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@ the Social, Nottingham (review © Jon Horne 2001) from Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide) 
A small, appreciative Sunday night crowd, a little drunk and slightly caned, cool without making a point of being so; two acts, both of them modest and personable, and interested in each other's sets: is ambient electronica the new pub-rock? Hear me out on this one. It's not headline news that dance music has gone the way that rock music went, thirty years ago. Then as now, skinny white boys from the provinces who had once taken black American styles and synthesised them into something original and exciting, became lazy and egotistical, hiding behind enigmatic 'concepts', putting on laser-tastic 'shows', and (back in their rock-star mansions) exchanging namby-pamby dope, pills and bunk-ups with art-students for biz-friendly cocaine and relationships with supermodels. Then as now, another younger set of skinny white folks (not all of them boys this time) took a look at their bloated elders and thought: "Tossers." Their reaction was to play much the same sort of music, but scaled-down, somewhat archaic, and intelligent without being so damned serious.They took it to the pubs and small clubs, picked up an audience, and then in the case of the pub-rockers, got eaten alive by punk. Perhaps there is a new punk around the corner - some impossibly hard-nosed variant of acid-house perhaps - waiting to make everybody and everything irrelevant. Until then, you work with what you've got. At a venue near you, Stakka And Skynet are doing their impression of a punch-up in a drum-machine factory, while over in Holland, Elizabeth Solex is collecting obscure samples and breathing seductive-but-bitter aphorisms in mangled English into a cheap microphone. This here-and-now environment is where Her Space Holiday and Wauvenfold are coming from. Wauvenfold consists of one man/boy, some steam-powered synthesisers in a cute yellow box, and an i-Mac which controls both the music and the back-projections. There is no singing, minimal prodding at the synths, and no posing except for the occasional parody of a star DJ during those bits of the set which are impossible to dance to. Mr Wauvenfold (you can check out their real names - there are supposed to be two of them - on their web site) smiles a lot, is very skinny, wears a hideous purple T-shirt, and looks just like Tony Le Mesmer from Knowing Me Knowing You. The music is fractured and extreme in its rhythms (like drum 'n' bass without the speed - anything to avoid four-on-the-floor), and quiet in its simple, nursery-rhyme melodies. Even better, the tunes are short. Let me go over that bit again, because I might just have identified what makes Wauvenfold unique in dance/electronica circles: the tunes finish before you get bored with them. There's something unusual in the visuals too: they don't drive you mad or make you feel sick. Anyone who has sat in the Broadway bar for too long and watched the projections on the wall will know that artiness is often the cover for a chronic lack of inspiration. The same can be said of the back-projections at most music events - most of the time they bore you witless, but then it gets, like, real and you have to brace yourself for the inevitable images of sliced-open laboratory rats, beagles smoking cigarettes, and in more extreme cases, the old film clip of the girl in Vietnam running down the street naked because her clothes have been burned off her back. Wauvenfold, on the other hand, have noticed that no matter how real you are, boredom and pain are not the whole story. Their visuals are made up of childhood images - not exactly gentle, but beguiling - as twisted as the rhythms, but twisted for the sake of humour rather than nausea. More than once I was reminded of listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees, circa Christine or Playground Twist - not in the sound, but in the way that the images caught the same mad, funny, disturbing, whirling feeling of being a child. The audience loved it. Wauvenfold got applause that he wasn't expecting, and an encore for which he wasn't prepared. Some of the louder cheers came from someone standing at the back, as skinny as Wauvenfold, wearing Buddy Holly glasses and tattoos up his arm. He turned out to be half of Her Space Holiday. Until recently, Marc Bianchi was Her Space Holiday. Formerly the guitarist in San Francisco thrash outfits Indian Summer, Calm, and Mohinder, he became Her Space Holiday in 1996, in order "to fully express (his) musical taste", and to get away from the office-politics of being in a group. Bianchi's taste, or at least his inclination, is to write hundreds of songs about his girlfriend, Keely. Her Space Holiday are extraordinarily prolific, amassing a backlog of eight CDs which have recently come out on their own record label, before their switch to a slightly richer indie label, Tiger Style. Tiger Style demanded live shows, and Bianchi has obliged. So as to lighten the workload, he has brought the aforementioned Keely into what is now a two-piece group. She also wears Buddy Holly glasses. The new record Home Is Where You Hang Yourself is a double-CD devoted to the story of a relationship between two Californians who get through to each other by writing songs about each other. This, along with the dry ice that they insist on using on-stage, rather blows my pub-rock theory out of the water. You could call the CD a concept album if you felt like it, and you could point at the presentation and say: "Look, a poncy light show". I'm not going to do that. Her Space Holiday may be too frightened of their audience to show their faces, but they lack the arrogance to take that fear seriously (for example to present it as 'alienation' rather than the simple stage-fright). A Stephen Hawking computerised voice introduces every song, and then apologises for it. When the computers go wrong, Bianchi and Keely panic charmingly - and finally they get the job done with as little fuss as possible. In the end, they didn't go down half as well as Wauvenfold. The light show was a bit much, and the Hawking voice was only funny once ("we are more afraid of you than you are of us"). The music was slow, and followed near enough the same structure ('Dear Prudence', essentially) on every song. Most of all, the dry ice just made the dance floor cold. Bloody freezing in fact. Sorry but I don't expect to go to the Social and have to keep my pullover on. If they drop the dry ice and get Wauvenfold to sort them out with a few visual aids, Her Space Holiday will become a far better live act. That done, they could sift through their vast back-catalogue, and pick a set to get an English audience going. Then they might get the acclaim which they are so afraid of, and which they probably deserve. |