No silence, no room, no air, no reprieve. These are the deprivations that confront us early in electronic noise duo Fuck Buttons’ sold-out show.
Yet it is not deprivation that characterises the experience, rather it is a kind of aural gluttony as we are fattened by shimmering sheets of treble-drenched noise, forced down our feeding tubes like so many French geese.
On record, Andrew Hung and Benjamin Power’s sound is dense, arresting and fit to be blared across London’s Olympic Stadium as part of last year’s opening ceremony. It is both primal and technological, earthy and sharply sterile, as much Space Odyssey 2001’s yelping hominid scene as it is “Open the pod bay doors HAL”.
Live, the Bristol duo’s sound is a terrifying and immense layer-cake, separating out those able – and willing – to dive into its curiously melodic depths from those unpleasantly stunned by its scale.
Presumably, it is this separation that thins the crowd about half-way through the night, allowing those left to eke out slightly less meagre perimeters in which to move to the heavy tribal beats that in any Fuck Buttons’ song are so soon steam-rolled by other noises that you find yourself moving to something else entirely with no recollection of the shift.
It takes a few songs to shake my attachment to last year’s Harvest Festival set where a small but dedicated crowd danced the grass into dust. But having my arms pinned to my side does help me appreciate that Fuck Buttons’ oppressiveness is aerated by an ever-present expansiveness – close your eyes and whole worlds bloom – creating a fiction of space that relieves the lack of it here.
Not content to gorge us merely with sound, the duo’s stimulus package comes with visuals too. Power and Hung’s digital silhouettes loom on a screen that features prismatic shapes and splitting glaciers – a fairly apt visualisation of their sound.
From there, however, I don’t know what visuals were magicked up, preferring instead to close my eyes, a darkness that made it easier to sample from the incredible diversity of sounds proliferating in the undergrowth.
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Sydney Morning Herald version here
