Saturday 19 January 2013

Live Blog from New Projects Weekend (1)

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Welcome to the VileArts’ Live blogging session for The New Projects Weekend. Co-conspirator Eric Karoulla will be over on his blog, sharing his experiences from a day of wild music and perfomance action.
We are side-by-side in the basement of Nice’n’Sleazy and there’s the first act: plenty of strobe action from Princess NRG. It might be one man and his laptop, but I am heading to epilepsy through the light show.
Nice used of washes here – not too heavy and not too melodic, but certainly emotive and forceful. It has that sweet isolationist quality: music not too fussed whether it explains itself. But now he’s breaking up into a drum versus sampled vocal battle.
He’s got a microphone and the voice is rattling right through me. The drum sample is very metal, the voice is almost jazzy, maybe r’n’b. Maybe Eric’s got something on it – he’s the one with the knowledge of languages.
Princess NRG has got what appears to be a massive fluorescent bong next to his laptop. The impact of the strobe is starting to wear off now. The sound of scraping metal he’s just unleashed takes us into darker, raw territory. “It’s just a loud of bloody noise,” and considerably less interesting than the previous mash-up.
Ah. The computer just shut down, and he’s had to start again. It’s difficult to tell, but I think that he’s just realigning the samples…
Bulgarian voice choir: very topical. And now a more jittering beat arrives with orchestral wash. Princess NRG is picking up on the eclectic potential of the sample, showing little respect for sources but emphasising the juxtaposition of different geographies. That’s a fairly eastern groove he’s dropping now.
For first up on a Saturday afternoon, the boy is doing well. There is a consistency to his sound: the volume makes it aggressive despite the pop sensibility and the judicious use of samples. He’s letting the bit play itself out, rotating the variations of the melody over a rhythm that wouldn’t shame a bhangra banger. I’d argue that this isn’t the perfect time and place: it’s disco music from a scene in Bladerunner. Harsh, almost militaristic and diverse: he holds the beat long enough to make this dance music, but rough enough to be evocative.
The fact that Eric and I sitting in the corner typing is probably as much of a show as the performance isn’t wasted on me.

Let’s see how Eric is getting on…
  



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