I’ve been waiting years to catch Fennesz live. I didn’t figure on the first time being in the unlikely settings of a pub in South London.   I suppose, however, that if Touch want to organise a shindig to celebrate their birthday, they have probably earned the right to hold it in their local boozer in Balham.  The event featured a couple of the big names on their roster (Fennesz, Philip Jeck), a couple of those less well known to me (Rosy Parlane, CM von Hausswolff), and some delightfully off-kilter DJing by Jacob Kirkegaard.

I entered to the sounds of recent signing Rosy Parlane, sounds akin to bees in a blizzard on a poorly tuned radio; an unrelenting and particularly dense buzz.  I was unsurprised to discover he has previous on the Ecstatic Peace label, given some similar reference points (if different modes of transport) to such Thurston Moore favourites as Double Leopards.  A suitably meditative start to the evening.

Philip Jeck was on next, and began in sprightly fashion, shuffling a selection of distempered beats onto his turntables.  These were soon chased away by elegiac strings, buried within vinyl crackle, singing dream-like from distant brain recesses.  On occasion, sound and visuals would neatly coincide; as when Jeck dropped out the harsher sounds, with an orchid unfolding on screen to dispense music box melodies.

If Fennesz disappointed tonight, it was only by virtue of following Jeck’s virtuosity, and by not having enough time to develop his ideas to their conclusion.  Guitar strapped on, he began by teasing out gentle drones by rubbing his knuckles down the strings and gently tapping out chords.  He played some slow, fuzzed-up melodies, which increased in intensity until he was scrubbing frantically at his instrument, washing the audience with near-MBV noise.  This would then drop away, leaving a looped fragment of guitar, which he would fuss with on his laptop, building electronic symphonies like those on Endless Summer or Venice.  “I feel like I am inside the speaker”, my companion said; “I don’t want this to end”, I replied, only for Fennesz inevitably to immediately reach the end of his allotted thirty minutes and leave me feeling both elated and frustrated.

The night left us much as it found us, with a CM von Hausswolff setting pure sine waves in relay.  One would overcome the other, only for it itself to be caught and subsumed.  The beauty was in the sections of overlap, as the two frequencies vied for superiority and, like looking through a prism, I found I could experience a world of colour by tilting my head through a range of angles.  Almost unnoticed, a pulse had developed throughout the piece, and just as it reached room-shaking proportions, a switch was flicked, and all was calm again, worlds away from the din outside. 

The inside of the room had felt like another planet all evening, strange gravities tugging at my sensation of time, alien atmospheres pressing against my skin.  Touch has now been spinning on its unique and oblique axis for a quarter of a century.  A quarter of a century in our time, that is.