Fuck Buttons

I admit I had modest expectations for the evening, partly because of the typical static nature of live shows by projects that aren't really "played" in the traditional sense, and partly because a few nights earlier Growing hadn't given us any memorable emotions.

Instead, right from the opening of "Sweet Love For Planet Earth", the atmosphere melts into the minimalism of a drone-carillon, over which builds an obsessive ambient-noise crescendo, with Stars Of The Lid coming to in the arms of Merzbow.

Andrew Hung has almost the entire "manipulative" arsenal packed in the most classic of grandma's suitcases, while on Benjamin Power's side there's a fisher-price tape recorder whose microphone is literally chewed up in a scream that creates a Gowns-like effect, should Erika Anderson ever decide to get closer to the genre.

Our two are facing each other, eye to eye, and seem to be miming the struggle between harmonic, liquid, granular sound matter and its rhythmic, dark, ancestral counterpart.

And in "Ribes Out" kick drum and vocal loops create the atmosphere for a propitiatory ritual for the 2000s and beyond, like Animal Collective at the zero degree of language. Bursts of caustic shoegaze, ambient trails and the shadow of London clubs, disavowed by a hardcore attitude.

And finally the long polyphonic pitches of "Okay Let's Talk About Magic" and, following that, "Race You To My Bedroom/Spirit Rise", a pitch-black ambient monolith that marks the peak of the sonic ascesis.

"Bright Tomorrow" sticks to the album's tracklist right to the end and takes us into Nathan Fake territory.

A cathartic happening, tonight at the Circolo, people wonder about an encore, but a playlist immediately starts up instead. We leave knowing that in a year's time, Fuck Buttons' audience will probably have quadrupled.

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