Wheels Instead of Hooves
Friday 4th March 2005
Electrowerkz, London, N1

Wheels are back! Where did they go? Erm, dunno. I guess they figured no-one else is gonna be brave enough to do IDM parties anymore. But tread the familiar, the comfortable, the cosy, the filth smeared interior that is the Electrowerkz. It's been a week since I went and I still stink of grime. Still, mustn't grumble like I'm a thirtysomething. Time to get down with the kids....

Artists reprazenting the Skam and Spezialmaterial labels occupy two floors, but it made no difference. The snatches of music heard from either room just reinforced the notion that the pixel thin thread of electronic music known as IDM hasn't really progressed since I last paid attention. Freeform might have been good fun....

Upstairs Ceephax Acid Crew WAS fun. His mix of acid, acid and more acid meant we had nowhere to go but squiggle. Even the girls were squealing with delight. Luke Vibert also knocked out meaty slabs of techno, his playback of the AFX 12"'s just reminded everyone that Richard D. James is still around. Musically and in the vicinity.

But despite the novelty of actually being at a club in 2005 and blankly greeting the same scenesters. I, along with a few other elders, are really here for B12. Having knocked out a collectible series of prototype detroit techno 12"'s on their own label and a couple of albums for Warp. They then promptly fucked off into obscurity. Some would say quite rightly so, as their last few releases stank.

So, here they are, two rather reluctant essex boys. crouched over their mammoth mixing desk. Teasing out aural relics; sounds and sequences from a time before DSP, plug-ins and other modern-day laptop shpongle. Except that it all goes nowhere fast. The futurist chrome landscapes evoked by their music still tingles with possibilities, but live they lack the compositional dexterity needed to sustain.

They built-up, broke down, muted/unmuted and looped to a largely indifferent me. The end of the set predictably emitted a crowd-pleaser from their back catalogue. Like duh, they should have done this all along: one off appearance? Just belt out the classics. A greatest hits set, anything but this.

A week later and I'm being treated to their magnificent track 'Obsessed' by Jon Soul Jazz over the shop's system. And the precision sequencing of ideas in those five minutes and forty-seven seconds outdoes anything I heard from that night. B12: deficient live, playback preferred.