Review: M?dul?s, Left Bank

I wasn’t going to review this gig, and they weren’t even necessarily going to be called Mödulüs. Indeed the name may only have existed for that one night. However there is every reason this electro-acoustic trio should take their excellent project onwards and upwards – the crowded Left Bank’s attentive audience apparently yielded the bar’s biggest ‘hat’ collection ever – and thus, for the record, their debut gig needs to be memorialised. That did, however, mean crappy phone pics in a dimly lit room but there you go.

Mödulüs has grown from an improvisational session between keyboard and synth man Dan Moore and drummer Matt Brown who have recruited synth and cello player Drew Morgan to extend the idea. The music grows spontaneously in the manner of The Necks or The Bays, the exchange of ideas between players shaping and reshaping as they put new ideas into the mix. Things started small, therefore, with drummer Matt sitting on his hands for several minutes while the two synth players built up a simple looping riff into a throbbing neo-techno heartbeat. When the percussion kicked in it was assertive, taking that pulse into a kind of cosmic Afrobeat that could have driven a dance floor and which, eventually, fractured into a more sketchy rhythm with clattering Rhodes piano from a lost Doors out-take.

It soon became apparent that these players had a real depth of knowledge of the roots of European electronic music from Faust to Underworld via Kraftwerk and Can, as well as minimalist guru Terry Riley and Miles Davis in his free jazz rock period. All these elements emerged at different times, sometimes unlikelily: a military drumbeat gave rise to an Autobahn-style groove that, in turn, was led by haunting cello into a Rileyesque series of meditative deviations. The process ended with a superbly restrained solo drum delivering tidal variations while a sepulchral organ intoned.

It wasn’t all old school, however, and the second half threw up some gut-grabbing dubstep, Dan and Drew standing head-to-head over their ranks of gizmos to extract a perfect contemporary sound. This accuracy of tone was further proof of just how much they were in control of the technology, finding the most evocative shapes within that infinite electronic palette. How much listening does it take to know how to do that? Similarly, Matt found clanking ‘Tom Waits’ machine percussion sounds by scattering small instruments across the drum heads and at one point continually adjusting the snare setting between beats to give that one drum a range of voices. Throughout the evening he seemed able to throw exactly the beat that the sonic architecture needed (including none at all).

Whatever name they settle on, however, Mödulüs already have the mojo to figure at All Tomorrow’s Parties and the parties after that, too. If they choose to stick to beat-driven things (à la The Bays) they could easily end up seeing the dawn rise while rocking a Croatian castle, if they keep exploring wider they’ll soon hold Hoxton in thrall – and beyond.