----- Original Message -----
From: "Toby Frith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 10:54 AM
Subject: (313) Convextion and Echospace @ Fabric
A polarised affair at London's Fabric. Gerard was fantastic - mostly ERP
style electro that sounded razorsharp on the soundsystem..some new bits
and classics, although Vox Automaton was a bit short for some reason. Very
happy to see him get a fantastic reaction as well.
Deepchord/Echospace was unmitigated sh*te. I'm sure Tristan will elucidate
far more than I could, as he was fuming! The sound was muddy, so you
couldn't hear the treble at all, but this was an hour of relentlessly dull
dub techno with no variation or subtlety whatsoever, and a real shame
because one of them (not mr Modell) was having the time of his life behind
the laptop. A shame he couldn't obviously hear what sh*te we were hearing.
Yeah, I was severely disappointed. Going in, I was actually more excited
about them than Convextion, who I'm always really excited about. I posted up
some thoughts about his set yesterday (it was amazing), but my e-mail setups
are totally hosed at present and it seems to have been lost in the ether
somewhere. I'll try and re-send that when I get home. Anyway... I doubt the
Echospace sound had anything to do with the sound guys at Fabric. They have
tablet PCs with WiFi connections so they can stand anywhere on the
dancefloor and make corrections. And beside that, Gerard's set sounded
amazing, so it's nothing to do with the rig. I suppose it could have been a
monitoring thing (Modell had headphones on for at least part of it) but
there was a sound guy on the side of the stage, within ten feet of them who
I even tried to talk to at one point who didn't seem to think there was
anything he could do about it.
IMO what they are doing today has emerged as something distinctly different
than the BC influences. In fact, I think it's reaching directly back in to
the dub influences that inspired BC, and they're fleshing those ideas out in
a way that is less purely "techno", or maybe less encumbered by a futurist
impulse. They seem to be purely in to dub as a process or a technique, and
the end result is better for it. I certainly think the "BC copyist" tag they
are sometimes laboured with has been a poor fit in the last couple of years
anyway.
What erked me to no end was that there was scarcely any dub in it, or at
least whatever Rod Modell was doing was so overwhelmed by the pounding thud
of the kick turned up to 12 that you couldn't hear it. And that kick was
routinely "doubled up" on the eighth notes, to give you an idea of the way
in which they changed their normal style. The dub was totally left behind,
or somehow inaudible. When those guys are clearly booked on the strength of
these successes I don't understand how they can turn up with a different
sound, which would have been more at home beside Joris Voorn in the other
room. I know American techno producers often carry the view that a European
crowd is only interested in the chugeda chugeda Marco Carolla sounds of
about seven years ago and I can only suspect it was that sort of
misunderstanding of what will fly here that inspired this choice. I mean, it
was just dreadfully dull in a way that sound problems alone couldn't really
account for. And for whatever it's worth, I only recognized one or two bits
of their tracks in the entire set, and they didn't get any kind of a
treatment like you'd expect. I wouldn't even have called it 'dub techno' as
you couldn't tell if there was any dub going on.
I hate to be so negative about this set, as I'm digging their releases today
more than anyone's, but when people fail to live and die by their strengths
it really pisses me off.
Tristan
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