A new one-day festival of modular and associated noises in the heart of Swinging London
Across four venues in London’s Soho, over twenty electronic artists showcased the limitless possibilities of modular synthesis. Far from being the domain of a solitary figure alone on a darkened stage with a rig and a bunch of patch cables, Soho Electronic offered a diverse array of performances, covering everything from jazz to bleak synth-pop to the wildest fringes of noise.
At the heart of each of these performances is a spirit of adventure, exemplified by something Mute Records founder Daniel Miller says during an interview with SchneidersKeller’s Ed Butterworth. “What happens if I plug that into there?” asks Miller rhetorically. It neatly summarises the improvisatory, exploratory, inquisitive quality that underpins modular synthesis.
At SchneidersKeller, below Rough Trade on Denmark Street, we watch Butterworth, Alex Tucker (MICROCORPS) and Jean Marcel Fricke building intricate patches. Tucker coaxes metallic shards of sound out of a synth. “Shall I add some R2-D2 sounds?” asks Butterworth, before sprinkling Tucker’s sharp-edged noises with pointillistic bleeps. Later, upstairs at All Is Joy, their trio set is a dark and brooding, bass-heavy electro monster that seems to snake menacingly around the dimly-lit room.
At the Farsight Gallery, MM’99 offers up a form of electronic shoegaze, fusing bewitching beats and breathy vocal sounds in the space’s blank canvas, her droning bass lines and rhythms melding seamlessly with the bells peeling at St. Giles-in-the-Fields next door. Haunting, ghostly, ethereal vocals drift like vapour around the gallery before coalescing into hypnotic, gauzy mid-afternoon house rave vibes. Klahrk fills the same space with juddering, fractured electronics, fusing low-end throbs and distorted gamelan with dirty, unpredictable beats. While his set is occasionally serene, for the most part is built from intense walls of almost ritualistic rhythms.
For his performance at Farsight, Bobby Barry deploys pretty birdsong, out of which he allows drones to form and hover. These swelling, buzzing noises are created from a contact mic and a series of men’s razors. “They sound like lightsabers,” someone says from the audience. Indecipherable voices emerge from nowhere. Barry’s performance is strangely mournful and moving, in the most unlikely of ways, and I’ll probably never look at my Philishave in quite the same way again.
Agnes Haus pre-empts their forthcoming release for Penelope Trappes’ Nite Hive label with isolated pulses filled with an intense and enveloping resonance, while increasing levels of distortion give off an air of danger. We hear pinprick melodies that sound like plucked strings – or maybe a piano, or maybe water droplets – offsetting crackles of white noise energy and ringing sounds that have the clarity of glass. Haus’ set brings a slow increase in density, and the gallery is filled with reverberating noises that seem to thicken the atmosphere perceptibly. Sprinkled tuned percussion notes swirl in pretty shapes that are then subsumed under a wall of rich, turgid, drones, filling Farsight with an uncertainty and tension. A metronomic pulse and web of minimal tones arrives, providing an unexpected offset to the weightiness of the earlier dronescape.
In a subterranean bar at Below Stone Nest, Siel plays Manhattan Bridge-at-daybreak saxophone, which is seamlessly blended with woozy ambience and clouds of bassy drones. He is followed by Tullis Rennie, whose set begins with chiming, cascading tone clusters. They are fast-paced, almost Steve Reich-like in their velocity. There is a sudden break into shimmering, amorphous textures and drones. Behind him, a chef is preparing salad at the bar. Is creating modular music on the fly that different to combining ingredients like the chef is doing while Rennie performs? From nowhere, a nascent, dubby rhythm emerges, replete with an angular, Warp / ‘Artificial Intelligence’ hook, before lurching toward a sequence appearing to consist of displaced fragments of jazz solos.
Over in the cinema space at All Is Joy, a silver jacket-clad MFU begins his set by telling us that he’s been abducted from his home planet of Uranus. He proceeds to play the North Korean national anthem, before introducing a piece of sprawling, politically-charged musique concrète using Donald Trump’s favourite singer, Lee Greenwood, performing ‘God Bless The USA’. Bursting any sort of notion of nationalistic sentiment, MFU instead manipulates Greenwood’s out-of-tune voice into a discordant mess, with high-pitched whistling sounds making deep cuts into the looped and manipulated vocals.
Smelliot delivers bone-breaking beats and power electronics that sound like Autechre covering Moby’s ‘Thousand’ at a faltering electricity substation somewhere below the comfy sofas of All Is Joy. Scrape through the layers and there is subtlety but it’s deceptive and obfuscated, accompanied by whirling visuals that feel like a zoetrope of randomised memories you barely remember. Felt Trip begins his set with what could be nostalgic sounds from an episode of ‘Magic Roundabout’, slowly dissecting the pretty melodies into atomised sounds and trace echoes of what was there before. His set is accompanied by a trippy video of a magnolia tree, which seems the perfect analogue to his woozy, dream-like electronics.
During his interview with Ed Butterworth a few hours before his headline set, Daniel Miller spoke about bringing along a modular rig that was roughly two-thirds empty. It spoke to a sense of enforced and intentional restraint, of resisting the temptation of having absolutely everything available. Miller’s comment harked back to his affection for the miniKorg 700S synth used to make ‘Warm Leatherette’ and ‘TVOD’ back in 1978, where its limitations made those pivotal pieces sound so distinctive.
His set begins with a whining drone that almost seems to have the timbre of a sitar, around which noises rotate, eddy and spin. There is a sense of turbulence – or uneasy, or tension – through the introduction of rapidly-fluctuating oscillations and rattling percussive sounds. For the majority of his set, everything he creates exists solely in the upper registers, even when the outline of a erratic, faltering, dub-like rhythm bubbles into view. When the bass finally appears, almost halfway through his performance, it is terrifying, a rapid, undulating throb caused solely by nudging the pitch lower.
The rig suddenly appears to scream, a fierce web of sounds that attack with intensity and then fade back to the original whining dronescape. Chirruping, off-grid snares evolve his set toward a rhythmic denouement, filled with layers of unpredictable beats and squalls of high-pitched, howling sounds that recall his Arp 2600 work on Fad Gadget’s ‘Back To Nature’. Miller then swiftly deconstructs everything back toward empty silence, concluding an innovative festival that will hopefully become a mainstay of the London electronic music scene.
