Colour Ride All Dayer - The Windmill 15/08/09

I was pretty distracted during this whole thing due to attempting to film it all, but after getting a taxi to the wrong venue in the wrong part of London and lugging a load of equipment to this
back road pub, here's the stuff that stood out:

- A big old Irish cunt serving up barbecued food with a scowl and the temperament of an irritated bear. Procuring a burger has never seemed so frightening, or amusing.

- KK/KK opening the day with a decent bout of slightly too quiet drone.

- Mutant Ape delivering a solid wodge of noise in a biscuit tin.

- An awful gaggle of fools channelling their inner retard in the smoking area via the medium of shit instruments played with feckless abandon.

- Drums and sax free jazz outfit Rose-Nichols Duo (I presume) who would probably have been more impressive had I not had Alex Ward, Alan Wilkinson and Yoshida Tatsuya make my ears cum the weekend previous.

- French improv pedal pushers Motherfucking inadvertently looking like they were furiously wanking and enthusiastically sucking dick whilst playing, which was hilarious and yes, puerile, but way more entertaining than their music, unfortunately.

- A horse-riding looking woman swaying over some space journey synth. Stellar Om Source, I believe. She was average and Dutch.

- Blood Stereo cancelling.

Overall the lineup was as varied in its sound as it was in its quality, but the infectiously laid back atmosphere remained constant throughout the whole affair. Whilst nothing wowed this cynic, it was at least a relaxing day, even with the effort of recording bundled on top of it. I appreciate the work put in to organising something like this so respect to Colour Ride for keeping its knuckle down and promoting the experimental, even if half the experiments produce stinky results.

Burial Hex/Saturn Finger/Kinit Her - Cafe Oto 16/06/09

Kinit Her up first with an odd mixture of growling, extremely high pitched vocals and staid metal riffs which you'd assume were a joke if they didn't look so serious about it. I wouldn't recommend it.

I'd come to see Burial Hex who was apparently going to perform a set especially adapted for the idiosyncrasies of Cafe Oto, which turned out to mean he played Oto's grand piano for a bit before continuing on as normal, smashing bits of metal into each other and manipulating distorted loops with effects pedals. The piano was accomplished and morose in the extreme and accompanied by some chanting and growling vocals, with very quiet, soft, noise under it all. It was all satisfyingly gloomy. The perfect intro to the crushing noise that made up the rest of the set, like something irascible was lurking there and spurred to erupt. Very angry, almost frightening, and utterly engrossing.

Rounding off the night were Saturn Finger, who just sounded like a couple of amiable but demented alpaca farmers calling upon some Peruvian god for god knows what. Something exciting maybe? Their god wasn't very forthcoming.