Drop Dead Festival
Day 2 - Bands in order of appearance:
Mueran Humanos
Vilkduja
oFF
Ania Et Le Programmeur
Butterclock
Scream Club
Schwefelgelb
ADS, Berlin
Friday September 2 2011
Day two of Drop Dead, and things are starting to get really international. Let's check out what's happening in the big room (as opposed to the front room or the back room - Club ADS is nothing if not a labyrinth). First band today: Mueran Humanos, who come from Argentina, although, handily enough, the band is based in Berlin at present.
Berlin does tend to attract bands from around the world who are looking for a European base - London has a similar role as an artistic crossroads, of course, although it's a brave band that takes on the cost of London living.
From Drop Dead's point of view, it's very useful to have an international pool of artists on the doorstep. I doubt if anyone could have afforded to fly Mueran Humanos in from Argentina just for this show - so I'm glad the band decided to relocate. Because - you know what? - they're really rather good.
There are two of them: keyboards and guitar. But there's no dainty minimalism about Mueran Humanos. Sure, they can be spookily ethereal at times, or even, here and there, get all smashed-techno, like an 80s computer game being nailed to a wall. But there's a glowering menace behind even their most meticulous minimalism, and as the set unfolds the music billows and builds like an approaching storm. A ragged, thrumming electronic rumble underpins everything, with treated guitar skidding about in front like a plane trying to outrun a hurricane. Male/femalevocals mesh and entwine and then go their separate ways. In the end, the sound is so all-encompassing you forget there are just two people on stage. You're just mesmerised, as the Mueran Humanos juggernaut powers towards you.
Vilkduja also have two people on stage, although this seems to be an economy version of the band's usual line-up. Vilkduja come from Lithunaia, and by all accounts were something of a home-town hit last year, when Drop Dead took place in Vilnius. This time - well, maybe not so much. A boffin-bloke busies himself with a table of effects and sings; a geeky guy plays guitar. They generate a kind of electro-folk racket, as if Gogol Bordello had been locked in a box with Depeche Mode, and maybe, if the band had a full line-up rocking it up on stage, it would all make some kind of crazy sense. As it is, it doesn't quite hit the target. So let's leave Vilkduja to it, and head into the back room - where some Gucci Goth is going on.
What the blinking flip is Gucci Goth, I hear you cry. It's tempting to reply 'Anything you want it to be', since it's not like anyone's come up with a handy mission statement. But, in a Swarovski crystal-encrusted nutshell, it comes down to picking the bones of mainstream fashion, music and culture, and creating something with a streetwise edge (if not necessarily a heart of darkness) out of those gleanings.
That means, of course, that Gucci Goth doesn't necessarily have anything to do with actual goth, and I dare say both sides are pretty relieved about that. But for all the inevitable suspicion that someone's trying to invent the next big thing, there is something real out there: kewl kids in reinvented designer chic. I saw it myself a while back at an HTRK gig in an eighties-throwback London cellar, when I suddenly realised half the audience looked like it had stepped out of the Gucci Goth Tumblr blog. It was inevitable that sooner or later someone was going to notice the phenomenon and give it a name.
So it's Gucci Goth a-go-go in Drop Dead's back room tonight, then. And because Gucci Goth isn't actually a music genre, that means the bands could be interestingly all over the shop. But let's not speak too soon. I'm not sure I'd use the word 'interestingly' about oFF, who turn out to comprise an average-joe kinda guy in T-shirt and baseball cap, flanked by two dancing girls who strike mutant-yoga attitudes in underlit gloom. They're all wearing handkerchiefs tied over their faces, as if someone's just farted.
Minimalist trip-hoppy beats 'n' sweeps unfurl leisurely from the PA. The dancing girls give us some shapes while Joe in the middle tries not to look like a spare part. Musically, it's not bad, in a kind of bedroom-electro dreamscape kind of way, but they really, realy need to work on the visuals. Or at least make the bloke stay behind his laptop, or something, and let the girls run the show.
Back in the big room, we're about to experience something a little more fully-realised. Ania Et Le Programmeur are a electronix 'n' guitar collision, originally from Paris but now, like so many others, Berlin-based. They generate a huge and hurtling distort-o-noise, agonised vocals shrieking over the top like a nightmare mash-up of CJ Bolland and Sonic Youth. It certainly passes the punk rock test, that's for sure.
And yet, for all the freaking, the band remain entirely self-contained, almost reserved, on stage. The contrast between the sound-rampage and the band's studious demeanour actually works. The girl on keyboards (I assume this is Ania) keeps her head down and smiles a secret smile; the guy on guitar (presumably this is Le Programmeur) stands side-on to the maelstrom, hollering into a micohone held up by a scaled-down replica of a construction crane. Ooh, very industrial. But here's the thing: nobody actually fronts the band in the conventional rock 'n' roll manner. The noise is all.
In the Gucci Goth zone, Butterclock is ticking. Butterclock sounds like the name of a children's TV show, but in fact turns out to be a girl 'n' technology deal. The girl is Laura Clock, from France via the USA, apparently, although if she's not based in Berlin yet I bet she soon will be. She wafts ethereal, jazzy vocals over a downtempo beats and samples brew.
It's actually more of an assertive experience than you might infer from that description, since Laura Clock is a fairly full-on performer. She works the stage like a trouper, getting into the audience's faces as her fuzzy-at-the-edges sounds fill the room with sonic mist. It's a bit like watching shoegaze being re-engineered for the twenty-first century before our very eyes.
There's nothing shoegazey about Scream Club, who crash-land on stage in the big room now. The name drops a clue that we're not about to get on an ethereal tip here. But then, what are we going to get? Diamanda Galas-style shrieking? Nope - because Scream Club are a female rap duo who seem to have been beamed into reality from the club scene in the 80s new wave sci-fi movie Liquid Sky. They're all primary colours and party-or-else attitude, a vindaloo version of Salt 'n' Pepa.
The two Screams - Sarah Adorable and Cindy Wonderful, names that suggest a certain self-confidence if nothing else - stalk and strut and holler like this Berlin bunker is Studio 54 in NYC, and it's 1982 or thereabouts. They're like the Beastie Boys' big sisters, showing 'em how it should be done. If there's an all-American brashness to Scream Club, it's probably because they are American: from Washington state orginally, although now they are - let's sing this bit all together - based in Berlin.
I can't envisage a German act giving it the full-on street hustle like Scream Club do. I imagine a European act would gravitate to a rather more arch, cabaret-slanted performance, while a British equivalent would have a natural tendency to play it for risqué laughs. Scream Club bring impetuous, upfront Americana to dour old Berlin.
Schwefelgelb sounds like something you dribble down your shirt when you've had too many beers, and is probably the reason this bunch of energetic EBM-sters hasn't made much headway in the English speaking world. In the German speaking world - or, at any rate, this bit of it - they've clearly got 'nuff fans. The crowd seethes and bounces just as vigourously as the band, which seems to consist of an electronix-controller lurking in the shadows, and a hyperactive gym instructor in a glittery top, giving it loads and barking out the vocals up front. Mind you, there's so much smoke on stage they might have an entire symphony orchestra lurking back there for all I can see.
Schwefelgelb lead the crowd through some vigourous callisthenics to their thumping electronic dancefloor beat, and at its best the show is like a glammed-up DAF in full effect. But as each dancefloor workout is followed by another, I can't help thinking that if you replaced the hyperactive gym instructor in the glittery top with a stout Irishman in a black shirt, you'd practically have VNV Nation. And I don't think I want to go there.
I think I'll fade into the night at this point. Somehow, the early hours of the morning have come around again - the club's 'open end' means nobody's too bothered about getting the bands on stage on time, and, inevitably, Drop Dead has started running late. But my body clock doesn't have an open end. We'll see all you cool kids tomorrow for Day 3.
On to Day 3 of the Drop Dead Festival here.
Back to Day 1 of the Drop Dead Festival here.
Schwefelgelb: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Scream Club: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Butterclock: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Ania Et Le Programmeur: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Mueran Humanos: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Drop Dead Festival: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Gucci Goth: Website | Facebook
For more photos from the Drop Dead Festival, find the bands by name here.
