Difficult day to get logistics to work, but infact, as usual in S.I.C.K. gigs, soundchecks done in time, and everything ready without delays. Slowly incoming crowd was the reason why decided to delay 10 minutes with first band.
MANIC / DEPRESSION, seen it before, and it was ok'ish. But now, I dare to say they came as winner of the event. Simply brutal tape-noise and cruel power electronics. Modified walkman without motor, but functions tape heads, hole in side of walkman where mr. M/D was pulling out tape, making very nice malformed noise sounds somewhere between fastforwards, slowed down, distorted, blullers. Other devices with some effects, distortions, raw tape sources. Vocal sound worked well too. I think, that with sound as noisy as this, he could have performed also purely instrumental pieces just for audiodamage. But I won't complain of intensive vocals!
Eleczema started slowly. Droney feedback loop, humming electronics and other things, with the trademark vocals of T.Myöhänen, which belongs in my opinion to very top of the genre. Start was pretty quiet. It started to build intensity and volume, and in middle of set finally louder songs started. Pulsating PE and one track even danceable semi-melodic industrial muzak! Strange choise, but in the end, it was perhaps one of the best songs in set. But then... what happened? Suddenly the magickal grip on the gear seemed to slip away and volumes dropped very randomly, songs fall apart and you didn't exactly know did it end now, or not. Abrupt re-starts with samples, clumsy fades of sounds in & out. Con-Dom style phaser type of vocal effect and pretty amusing high pitched electronics.. but artists fading volume so low, you suddenly heard vocals acoustic from stage. PA and amps where all just fine. Don't know what happened with focus, but that's something people should take care of. If set would have ended at its climax, I'd say this would be very good. Now with last 5-10 minutes being such a clumsy thing, can't rate it too close to band at his best.
Umpio had misfortune to withness one of the amps blew up just when he was about to start. Well, with one more amp and PA, it was still going. Brutal clashing metals, overdriven broken piezzo contact mic'ed metal objects, a lot of physical banging and crushing. Somewhere in middle, he started to lose the forus maybe, but got again better by the end. Perhaps more amps on stage power he'd be more in his element than with relatively clean PA systems? Definitely material what demands more gut-wrecking volume instead of just ear torture.
AntiChildLeague set was clearly a failure where artists wasn't happy how things went. Simply technical problems with mixer, effects .. or something yet unknown what made vocals pretty much unheard. Music itself, didn't sound bad at all, when you didn't see what was happening on stage. You could easily enjoy the pulsating "euro pe" atmosphere, but as soon as you knew the hassle on stage, I think it just wasn't the "same" ACL what I've seen perform very strong live shows. But this is how it sometimes goes. I've been in very similar situations when man vs. technology battle hasn't been very favourable for doing good liveshow... Lesson learned is: keep it simple. What works in studio, may not work live.
Counting people who paid in, hang-arounds & helpers etc, I guess about 80 or even 90 people? I consider it pretty good for event with kind of low profile artists. Next time few things taken care of better, overall night went were smoothly. Special mention for SS kommander for delivering some of the most bizarre/retarted/obscure DJ music!
