Crack

A confession: I’d never seen and barely heard Christian Fennesz and Portland’s Emeralds before this evening, a borderline ludicrous and socially embarrassing proposition for someone with even a fleeting interest in the drone and ambient scenes, especially considering how long both have been active. So this pairing, at Islington’s heavenly Union Chapel, was a particular no-brainer for a quiet Sunday evening.

Despite intermittent pauses and some clumsy initial sampling, Christian Fennesz pretty much lives up to weighty expectation. Drone, inevitably, can be cursed by a lack of dynamism, but the Austrian veteran’s music – comprising a basic guitar and laptop set up – is, for all its volume, subtle and affecting but ever so slightly underwhelming. The initial, sample-laced swells of layered haze transcend effectively in to dissonant metallic noise – by way of what sounded like some heavily-buried Balearic house – and culminate in an enveloping melodic warmth, before being cut out in an instant. The surprising highpoint is his use of simple guitar figures which, at times, recalled an even more ruptured take on Neil Young’s improvised soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. All in all, nice, if not much more.

In comparison to Fennesz’s mannered, static presence, Emeralds are positively kinetic. Even as they take the stage, John Elliott is pumping his fist at the crowd, a precursor to, if not a promise of, the ecstatically ‘rock’ take on kraut-laced drone the trio dispense over the next three songs and fifty-odd minutes of stage time.

Much has been written on the group at this point, and for good reason; last year’s classic Does It Look Like I’m Here? was essentially a breakthrough record and only the latest of nearly 40 releases, even excluding Mark McGuire’s increasingly lauded solo work. Though consistently labelled drone, their Kosmiche-futurist, New Age embellished soundscapes encompass a propulsive, chugging energy which has understandably earned comparisons to Tangerine Dream and other Krautrock groups. But tonight, despite the regressive labelling, Emeralds sound like no one else. Initial problems with sound levels, prompting Elliott’s manic eyeballing towards the sound desk, leave Mark McGuire’s guitar lines sounding like faint ambient washes under the crisp, icy treble of Elliott and Steve Hauschildt’s rigidly-sequenced analog synthesizers; indeed, witnessing McGuire’s animated stage presence with such a meditative lack of volume is almost as surreal a juxtaposition as the Funktion 1 sound system dropped in the middle of the Union Chapel’s divine, Gothic non-conformist interior.

Once these technical problems are attended to, watery samples and mercurial electronics take relative second fiddle to McGuire’s histrionics and Elliott’s hilariously incessant headbanging. The band’s second piece essentially comprises a mannered forty-minute solo over rhythmic keyboard and acid-leaning basslines, but was infinitely more engaging than it had any right to be on paper. An encore came with intriguing surprises - an actual drum machine?! - proper, floor-rumbling noise and yet further proof that, in the right hands, these exercises in repetition and extended jamming can be as immersive as any more conventionally emotive examples of the genre. All of which makes for one of the best live experiences I’ve had this year; about as much as one could ask for, right?



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Words: Tom Howells

http://www.myspace.com/fennesz

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