Righteous Riot

Another live review, this one from the night after the last post. Friday 18th July, Yvonne Ruve, Surry Hills. A delightful night of mostly quiet, almost sleepy sounding acts, the audience lounging, sitting, standing (except for a few louder moments, provided almost exclusively by the Castings lads) all enjoying a rather odd and out of place way to begin a weekend. I say out of place from my own point of view: I had been working all week and was in a mood to get a little wild and while the bands didn't have the same idea as those in my mind (you'd be surprised how often they actually do) I still managed to fend off the sleep they seemed intent on inducing and fall madly in love with the soft, quiet, awkward wonder of the music.

Recordings of all the performances can be found here: http://skyhut.blogspot.com/2008/07/ruve.html

After wandering lost through the messy bowels of Hibernian House - all graffiti and concrete and pipes and syringes - my brother Leigh and I finally located the space and, after some brief greetings, paid our entry, found a spot on the floor and tucked into our tasty bottle of vodka. We had arrived just in time to catch Polyfox And The Union Of Most Ghosts, who is a dude from Newcastle called Nick who plays lovely sad little instrumental pop songs. The pieces themsleves were tiny; short little licks of sublime melody that started off with a single chord sequence that then got looped and had colour added. My only complaint would be that the songs were to short, stopped abruptly without taking off into other spheres like they could have. But the tunes were delightful, reminiscent of all the lo-fi Kiwi pop that so many kids with guitars in their bedrooms produce so wonderfully, simply well.

The aforementioned Castings crew were up next, playing a monster set, probably one of the longest I've ever seen, maybe more than double the usual twenty minutes. Another set that solidified them as the giants of the current improv/noise scene. Six guys, guitars, mixers, mics and whole lot of huge swirling sound, waves that battered and burst forth from their tortured tangents. After the pyched-out onslaught of the first half of the set, they seemed loathe to quit and unleashed a pulverising industrial-punch that confounded any prettiness that may have appeared earlier. Quite simply the best performance of theirs I've ever witnessed.

From there it was back to the quiet, dreamy pop that seemed the proper flavour of the evening. The Bowles are a group that have only been together a matter of weeks, made up of Mathew from Naked On The Vague and couple of friends of his. They played in sort of circle, facing each other and only rarely the audience, drums, guitars, keys, all swapped around after just about every song. I grew a little sleepy part-way through the set; it was so slow and dreamy but tinged with a soft gorgeousness that seemed trapped in solitude and sadness.

Alps jumped up between the next act. Unbilled and impromptu, he wailed low to his organ drone and conjured the spirits of lo-fi loneliness.

The last act that we saw was a couple of kids from Brisbane who played damaged acoustic pop under the moniker Kitchens Floor. The name comes from a song by Look!Pond another Bris-band of which the 'Floor front-dude was a key member. With this new group he's roped in tiny girl-drummer dressed decades too late who provided tapping beats and soft harmonies to Matt's griping ballads. Something about the softness and touching tales in the songs somehow managed to enrage a couple of drunken Castings boys who took it upon themselves to begin ripping up a cooling-fan and kicking around bags of bottles. I think I remember one of them pulling a paint-stained door from the outside hall and put it on the floor/stage as a backdrop. So rarely do you see such raucus reaction to music that is so quiet and damaged. It suited the performance perfectly though, the kids going even wilder when an old Look!Pond song was pulled out.

I didn't stay for the last band. Haven't listened to the recording yet either. Maybe you can grab it for yourselves and tell me what its like. For my part, the sleepy songs and wasted nature of the night carried me home through the cold at once both sad and elated.