Mme Shake Yer Dix London Music Reviews

  ✪  New York & more at Le Bourgeois (Art Gallery in Catford) - 28/04/2023 The general vibe is the one of an art show obviously, so you’ll be sure to find lots of pretentious leather jackets, fashion people, everyone rigorously dressed in black, as well as y2k fine art students, which nonetheless makes for a good mix for the strobe seizure inducing electro dance assault that New York will deliver. New York are a duo based in London of estonian audiovisual artist Gretchen Lawrence and VW model Coumba. The show takes place amongst the audience, with blinding strobes controlled by Gretchen or cleverly put on auto pilot at the center of the room. These are combined with amazingly robotic yet original choreography from the duo and hot electro beats, which makes for a hypnotizing visual effect that I honestly don’t think I witnessed with such precision and intention before. The aggressive lyrics such as “don’t look at me, because I don’t like you” are at times repeated over and ...

  ✪  John Wiese at Café Oto - 24/04/2023 Great night, I arrived a bit late so didn’t get to see Peter Beresford’s impromptu solo gig (I was at a Junk Head screening at Genesis right before to get into the perfect industrial headspace). The opening act, a trio called “Tears” was quite good, political and tarot related spoken word over cello and sampler with nice AI generated background. After they finished, someone from Café Oto announced: “And now... John Wiese!” An amazing surround sound piece begins with no artists to be found by the bewildered audience. Follows an incredibly detailed and powerful 30 minutes of harsh noise moving around the room and interrupted with intention by some (still not live) “orchestral strokes”. Immersive, beautiful and very loud piece. After the end of the piece, John Wiese humbly shows up with a big beard and hunter cap, and Peter Beresford sits at his prepared piano with lots of crazy spring and tin toys from the past century. Follows, ending ...

  ✪  Kelora, Swarmm & more at Peckham Audio for Tissue vol.4 - 13/04/2023 Not gonna lie, not the best night out there, I love Kelora’s new album and have been listening to it ever since its release. I've seen them play in a church in Stoke Newington as a duo, and that was quite beautiful. Can’t say the same for this second time though, the duo decided to perform with a band, which is very probably something they need to get used to or explore in a different way. In fact, knowing they were going to play a full band set I was expecting those beautifully crafted cyber-folk songs to be translated into rock sludgy mania, enhancing the latent darkness of their tracks. Instead the bass player, drummer and even a 5th person operating an iphone, were merely there to accentuate certain passages, leaving 70% of the set to be composed by quietly and awkwardly played guitars (Peckham Audio’s sometimes sketchy sound system probably didn’t help) and achingly unaltered backing tracks, whi...