking around as if there was some problem. Hmm, I thought. Is there a problem? But no, he picked up his sax and started blowing into it, and the mic seemed to work.
AT FIRST I couldn’t get into the squawking, honking, brittle sound of Ben Vince’s sax… And the multiphonics… well I rarely enjoy those to be honest. (it’s when you blow the sax a certain way and multiple notes come out but it sounds a bit shite).
Partly the room was to blame (bad acoustics for sax) and the mic translating the sax sound through the speakers. But after a while I started getting into it… Ben Vince’s thing is not technical sax playing, it’s the whole, attitude, loops, punk, diy, anything goes vibe.
Soon enough Ben was looping his sax notes into a rhythmical melay of overlapping lines, with effects and delay on them. I liked it! It was a nice opening piece. In another piece he played a kind of backing track with more beats, but kind of 80s sounding, and blew sax notes over it, which sounded nice….er than before. In the next piece the beats stepped up in intensity and he took out an electric guitar. Now his guitar playing made his sax playing look like Charlie Parker, BUT I actually REALLY enjoyed that piece! Bizarre! He really got into it. Bopping around, knocking his mic here and there with his guitar (by mistake I think). But the focus translated into some gripping music!
As usual when I listen to music, whether I like it or not, I try to learn something from it. What is it that is objectively good or bad about it? Why do I like it or dislike it? I try to answer those kinds of things. Last night I thought about focus, how it translates into the music. While playing the earlier sax pieces he didn’t seem to be intensely focused but while playing the guitar piece he did… and I enjoyed it more. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
As the set went on, he went back to sax, and for a while vocals (which were a spoken word kind of thing through much effects, hard to hear the words but something like “I walk through the night”) and then sax again, and the beats got harder and harder and more intense, and the last two tracks were really good! People bopped around a little bit. He also got a warm and enthusiastic round of applause.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IyKtmVwVPFM
During the break after his set, I wandered around and then sat down on a speaker and suddenly OMFG IT HAPPENED!! The moment I’ve been waiting for, the moment I’ve worked towards for so many years…
A guy came up to me and said…
“Are you ZOiD? I recognize you from Youtube!”
🫨🤯
Haha!! It was pretty awesome. He also said he thought it was his fault I was there – because in my video “Why I’m Leaving Ireland” (my one big hit so far, 15k views) in which I mentioned I was moving to Bristol, he had left a comment saying “You should check out Strange Brew!”
I didn’t tell him I’d already had about 50 people recommend Strange Brew to me. Anyway we had a nice friendly chat, me and him and his partner, about Aphex Twin. His partner had just discovered a lovely table-top guitar version of Avril 14th. Nice.
And then Manisdron started playing on his drumkit/electronics setup.
Until then I was thinking, this gig is kind of disappointing for Bristol standards. I’m usual blown away the whole time. But this was like, solid 3/5 so far.
Dion had really bigged up Manisdron to me. I knew nothing other than there was a drum kit there.
He belted out an hour of techno, acid techno, with very tight drumming just SLAMMING the whole thing along. His platform was in the centre of the room so there was a circle of people around him. Perfect set up! I danced like a techno-mentler for the whole set. It was fantastic.
I would take a couple points away from him for overdoing a certain technique where he dropped down to floor tom / no kick, tweaked the modular and then did a snare fill and dropped into just kick drum. The first time it sounded great but by the third time I was like dude get another trick. But he did have other tricks and basically he smashed it out of the park. Polyrhythmic (a lot of his tom rhythms were in 3) and super tight but yet human (I love hearing beats that drift ever so slightly out of time and back into time as it’s hard to replicate that with a computer and computer beats tend to be very perfect and maybe boring as a result although I still do love a good drum machine straight 4/4 like Kraftwerk “so straight it’s funky” etc etc).
The whole crowd was brilliant, doing all manner of different kinds of dances. Anyone could and would bust whatever moves they felt like busting in that crowd! Flail arms wide? No prob. Hunch down and gyrate? Go for it. Spin around for a while? Why not?! Anything goes! It was class!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bMyrw0ndux4
Alright alright we’re getting there. One gig over, one more to go. 3 more acts. Let’s get in.
In between the two gigs, me, Dion and Trish K Means went to The Bank, a nearby pub. We had a good chat. Trish was heading to the airport in a few hours to go to DJ in Italy and me and Dion were heading back for Part Two.
When we got back to Strange Brew the late gig had started. This time it was in the backroom. There was LOADS of dry ice, smoke machine, fog juice, whatever you want to call it, and dim red lighting. This is the PERFECT club ambience I reckon. You can’t see two feet in front of your face. You get to go into your own world, just you and the music. Jay Galligan and Robin Steward were playing techno. Huge bassy tracks, great warm up set.
Met another Irishman in Bristol, Bernard, and his partner and their friend, and had a chat with them before heading back to the dance.
Carrier started his liveset at midnight. It started with looooong intense noises. Swooping and swirling. Suited the vibe of the room perfectly. You have to be super confident to do a long no-beat intro at midnight on a Saturday night at any club anywhere. Carrier is confident. He brought the beats in when he was good and ready and I’d say they were around 155bpm, no 4/4s, very interesting polyrhythmical workouts… there was kind of a bass drum pattern I kept hearing that sounded like it was in 5, but every around 6 or 7 repetitions there was a different pattern of 2 beats. I wonder if it was a 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 2 pattern – that makes 32 beats or 8 bars of 4/4. Couldn’t quite figure it out but if I ever meet Guy Brewer, oh boy will I be asking him!
The sound palette stayed the same throughout the whole set (bit too much the same for me) which was:
Bass drum: tasty kicks
Bass: super sub bass, also tasty
Background sound design: gurgling, crackling, snapping – lush
Swirls of noises: Like the opening, not quite notes, more like filtered noise
Percussion and snare-like things: found sounds, metallic plonks and rattles
And that was it. That and a load of delay. Dubbed out delay. It was masterful, focused… and it really sucked me in. For a while. But then I got bored. That attention deficit again. I wandered out and found Dion equally bored, we had a conversation about Squarepusher and how he made all his classic tracks on just a BOSS DR660 sequencing an AKAI S950. HOW?!!!
Went back in for another try but I couldn’t really get back into it. I think if there are no chords, no notes, no melodies… it’s very hard to keep my attention on the music. Top marks for sound design and rhythmic inventiveness though.
The set finished. Lynne came on and played a lovely opening. First couple numbers were really interesting, like nothing I’ve heard before. But then, it was after 1am and I scarpered home and went to bed.
Thanks for reading, bye!
ZOiD
PS New bundle offer on my two courses: