Tuesday 4 October 2011

Drumro[ll] 1st Birthday with Sandwell District, The Black Dog, George Fitzgerald & Richard H Kirk at Park Hill

Emerging from Sheffield train station, Park Hill, an old sink estate currently undergoing redevelopment, looms over the city skyline like Dracula's castle, as if remodelled by Le Corbusier. From the middle of a concrete fortress, the nights kicks off at unnaturally early 8pm (licensing issues having now required a 2am curfew). Darkness has not long settled in over the city, and Park Hill now assumes its unlikely status as the place to be. An old brutalist monument to post-war social democratic optimism and the subsequent political, social and architectural decay? Not a popular choice, but that'll do me for a night out of dark electronic music. Steely music for the steel city, dark music for a dark space.

All 3 acts (George Fitzgerald, only dj'ed at a subsequent afterparty) formed a logical programme, ensuring a continuity of dark, brooding electronic music, with differences enough apparent to keep things interesting. Richard H Kirk, who as part of Cabaret Voltaire, was making strange noises before most contemporary producers were even sperm, had an early start, and set about establishing the industrial theme of the evening from the off, chafing as this initially was. This was no warm-up. Straight on to local gods, The Black Dog. No nice groovy tech-house interludes, it was on to Techno with a capital T. It was heavy, dark and rolling, as one would expect, but they were not to bludgeon the audience into submission. That role was to be assumed, as expertly as could be expected, by Sandwell District, whose two members have as much techno experience between them as your average Detroit phonebook.

On record, Sandwell District manage to introduce a little warmth into one of the most hair-shirted and ascetic strains of dance music (or any music), through the use of icy synth lines and ethereal washes of sound, forging a continuity between their post-punk and techno/IDM influences. Live, underneath the raw concrete of Park Hill, atmospherics and abstraction is substituted for brittle, body-bashing blasts of percussion. It could be said that it is all just merely very functional, but in the world of techno, 'mere' functionalism is nothing to be scared of. Where the function is to create a dark spasm of euphoria on crowded dancefloors, forms follow function, and ends justify means.

In a mix of their own tracks ('Immolare'), SD affiliated offshoots (Regis' 'Blood Witness' being a sheer glory of a cacophony) and various referents too numerous to name and number, SD prove in a two-hour sprint that while techno may be mocked by many for its apparent dryness and emotional frigidity (as noted in Simon Reynold's excellent Energy Flash), it can, at the right place, the right time, inspire sweaty, mindless (as in un self-conscious) possession as any other music you could care to compartmentalise.

The remarkable congruity of the programming, the venue and the novelty of the occasion was an affirmation that dark, sometimes difficult electronic music, is to be enjoyed, and is not the arch soundtrack to pseudo-nihilistic grandstanding it can sometimes appear to be.

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