Last night for the first time in a very long time I actually left the house to see some live music. Room 40 a Brisbane experimental music label has been hosting the Open Frame festival for the last couple of years and this year I decided to get myself along to The Brisbane Powerhouse for a bit of a look. What a fucking night. There were four artists in all – Pumice and Rosy Parlane form New Zealand, Ducktailss from New Jersey and my pick of the evening Ilios from Greece. Now before I headed to this festival I knew about was Pumice but the rest of them were a bit of a mystery. Two hours later I had a couple of Ilios CD’s and a CD by Rosy Parlane in my hot little hand (bless those merchandise tables). All of them were great and I’ll post on how great Rosy Parlane was at a later time.
Ilios was simply incredible. His set consisted of a slowly evolving noise track accompanying a video installation. The video started off as a couple of dots of light and as the set continued more and more of the what was on the screen was revealed. As the music built in intensity and finally climaxed the picture is finally revealed, a rather lovely photo of a corpse with it’s head and arm blown off in a puddle of blood. It’s difficult to describe the sound itself except to say that it had an actual physical presence. At one point all of the air of the room was sucked out and waves of sickening pulses pressurised the room. I actually had difficulty breathing at one point but that may be because the cockhead in front of me took of his shoes for some reason. It has a similar effect to some of Giffoni’s best work. Extraordinary set and if you live in Newcastle I think he’s playing there on Saturday and at the Toff in Melbourne on Sunday.
Love is My Motor is his latest CD released last year. Essentially it is one long track divided in to eight pieces all with titles of cheesy love declarations. Ilios straddles a line between drone and noise. With the textures kept simple, he uses volume incrementally to create something rather special. There is no rapid rate of change in his sound. The noise changes with great precision and purpose. this is minimalist noise for drone heads and if you liked those last couple of Carlos Giffoni records on No Fun then you might just like this. I sure as shit did. I have no idea how easy this is to track down but you may be able to get it form http://www.antifrost.gr.
Ducks Battle Satan 