…feral, button-cute Japanese lady in ragged daisydukes crouched on a tabletop pulling the same faces your dad makes while fiddling with the wires in the back of a television…
Doddodo / Dimension X, The Luminaire, London, 16/12/08
There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan. Not my backwards words – the backwards words of Robert Plant, and I think they emerge, briefly, in the shitstorm of mangled noise(s) flying out of Doddodo’s little collection of racket-boxes. Apt considering the context; one feral, button-cute Japanese lady in ragged daisydukes crouched on a tabletop pulling the same faces your dad makes while fiddling with the wires in the back of a television, scattering jazz-beats, white noise, record scratches, monk chants and the plinky-plonkiest of melodies about the place. A huddled mass (of sorts) has turned up to see her rap, wail and sing like Yoko’s pet canary over distinctive toy-box beats.
Loud, it is. By the time she announces "This last song. I finish now" and wanders offstage the old ears feel like battered scraps of meat ready for chucking, the dada barometer has exploded and athlete’s dancing foot is well and truly spread. Still, as they say, some things are worth a lifetime of tinnitus and a long-needed visit to Eng-er-land by Osakan noisecore’s answer to Timbaland via little Jimmy Krankee is surely one of them.Next up, New England’s premier free music sticksman Chris Corsano; gangly, skin-headed, juggling bits of metal and various sticks in the name of hitting about fifteen things per second while ex members of Zu (nah, me either) wrap a woolly blanket of chest-rattling feedback around Upset The Rhythm’s nippy little audience.
For the uninitiated, Dimension X was probably the finest sci-fi series to ever grace radio-waves, spinning stories of little green men and crimes of robot (pronounced row-bert) passion to yesteryear’s aspergic cross-legged youth and a more recent generation of neckbearded, tape-bartering weirdos (laugh out loud – Ed). Now resurrected via the inexhaustible gift of sampling as three young men jam cutlery between guitar strings and scrape a live wire against the Luminaire’s beautiful post-ironic disco ball, drawing a thick black line between scrap metal riffage and patiently drawn out atmospherics. Very briefly there’s a feeling of complete removal as the surreal clambers into being, time stands still, London drips and slides away. Then we’re back again, zipping up for the last tube.
Words: Mr Gav
Pics: courtesy of the artist