It was around eight months ago that a tune appeared on my randomised shuffle list (and by mine I mean my girlfriend’s mp3 player I’d nicked for the day) that would turn my freezing December afternoon jog into a struggle not to push past the sound barrier, resulting in my head to sexplode in the process. That song was Turbo Dreams, a wonderful entry point from the 2006 album Orchestra of Bubbles. A collaborative album, it featured the combined powers of musician, producer and label owner, Ellen Allien with fellow countryman and electronic wizard Sascha Ring, as known as Apparat. This small sample had me hooked like a whore after their first taste of crack and my ears were metaphorically legs akimbo for more.
Fast forward to a sunny Monday night and the arrival of Apparat at Kings Cross’s Scala with Apparat spending the intervening months working on forthcoming album The Devil’s Walk. For myself, it was months spent discovering his diverse back catalogue of early techno tracks, his sparse and atmospheric ambient output and, more recently, expansion into glitchy IDM. By this point I was like a dog in heat, aching to be filled.
In support were Ghosting Season, a reconfiguration of Ghost Gavin Miller (probably ghost number 1) and Ghost Thomas Ragsdale’s (probably ghost number 2) worriedaboutsatan project, featuring for one night only Yvette Fielding and Dr. Ciarán O’Keeffe as backing ghosts.
At first this fortean-esque electronic / minimal techno duo eluded my attention as their spooky title would suggest (with only two “celebrity” backing ghosts, how can you blame me?!) and as my attention wandered, I chose instead to discuss the finer points of flying in a helicopter with a friend of mine who has just recently flown in a helicopter and enjoyed her experience of flying in a helicopter. I have never flown in a helicopter :(. However as the evening progressed and talk of helicopters reached their inevitable shelf life, I became aware that the ambience that had been filtering through my lovely sound pussies was in fact something worthy of my attention indeed. I began to appreciate the lovely proggy builds and intermittent electronic drum smashes provided by one of the front ghosts armed with a Mac, a guitar, and a drum stick, yet only two arms.
Not to be outdone, front ghost number 2 armed himself with a Mac, a guitar and a violin bow, which worked well as a retaliation and provided an ethereal balance to the crazy electronic drum bashingness of ghost number 1, who was by now trying his best to shake his spirity head off. Alas this realisation was too late, and before I knew it, the ghosts had left and the wait began for the chiselled good looks of Apparat.
His stage setup was a lot different to what I had anticipated, with a full blown acoustic drum kit, Björn Borg on bass guitar, himself on guitar and vocals and a man surrounded by very low lying synths. So low in fact that at points during the performance it looked as though he was doing the gardening on a sunny Sunday morning, oblivious to the crowd nodding their heads around him or lack of sun. As expected, this gave me the horn.
After a longer wait than anticipated Apparat opened with a track from his new album that was warmly received before ploughing into the crowd pleasing Arcadia which saw Sascha hitting those trade mark ball clutchingly high vocal lines. Lines I often emulate and nail far better than he does in the shower. Not that I’ve ever showered with Sascha. Moving on. Between Arcadia and the track that followed, Sacha apologised to the audience for the way in which the evening would mostly be a testing ground for new material. In my opinion, this was by no means a bad thing, although it was to become apparent that sound quality issues would subsequently hamper my initial listening pleasure. At the time I just mentally composed my “disgusted from Tunbridge Wells” letter in my head.
The next new song whose title is unknown started with guitar and drums featuring more prominently; the drummer choosing to use sticks with no cotton wool on the ends this time, so you knew this meant business. The song gradually built and progressed with Sacha’s vocals rising with an ever more prominent sub bass rhythm which threatened the inside of my pants with it’s flirting of the brown note. This was only to get worse as followed an ever more prominent sub bass rhythm….and an even more prominent sub bass rhythm ad infinitum. In the end this low-end detracted from the song as the sub-bass resonated at the same natural frequency as my chest, skull and that bit between your balls sack and anus that doesn’t have a name distracting me from the music with the pleasing sexual sensations. Moving to the back of the venue helped the resonating sub bass sound to magically disappear.
Later noteworthy tracks featured more textural lullaby sound qualities with bass guitar and sub-bass samples inter-playing with prominent xylophone lines that were crisp and clear and a million miles away from the brown note muddiness of the start. This progression pleased me greatly, though just as it was starting to get interesting, the show was over. Even the encore only offered one more new track as we awaited their toilet breaks.
Overall I was impressed with the quality of the translation of older material to the live set and although personally I would have been just as happy with more of the same, the new songs provided a taster for a new dimension of progressive ambient electronic that gets me excited for the forthcoming release and not just for the purposes of pushing down my speaker and straddling it like a Sybian.
