Pita

Crash 1010
Friday 11th February 2005
ICA, The Mall, London SW1

As my learned (and bearded) colleague, Anil, rightly points out. This evening's contest of man vs. noisy laptop had a female winna. Sonically rich / visually pleasing as she contorted and twisted her face to reflect the pain that her patches were causing the Operating System.

Elsewhere, Stillupsteypa took a different tack as they ventured down the road marked 'plunderphonics'. The mix of japanese country 'n western and midi-funk easing off on the brutality of previous acts. The sudden introduction of melody jolts you though, a bit like hearing Heart FM on the cab home after a night of hard techno.

Mego boss Pita (aka Peter Rehberg) played a criminally short set; his orchestral manoeuvres in the dark simply failed to ignite. Farmers Manual spent the entire set throwing digital dice to see what random sequence would come up. A 25-minute process of fine-tune and tweak until they hit the right sound, at which point they all left the stage to let the machines smear us with the end sustain and resulting decay.

Russell Haswell

It all ended with Russell Haswell, reluctantly the glitch_core poster boy, sharing bandwidth with one of the Farmers. I've always accused Haswell of being unnecessarily brutal. A swaggering laddish approach to noise. But here he seems restrained, almost ambient in tone; all burn and less burst. The sudden use of strobes proving apt eye-candy; a limited palette of repetitive detuned fuzz that sounded like they were operating a pair of lawnmowers.

Please keep off the grass....