Walking into the auditorium was like wading into a primordial swamp: the lights were low and the entire room filled with the most impenetrable smoke. The stage was barely lit and the dense smoke created more than mere atmosphere: immediately I found myself in my own space, the smog dense enough to form an almost tangible separation between each audience member.
Somewhere in the purple murk, the neck of a guitar occasionally emerges from behind the bank of wired and circuitry that presumably houses a laptop or somesuch. Presumably it’s Lcoma who’s responsible for the rippling screed of sound, the mult-dimensional rumbling that fills the space. The sound is loud and crisp and deep and textured. The 25 minutes evaporate in the mist.
A mere five minutes later, at 9pm sharp, a snarling bass whips through the air - there are no speaker or PA kit visible, so it feels like sonic alchemy – and builds to a whorling fizz of noise. The noise pulses and beatless rhythms emerge from the darkness. A pair of ghostly hands float above a pair of tablets lying on the stage. Beyond that, there’s nothing to see. Stylistically very different from LCOMA, Colossloth cranks out a dark and brutal sound that’s every bit as dark and claustrophobic as the atmosphere in the room.
Ten creates a more gentle and less abrasive sound, but it’s no less absorbing, the shifting sounds merging with the smoke, eddying around the space and amassing an almost tangible density.
In truth, these three acts turned in performances of a calibre that would have made for a satisfying night out on their own. To conceive all this was mere build-up... the lights above the stage go out, leaving just a couple of low-level spots at the edges of the room. The purple hue is just discernible in the air as Hecker casts the first audio waves into the darkness. The audience is as silent as the room is dark.
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A common complaint levelled at laptop musicians is that their performances are dull. Acts like Fuck Buttons and Nordic Giants go a long way to address such issues, but Hecker’s approach is phenomenally effective. By completely removing the visual element from the show, and simultaneously removing himself as artist and focal point, there is nothing but the music to engage with. With nothing to see – literally, nothing, not even the people around you – you find yourself listening so much more intently, absorbing the most minute textural and tonal details. Hecker pays great attention to those details: he’s more than an electronic musician or composer in the conventional sense, producing works that could best be described as sound sculptures. Time and space dissolve as the ever-shifting sound envelops your being and you find yourself, completely immersed and completely adrift in your own personal space. It’s an incredible experience, liberating, transcendental.
After about an hour, it stops, Hecker, unmiced, calls out ‘that’s it,’ and he’s off. It may be the antithesis of showmanship, but Hecker leaves us in no doubt that we’ve been to another place, and somewhere rather special at that.
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