The Wire presents Into The Vortex: New Planes Of Ecstasy, 09/10/09

And so we gathered in Dalston for the start of a three day celebration of…of what exactly? Well it isn’t The Wire’s 25th birthday, I’m pretty sure I remember that one taking place a couple of years back. It seems the purpose of this festival is purely to celebrate the new: The Wire picking holding three three separate threads of new music up to the moon. Tonight was to be the night when we looked at what Wire scribe David Keenan has dubbed “hypnagogic pop”, ecstatic experimental music which traces its roots way back to the Kosmiche records of the 1970s, and which is “led” by the likes of Emeralds and tonight’s scheduled headliners The Skaters.

And Keenan was on hand to see his partner Heather Leigh Murray open the show in a duo with the extraordinary musical itinerant Richard Youngs. In recent years, I’ve seen Youngs play a capella and solo folk guitar shows, and heard him release synth and “pop” records. Here, he and Murray were to play an improvised set, both adding layers of torrid psych-noise guitar. From within this turbulent and unpredictable wall of feedback, Youngs and Murray would step forward to deliver a vocal line in perfect synch. But what was that vocal line? “No lights on”, I made it, although it could easily have been “Horizon”, or “All rise up”. “No lights on. No lights on”. The guitars dropped out to leave them singing unaccompanied, with Murray twisting the melody line around Youngs’ delivery deliciously. “No lights on. No lights on. No lights on. No lights on.”

“Can we turn off all the stage lights?”, asked Astral Social Club’s Neil Campbell. He began in near darkness, although the music he was to produce provided its own luminosity. The first half of the set was astonishing, as he sculpted his huge waves of sound. With equipment scattered across all four corners of the stage this was a very physical performance, Campbell purposefully striding around to harrass a speaker with a microphone, to adjust a pedal, to add melodica loops. The sound rose in intensity, reaching a peak of massive, rumbling, pulsing tumult. The monochrome projections behind were seemingly created by the music, building from straight lines to geometrics of migraine-inducing complexity. The noise cut out abruptly and Campbell began to make smaller constructions from some electronic equipment laid out on a table. These primitive-sounding glitchy, patterns eventually swallowed tape-hiss and recordings, gathering melody and momentum as Campbell charged to the end of a memorable set.

That event title – New Planes Of Ecstasy – probably made a bit more sense with the original billing in place, with the blissed-out drones of The Skaters rounding off the evening. But then a family illness deprived us of Spencer Clark. And then Belgian immigration robbed us of James Ferraro. Thankfully, and despite him having tickets for the Ulver gig taking place across town in the South Bank Centre, Alex Tucker stepped in to the breach. And although he wouldn’t necessarily fall into Keenan’s hypnagogic pop category, the way that melodies drifted in and out of his dense, swirling sound at times wasn’t a mile away. Tucker took pieces from his fine Portal album and beefed them up, adding extra layers of guitar, cello and volume, looping and distorting his instruments superbly. At the end of all this, he contrarily played what he described as a “pop song”, leaving us – fittingly – on a high, and already beginning to contemplate the state of song…

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