WHP & Paxahau Present: Movement Detroit
Victoria Warehouse, Manchester | November 30
Detroit: the hinterland of the countercultural techno renaissance. Tonight, Manchester’s Victoria Warehouse is a microcosm of the above; appropriating the 4/4 rhythmic music policy of Paxahau: the Motor City’s flagship techno promoters. This is one of a fistful of exclusively curated events and as such, Manchester’s homage to the merits of machine made beat music.
En route to the entrance, Crack and sozzled company are understandably stoked. First up, Cocoon bossman Sven Vath is giddy on mountain-sized mechanical throbs, building skyscrapers of suspense as designed by Kraftwerk in the acid-drenched basement of Tresor.
The psych-infused mini-melodramas soon make way for Marcel Dettmann’s straight laced tedium of beat though, as confirmation of his belated arrival (as revealed via Facebook) triggers a mass exodus to the markedly smaller Room Three. But instead, we segue via a combative Joy Orbison next door in Room Two, who’s doing his damndest to divert the traffic and make us sweat by way of unleashing an onslaught of tribal percussion and dithering basslines. Looks like melody is for chumps.
We hunker down in the darkness, pissed to the marrow on 808 drum loops, but Orbison’s heady tribalism is a mere entrée to the dexterity Maya Jane Coles and Nina Kraviz harness. Equally divisive and provocative figures on a male-dominated line-up, the duo’s three hour mélange of robotic minimalism and Plastikman plagiarised acidity is a snapshot of the sound that’s cross-pollinating once disparate styles. The caustic meets the intelligent in a sub-cultural experiment and we’re the beneficiaries. A rework of Inner City’s Good Life from Kraviz provides us with just a flicker of light before Damian Lazarus delivers a commanding set comprised of techno/house staples via his Crosstown Rebels canon.
Back in Room One, it’s 5am, and everyone’s still losing their shit, transfixed by Chris Leibing’s two hour techno odyssey and the gargantuan ‘Testudo’ art/machine/centrepiece, aka a wormhole into another universe. The ghosts of Detroit have blazed a trail through WHP’s urban temple and these early morning clusters of technonauts have been possessed by their presence.
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Words: Joshua Nevett
Photo: Liam Birnie
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