Music / BEEF
Review: Rashad Becker, The Brunswick Club
Bristol’s independent film and sound collective BEEF, newly installed in the Brunswick Club, provide a platform for artists’ production, distribution and critical engagement, often focusing on analogue practices. First up (after some excellent drone-and-faulty-wiring selections from the DJ) is Louisa Fairclough’s piece, A Rose, composed for none-more-analogue reel-to-reel. Tape op George McKenzie carefully threads his Ampex around a microphone stand six feet away and Samuel Middleton sings long sonorous notes dropped like smooth pebbles into a well. With glacial slowness they accumulate upon the tape head to form a distant choir ebbing gradually into silence. It’s exquisitely controlled but a second piece, almost identical and equally long, begins to test the audience’s patience.
For proper head-twisting strangeness, few albums have impressed in recent years as much as Rashad Becker’s two volumes of Traditional Music Of Notional Species and BEEF have pulled off something of a coup with this rare Bristol visit. Chatting earlier, Becker briskly dismisses the suggestion that the music he creates is a reaction to his day job in Berlin, mastering techno and house records at Basic Channel’s D & M Studio (Becker has overseen approximately 5000 releases.) “That is highly compartmentalised, it’s how I earn the money to feed my dog,” he jokes. He amiably concurs that his music could be described as the synthetic transformed into the organic. From his tabletop arsenal of modulars that means wrenching unearthly tones that glisten wetly, writhing and sucking like pink new flesh calving, alien life forms drawing their first shuddering breath in strange gaseous atmospheres. Hulking bullfrogs bellow forlornly as jewelled insects buzz between the speaker stacks. Squeaky balloon animals rub up against each other in vaguely obscene fashion. Imagine John Carpenter’s The Thing transmogrified into music. The solid thud of a falling wardrobe that then begins to inch across the floor, extruding tentacles, plaintively mewling to be fed. It’s frankly unsettling. This is that most rare of things; genuinely new sounds never heard before. Becker’s quiet determination to carve out brand new musical destinations deserved the enthusiastic applause.
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