Moon Duo LIVE @ Village Underground, London
30.04.15
★★★★☆
Lights and vibrations that make us perceive noise in fuzzy quadrants. Luminous sketches and strobes in tones of reds and whites. Fugacious demonstrations of noise that drill your skull until you give up and enter into an hypnotic mood. Noises that allow you to listen to colors and to see sounds. Bright colors emanating from radiant hues, but that stick to the gloom and the darkest corners of the psych. Synesthesia that hijack your senses. Hallucinations. A tribute to the fuzz-like sixties. San Francisco´s filthy and greasy machinery of sound personified in an archetype of sonic hostility.
While Sanae Yamada´s synthesizer roars hard and deals with garagesque textures, Ripley Johnson´s guitar experiments with merciless riffs and interminable guitar solos that recall the filth and raw power of The Velvet Underground´s Sister Ray phase. In top of this acid trip, the repetitive but savage drums bring this claustrophobic demonstration of sounds into a sinister and fascinating experience.
The show continues and the ghosts of Silver Apples, Neu! and The Velvets restore our faith in what we used to call rock ‘n’ roll. The feedback. The fuzz. The reverbs. Yamada´s provocative performance is being camouflaged by an avalanche of lights and sounds that fill the old brick walls at the Village Underground.
You can´t do anything, but to surrender to the performance. ‘Night Beat’, ‘Wilding’, and ‘Free Action’ are the immaterial proof of being in one of the best shows of the year. At the end, everybody leaves Shoreditch´s warehouse vulnerable and with ringing in the ears. Tomorrow we will not recall the whole experience, but we´ll hopefully remember that Moon Duo opened, at least for an hour, a window to another passages of the soul. In case we still have one…
