Lola's Bad
The Nest, London
Friday March 28 2014
Apparently, I've been here before. Not in another
life, you understand, but at another gig.
It seems The Nest was previously known as Barden's
Boudoir, where I saw Psychic
TV - supported by current superstars Factory Floor, no less - in 2009.
One name-change and interior rearrangement later, and
the venue is unrecognisable. The stage has been unceremoniously shunted
into a small alcove at the far end of the room, which does rather suggest
the Nest isn't quite as serious about live music these days as it was in
its former incarnation.
Still,
Lola's Bad - being a solo project of film maker, performance artist and
left-field electropop
maven Evangelia C - should be able to fit into the downsized facilities
without too much bother.
Here she comes now, in a flurry of red hair and
thrumming electronix. She's got more loops than a stunt plane and enough
beats to build a wall. She threads her treated vocal through this assemblage
of sound as if weaving a carpet - her voice essentially used as another
instrument in the mix, rather than out front on its own. A democracy of
human and machine.
It's a heady swirl
of sonics , sometimes fuzzily ethereal, sometimes a full-on dancefloor
fusillade. Evangelia herself is always moving, dipping and swaying
behind her minimalist kit, one hand on the controls, one hand on the microphone.
Her almost-dancing moves are (I guess) intuitive rather than choreographed,
but it's interesting to see how far we've moved on since the days when
electronic artists almost universally stood stock-still behind their equipment,
radiating alienation as they prodded their Yamaha DX7s. Kraftwerk had a
lot to answer for, let's put it that way.
Lola's Bad represents electronic
music performance of now: primarily human and organic, which is slightly
paradoxical, I suppose, since I'm sure Evangelia has got more music-generating
technology in her laptop than David Bowie had in the entire
studio when he recorded the stark soundscapes of Low.
There's a point to
be made here, I'm sure, about how electronic musicians of yesteryear more
or less felt obliged to behave like po-faced servants of The Machine, even
though The Machine wasn't a particularly forbidding master at the time.
Now, the technology is far more capable, but we've learned to treat it with suitable disrespect. Zeroes and ones are still only tools, after all, and tonight Lola's Bad wields them with brash confidence as she engineers her own delirious disco.
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