Reviews

BOX #17 - 27 October 2002 - simulation :: ZOID - Puzahki - Agit8

Review by Michael Norris

Sunday 27th October 2002:
ZOID, Puzahki, AGIT8

ZOID was a pleasant wander through musical space. Nothing particularly challenging for the listener, but a good planned-impro set from some obviously skilled players drawing on a richly varied palette of sounds. I really don?t have much to say about the music itself - I was too busy watching the visuals. The performance situation was quite interesting, with the players standing directly behind the audience, with their video images projected onto a screen in front of the audience. While mediating the visuals in this way was a neat idea, I don?t think it was well enough exploited. I general I think that the visuals would have benefitted from a lot more mixing and processing of sources (provided that subtlety was preserved). The footage of other musicians, presumably recorded at Woodford festival didn?t work for me. I could see that the aim was to counterpoint the unusual mediation of the live musicians, but recognisable images such as Greg Sheehan playing a balloon distracted too much from the point.

Puzahki played a set of hard industrial drum&bass - not especially experimental, but certainly done well - he set a breakneck pace from the beginning and managed to keep the momentum up right to the end of the set. The earplugs remained in place throughout - it was all a bit loud, especially his screaming into the mic at the end, during which his levels were out of control. I thought the music worked well with the tacky manga video, though maybe the video could have been re-arranged a little to break up the narrative. What really impressed me about Puzahki?s set is that it was all played live from a single Boss DrSample unit and a mic, and so represents a dedicated exploration of one piece of hardware, which nowadays doesn?t happen enough.

Agit8 seemed a little lost for much of his set. He had a set of pedals that would happily transform a signal into a nice rich rumbly noise, and a few home-made instruments to supply the stimulus to the effects. The problem was that his instruments were not expressive enough to maintain variation for a whole set, so after the fourth time clicking a contact pick-up over a spinning fan grille it became a bit tired, and changing the settings on the pedals before the next despondent spin of the fan grille wasn?t going  to help. The set needed coherence in one form or another - either a structure with greater variation in sounds, or a deeper exploration of particular sounds. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the general extended-thunder sound enough to stay to the end.