Do you want to go to Leeds to see Hookworms and take some pictures and do a review?
Yes please.
So there you go. I mean, how difficult could it be? I liked Hookworms already but I’m thorough so I spent a large proportion of the week before the Saturday, October 17th gig listening to Pearl Mystic and The Hum and singing along and trying to get all the background stuff written in advance, but when I arrived it got more complicated.
First of all it wasn’t a Hookworms gig as such. It turned out to be the evening session of an all-dayer being run as part of The Recon Festival, which offers a multitude of “sense-indulging, mind-expanding and body-moving music and arts events across multiple venues in Leeds and Bradford throughout October.” You can find them on Facebook and at reconfest.co.uk
The Headrow bill included a mixture of experimental and electronic music with Rhode Island techno noise artist Container scheduled to bring the night to a close and Leeds very own star producer Richard Formby appearing twice, first as a solo artist and then with the aforementioned Hookworms, for a unique performance of a new piece, specially composed by himself and the band.
Headrow House is a recent addition to the music venues of Leeds, all bare brick and exposed cable over three or four levels, and it will probably be a long time before it sees a stage set up more in keeping with it’s old school industrial vibe than this one with its long row of tables, stacked with a series of complex but endearingly archaic looking equipment, in the design of which one could detect the hand of both Heath Robinson and that nice Mr Edison.
Richard Formby is a much in demand producer, famous for working on the two most recent Wild Beasts’ records, as well as Darkstar’s News From Nowhere and Ghospoet’s Some Say I So I Say Light among many others, and he drew a sizable crowd.
He performed with his back to the audience, moving between the various elements of the apparatus – a large analogue synthesizer that looked like the innards of an old fashioned telephone exchange, a couple of smaller boxes with dials, a large reel to reel tape recorder for echo – performing a piece of music that did not, apparently, have a title (I asked him afterwards – but maybe in a digital age the whole title thing is a bit of an anachronism anyway…), but which was utterly engrossing as it wound itself around the room and the assembled company, easily at first but with increasing tension as it gathered itself towards its climax.
How to describe the music? It’s difficult enough when it’s stuff you understand. How much more difficult it is when you feel completely out of your depth. I’m going to say ‘techno’, but if so it’s not the big beat techno that we know from the dance floors all over the world, this is a subtler, quieter manifestation. Fortunately for me I have several years of listening to Philip Glass and Steve Reich to fall back on, but I still feel like a media studies student who has accidentally wandered into a quantum mechanics lecture. To make life easier I made notes.
It sounded like this:
People are talking. A theatre interval crowd perhaps. Their voices rise and fall. A beat begins. A small electric pulse, which gets slowly louder. The people raise their voices in competition but it’s a hopeless effort. The beat wins. Another beat joins, this one spacier than the first and they entwine. Their friends arrive, one is a railway chug, which takes over the task of propulsion.
We are in a tunnel, falling, spinning. A new voice arrives. I don’t know what it is. It’s what a cowbell would sound like if it were a wind instrument. Things proceed with growing urgency. Each tiny change in the pattern feels like a lurching moment of profound significance. Ripples emanate from each variation. They gradually sink into stillness but it cannot be sustained. There is dialectic at work here – each moment of calm contains the seeds of its own collapse and decay, change is both the beginning and the end.
The audience was perfectly still apart from some furtive nodding. It was a bit like a recital being given to a colony of meerkats.
Suddenly quiet. The audience shook themselves into life to applaud and the process of bringing Hookworms with all their gear and members onto an already crowded stage began.
Having the band to work with allowed far more layers and textures to be brought into play. Opening with the deep thrum of MB’s bass as he crouched on the left of the stage, then in came MJ’s distorted keys and vocals. From the outset the room was seething with sound and echo and distortion. The tension increased. The room was vibrating. Just as it seems that something had to give the drums kicked in, a muffled snare pattern and the rhythm changed to off kilter clockwork. It was only a brief respite as it picked up again and now it was hurtling headlong, buzzy and wild until it became space music, the theme to the most amazing Atari game you never played and then transformed into viscerally thrilling psych with huge waves of noise and distinctly middle eastern vocal.
That’s what I heard anyway. Maybe I’m wrong. It was one of those nights when the music ended too quickly, before you’d even had a chance to come to terms with it. A night of fascinating, mesmeric synth psych and I’ve got a whole load of music to go away and find and listen to help make sense of it all. And if the nice people at Recon are reading this, thanks for a great show and for being so helpful, and if they don’t mind I’d appreciate being put on the mailing list for next year.
