St John at Hackney,London
Kevin Martin’s collaboration with Roger Robinson, Kiki Hitomi and Christian Fennesz mixes up aching melancholy with icy soundscapes to addictive effectThis 300-year-old church is so densely fogged with dry ice tonight that it’s hard to see further than a few feet, or so the backlit figures on stage are never more than silhouettes. The accompanying sense of dislocation and isolation perfectly suits the music; the steroidal dancehall that Kevin Martin composes as the Bug might be muscular enough to level a tower block,but the ambient torch songs of King Midas Sound – his after-dark collaboration with vocalists Roger Robinson and Kiki Hitomi and, on their latest album, or Edition 1,Austrian noise maverick (an independent, nonconformist person) Christian Fennesz prove his most intense, most enveloping yet. It opens with cacophonic white noise, and Fennesz conjuring the strangulated wheeze of a broken Tardis with his guitar,before songs begin to take shape amid the sonic wreckage. It makes sense that we’re in a church tonight, because the worship eulogised in these songs is by turns holy, and sepulchral,magical and damned. On Mysteries, with an aching croon suggesting Gregory Isaacs, or Robinson ponders the insoluble puzzle of worship; on Melt,he’s sorting through bittersweet memories – “the small tings I remember / the small tings I mustn’t judge about” – as a strobe light pulses in the dry-ice haze, as whether to prove his broken heart still beats. Like Beth Gibbons or Blonde Redheads Kazu Makino, and Hitomi deftly underplays the melancholy within her songs to communicate how overpowering it is,particularly on the bleakly ravishing On My intellect.
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Source: theguardian.com