KAVINSKY: OUTRUN ALBUM RELEASE
Netil House, Hackney | March 2nd
It can be hard to keep up with East London. Tonight there are two parties held in former office blocks/factories within three doors of each other, near London Fields. And accidents will happen. This evening, Crack spent twenty minutes trying to fathom how the salsa music we were gyrating to fit alongside the muscle-car inspired electro of Kavinsky.
“When’s Kavinsky on?” we asked.
“What’s Kavinsky?” said the lady.
So the chap on the door was right – we weren’t at the right place. He shouldn’t have let us in, mind, but we should’ve listened. We thought he was joking.
Thankfully, there’s no harm done and our second attempt to locate the correct venue is a success. We’re in time for the start of Riton, typically enthusiastic in tearing through a fun and trashy set. The Geordie has the crowd buzzed and mostly gathered by the stage as his hour draws to a close. He could well have come directly before the main event, but before Kavinsky we have further support from Philadelphia rapper STS and producer Bear One. Ultimately they struggle to win new friends as they stutter through a set that contains too many ropey sample choices. Bear One is certainly a skillful DJ, and STS, who cut his teeth as a slam poet, on occasion demonstrates his ability as a showman. However, the stop/start nature of their performance is at odds with the sort of night most people here have signed up for.
With a string of acclaimed EPs since 2006 and his music contributing such an integral part of Drive in 2011, producer Vincent Belorgey has perhaps taken his time in releasing his first LP. Whilst it may be overdue, debut album Outrun is an exciting record, ambitiously set to the story of the fictionalised Kavinsky, a character who crashed his Testarossa in 1986 only to rise as a zombie twenty years later to produce electronic music. It therefore seems a shame that little acknowledgement is given for that audacious creation tonight. The album is the soundtrack to a character, so you might imagine that Prelude might be treated as a dramatic entrance of sorts, or that Belorgey might be clad in the baseball jacket and wayfarers combo of the Kavinsky creation. Not so. Rather, he plays as Belorgey, in jeans and a t-shirt, smiling politely with little fuss. Which is fine, but adds a nagging sense of a missed trick.
That said, it definitely all sounds just right powering through the Funktion-One, in particular album highlights Blizzard and Testarossa Autodrive are incredible. The room stays packed, focused and unanimously thrilled for the duration of his set. No audio teething problems here then; the journey of this album is going to soundtrack a lot of very enjoyable evenings over the next year or so.
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Words: Jack Bolter
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