The Adelaide scene: to many of you it may be little more than a touring speed bump between Melbourne and Perth but to us it's a way of life. Feast within, on all its dysfunctional splendour, as we bring you the highly satirical, laughingly fictional and intellectually imbecile tales from our rock & roll wasteland...
MANI NEUMEIER & THE BITCHES OF ZEUS + SKELETONS LIVE @ PRODUCERS BAR / Saturday January 19th 2008
Some of the best gigs you'll ever see in Adelaide aren't explicitly advertised. There's no hype, no no hyperbole, no maddening hysteria screaming down your neck. No petitions fueling feverish anticipation for weeks and months in advance only for it all to sell out in the matter of minutes. You can't buy these with booking agents, ticket scalpers, ebay, or overnight lineups around the corner. There's no tv spots, radio, billboards, magazine articles, full pagers, myspace banners, competitions or viral campaigns to drive them. No, these are the freakingly obscure gigs you only find out AFTER the fact. They're the ones you kick yourself over for missing. Spoken through chance rumour, chinese whisper and hearsay. In misdirection, back alleys and broken down bookstores you'll hunt them. In secret handshake, password and badly drawn maps you'll find them. And sometimes, just sometimes, when some random hippy freak hands you a flyer to an obscure as fuck 70's Krautrock psychedelic drummer, you decide to follow it..
Which is why it's always funny, when you DO finally make it to a gig like this at Producers Bar on a Saturday night for an artist that seemingly NO-ONE has ever heard of (Mani Neumeier & The Bitches Of Zeus anyone?) only to then find it climbing the walls with 100's of people. Weird. Perhaps they all knew (just like I know now) just how fucking spaced out this night would be..
SKELETONS (*****) myspace :: I'd seen previous sets and I thought I knew what to expect. I brought the silver bullets, hand crafted revolver, crossbow, crucifixes, stakes, garlic and holy water just in case. I checked all my available exits. I had my duct tape. Believe me, screaming jazz-noir experimentalists are not ones to fuck with empty handed. But just when I thought they couldn't pull any more surprises, they go and reverse the polarity of my brain with this: their once-off supergroup mashup free-for-all, featuring extra special guests JC (aka: Thom Yorke Jnr from Wolf & Cub) on bongos and Mikey (aka: Sid Barret, ex Artax Mission) on guitar to rewrite the laws of gravity and uppend my splattering innards all over the fucking ceiling. Sure, it did kinda miss the random tribal screaming most notable from their original recipe (thanks in no small part to the absence of key member Sam from Fire! Santa Rosa Fire! on the drums), but in it's place with Mikey's thousand fold guitar bridging both hemispheres of my brain into the one swirling mush and JC's bugged out bongos it was damn near apocalyptic. Seriously, this was so face meltingly awesome, not only do I have NO intelligible words to describe it, but I'd happily live and die here and be reborn as an insect a thousand lifetimes over just to buzz off it for eternity!
After spending the next 20-30 minutes buzzing around the low slung tentacle lights of Producers Bar convinced I was a reincarnated mass moth collective licking the sun, I was finally brought back to a slightly more coherant reality by the abrupt coke can cacophony from this demented old fool and his mad entourage of mental patients jingling their cans in tow..
Little did I realise at the time that THIS was to be our headlining act, OOOOOH FUCK!
MANI NEUMEIER (*****) website :: Yup, I really didn't have the first fucking clue what to expect. What little information I could uncover (thanks to everyone's favourite misinformation source, wikipedia) was cryptic at best. To quote: "Mani Neumeier - German rock musician, free jazz-drummer, artist, frontman (singer and drummer) of the German Krautrock-band Guru Guru - collaborated with numerous bands and artists, such as Dieter Möbius, Damo Suzuki, Harmonia, Hans-Karsten Raecke, Irène Schweizer" (riiiiight big fucking help there!). Damn, I should've known warning words would be useless with a psychedelic space monkey of this calibre and only first hand experience would suffice. As such, it was a free-form improvised set. Mani Neumeier drove the spaced out rhythms in ecclectic percussion whilst Adelaide's usual suspects in session psychedelia: Dan V, Patrick C and Lenin M (aka: The Bitches Of Zeus) would swirl guitar soundscapes into ever more dizzying and spaced out forms. Sure, previous experiments with free form Krautrock jams have been mixed (as was witnessed with Damo Suzuki's utterly confusing set last year at Rocket Bar) but thankfully tonight's set was nothing short of liquid gold. Seriously, duuuude, I could curl up in a ball with beer as my umbilical and live here for the rest of my life!
After an hour's set, a short interval was called, at which point Mani leapt off stage, stuffed a black rubber rooster-hat on his head, spilled out a random collection of silver trays and pot lids in assorted sizes from his backpack onto the ground in front of him, before proceeding to jam out a frenetic poly-rhythmical jam like no other. All those different sizes, all those different notes, all dancing around our ears like raindrops and whizzing bullets, it's in a moment like these that you really get an insight into just how fucking paranormal 50 years working a craft can make you..
Then it's back on stage for part two, joined in kind by yet more collaborators from opening act Skeletons and beyond to push that weird-shit-o-metre screaming even further into the red. Of course, any language bordering on coherancy is clearly gonna fail in describing this, I know all of you out there are probably STILL scratching your heads, so I shall instead refer to all the mad scribblings I left in my phone SMS: "Pink Floyd whale song set to deep submerg, oceanic trench swims echoes of the ages, liquid stoner flow on the boil, noodles and red wine, tendrils and buzzing borealis clouds, individual krill like acid rain, hard shells dancing the sunspots, keratin and crustaceans snap crackle pop, lava lizard mumma tornado jesus puppet on ping pong strings dancing, develop like a fine wine, digest and develop like foetus back and forth reverse the tape, the perfect absurdity, swimming with the larvae my life lives to a liquid lung whilst the universe sings sweet song chaos to me" *cough* and look, there goes my brain farting up the walls like a helium baloon pissing out air! Take a moment for your pupils to dilate, wait for gravity to reverse you back to your upright standing position and then you'll surely understand..
Mani Neumeier & The Bitches Of Zeus do a little bow at the end, looking for all the world like a crack team of cosmonauts making first contact with aliens from Uranus, those in the crowd still able to exercise their base motor functions erupt in applause, and there's your monkey!
I think I went somewhere else after to drink myself retarded with beer: it may've been the Exeter, it may've been the Cranka, it may've been the moist armpitspace of an oversized intergalactic yak and chances are I'll be in many such places since, but very few in both time or space will ever be quite nearly as utterly spaced out as where I've been just now..
Oh, and that dull thudding percussive rhythm you hear right now? That one that's giving you that dull persistant headache? that's YOU kicking yourself stupid for missing this!
SWORDS + LIKE LEAVES + MEGAFAUNA LIVE @ THE EXETER / Friday January 18th 2008
The Exeter (aka: The Excreter): nestled amongst the yuppie slums of Rundle street like a giant steaming turd in a brown paper bag, burning and yearning for the doorbell to ring. The Exeter: give us your uni student, your unemployed, your artist and your huddled masses longing to be free of their braincells and we'll bring you back to the glory days of the early 90's to laugh like demented children. The Exeter: where the luxurious and expansive foliage of their beer gardens is surpassed only by the volumes of suspicious green smoke that shrouds them. Aaaah, what's not to love about this grand moldering bastion to the east? This institution? This asylum? This sanitorium for one and all of Adelaide's illbient children to dribble thoughtless yammerings into the void? If all conscious thought is naught but a lie, then let all roads lead to the Exeter!
To navigate through such a disorienting haze as this, clearly I'm gonna need the services of a qualified spirit guide. But since all the better ones were busily slapping Tom Cruise silly this week, I found myself scraping the barrel here with Zhu Jiang: the "national beer of China". Yup, weird I know, but surely one billion Chinese can't possibly be wrong!? (except for, y'know that whole Tibet thing *ahem*). And as for the entirely trivial matter of why this entire blog is in black in white, I hereby offer the following explanations: a) I've got a visual arts degree so fuck off! b) I've made way too many stoner jokes and thus your retinas won't be needing "cones" anymore (har har), c) all my colour photos sucked tonight and this was my fiendishly clever attempt to cover for it *cough* oh yes, RollingStone magazine heeeere we come!
Yup, you just know this is going to be one of those episodes: so blitheringly dazed and confused it makes Ashton Kutcher look like the psychotic drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, which considering the subject matter at hand tonight, makes this is an all too fitting tribute..
MEGAFAUNA (***1/2) myspace :: If your tastes in music extends to the most rarefied and obscure extremities of Adelaide's art-rock scene (ie: you're perhaps one of two spaced out university dropouts known to frequent Urtext Studios on any given Friday), then this band could very well be your fantasy supergroup. Featuring Kynan Lawlor (the bearded Silent Bob) from Hit The Jackpot, Corinna (the Ghost World chick in black) from The Holographic Colts and what appears to be some random homeless guy they dragged off the street for $3.55 in spare change and a few loose cigarettes; the played what loosely could be described as Sonic Youth for dead people. Prone to constantly swapping their instruments (a confusing habit inherited from Hit The Jackpot), Megafauna is a band that is effortlessly sparse, comatose, awash in seas of white noise yet also most blissfully meditative like a stoner grunge lullaby. If I was blitzed out've my skull, spread eagled on a couch with a bag of dorritos and unable to lift my head I'd be in heaven right now.. eeeee!
LIKE LEAVES (***) myspace :: Furthering the stoner vibes into more dissociative realms, we have another three piece that ups the ante even further in the stoner supergroup stakes. One that dares to combine the brain damaging illbience of Daniel Varricchio on double necked guitar fuzz, Patrick Saracino on cyclic mantra basslines and Ryan from Mr Wednesday filling the trashcan percussives in between. In theory this much maddening psychedelic power in full fury would be enough to demagnitise the earth, reverse the correalis effect and send everyone flying off into space; but thankfully this collective still appears to be in it's embryonic development. As such, I couldn't quite make heads or tails of this set but as much as I could figure (huddled in foetal position and yammering inconherently in front of the foldback speakers), this sounded like late 60's Pink Floyd meets Tibetan chanting in an echo chamber meets Maynard James Keenan playing ping pong with Jesus on a heavy hit of acid. If I played this all backwards; I dunno whether I'd come up with a unified field theory that combines general relativity with quantum physics, a new recipe for dope cookies or the Zeta Reticulan's response to the Arecibo Code, either way I'm frightened!
Unbeknownst to many, innocently walking the streets past that black curtain window, there's been a furious arms race at play here in the Exeter front room lo these past few years. Ever since the band stage was exiled from it's holy land in the beer garden (aka: the land of the long white cloud *cough*) due to all those pesky residential noise complaints, bands have long since sought retribution by vying for the honour of being the LOUDEST fuckoff band in the Exeter front room. Many of Adelaide's wastoid elite have laid claim to this title in the past: Trixie Plain, Artax Mission, the most recent of which being Diplomat (stoner grunge casualties from the late 90's) in their "legendary" attempt to level the block. Not to be outdone, headlining act Swords have also come to the fray with their own diabolical attempt in cochlea abuse tonight..
Foolishly enough (due to chronic overcrowding in howler monkeys clamouring to soak up the shockwaves), I've chosen ground zero, on stage, lying mere inches away from the band in front of the foldback speakers to document this attempt. I believe the shattering moonscape on the floorboards around me speaks for itself.. ooooo shit, this is gonna get ugly!
SWORDS (****) myspace :: A Swords set in any normal test conditions can be rather akin to attempting to dodge a series of swinging blades, spikes, collapsing ceilings, enraged natives, screaming nazis and oversized rolling boulders on your way through an Indiana Jones death trap. If your face doesn't melt off at the end opening up pandora's box, count yourself lucky. *HACK!! SLASH!! STAB!! KILL!!* They are a truly band to a minimalist intent: swords fucking everywhere, thousand fold steel, piston driven malevolency and zen minimalist brutality (and this is under normal "test" conditions). Tonight however, whilst vying for Exeter's heavy weight title: Swords is rather akin to a thousand phones ringing at once in sibilant singularity from your inner ear whilst asteroids smash repetitively into your skull. If your playing at home, reinact by throwing all your metal cutlery into the microwave, tap it in for 5 minutes and enjoy the fireworks! I know I did.
As for whether Swords managed to break Diplomat's record? Who's to know? We broke all our equipment trying to get a read of it hammering into the infra red: nothing but ear bleeds, shattered teeth grins and a car alarm encore for the next 1/2 hour.. whoaaaaaa!
Anyone wishing to contribute to the "Exeter Relief Fund" in the aftermath of this holocaust, please direct all donations and payments (we accept all brews, spirits, fungal caps, weird berries, leaf and homegrown) to the following site. As much as I would love to speak further of this night (and the combined carnage that drinking both Like Leaves and Swords' beer riders wraught upon the Adelaide CBD), I believe the muffled ringing in my ears speaks for itself.. ROCK!
