Nice!
Conditions must be better than legendary EST bunker and also despite lack of PA, better than many real venues.
Will Over Matter played maybe.. 3 minutes? It was told to be short and it was. Started with patriotic finnish poem coming from tape, and followed by extremely simple and crude electronic noise. Very haste moves from sound to another and I would have hoped the heavier noise element would have stayed longer. Vocals with no effects was few short moments, and then also electronics were turned off. All in all, whole short set full of unexpected and unusual choices!
Bizarre Uproar performed the set of Kuopio gig again. And what a success! It was so much better. Even if perhaps partly merely thanks to sound, but I think also how it was done. Pretty much in darkness, with little of led lights. Painful loud noise walls of amplified metal junk and rubbish, long and detail rich loops, some bounding snare beat in the end, short loud delay effect in screaming voice, where seems like first return of echo is actually louder than the original scream. Giving unusual touch for the vocals.
So, difficulty to follow close-to-perfection type of live show is simply to do your own thing. SSRI in theory was like SS in usual, but now, instead of vocals, table was covered with "props". There was lo-fi noise coming from backing tapes and then couple candles were put on stage, some iconography in front of them and then one by one, SS went through all the "props" set on table. Electric radiator was modified to be basically contact mic'ed table. Over that, he could scratch painful noises, pull piece of chain, blow some eastern "horn", play with metal anti-instruments created by mr. Umpio as well as play guitar with wah-wah pedal. And when you close your eyes, to me it worked. But when I opened my eyes, I also felt little amused. Because SS doesn't play with fancy effects, most of these props used on stage sound very blunt and dry. Especially guitar didn't seem to possess much brilliant sonic qualities, other than thick midrange semi-distorted sound.. and one must think Spede with his wah wah for sounds of his movies has corrupted my ears and I get that flashback much more than visions from rock history.
I think amount of elements in reach of hand, meant that pretty much perfect length gig as it was, still went with quick moves. Lets use guitar, lets scratch a bit.. ah, lets use the chain... lets blow the horns.. hmm, lets bang the table.. and every move would follow putting that particular instrument away into box. Of course this might tell also about intent of composition, that one won't suddenly change back to some instruments, but more it reminded of showcase of sounds than getting proper "song" out of each. After show I was confused with several feelings. 1) it was decent 2) it was pretty bold to do things this primitive and crude, which is pretty rare to see 3) Perhaps sometime in future combine THIS and the "usual". Do mix of both: vocals and the live noise, and perhaps that would get close to ideal?
Conrete Mascara started with simple "bass synth" sounding theme. Hardly music, yet somewhere between rhythm and couple chord melody pattern. Over this, screams with reversed echoes starts to loop over and gets more and more aggressive. Followed by very damaging sounds of electrical cords being abused. I guess everybody knows this most concrete, most usual "unwanted" noise of plugging and unplugging, touching the one end of cord with finger while it is still amplified and distorted. Screams with strange effects, occasional heaviness, yet most of all just electronic disturbance. When set gets close to the end, he finally hits the magick button of total distortion, and bass amps starts to rumble out this deep and crunchy brutal noise. It's crackling and abruptly crunchy. Over this, reverb screams and some feedbacks are trying to rise on the top. And I get some serious flashbacks of History of Aids era Prurient. Where brutality of sound is build from elements where heavy bass noise crunch sounds as if the speakers would be about to explode and high pitched shrieks etc dominate the upperlevel, yet there isn't the "traditional" harsh noise thing of fast exploding material, but like suppressed, huge sound, which seems too big to be able to come out of the speaker. My wish would have been louder vocals in mix, but it was good like this too.
I guess, it isn't totally mandatory to try bring some "big" names to Finland. If night can succeed with unknown visitor and couple of finns, I guess these should happen more often! Thanks to organizer!!
