henry homesweet + casio kid + falco lombardi & combat dave + big chip + the tin foil hat brigade |
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Monday, 01 December 2008 |
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Chip Tune Tour @ Duke of Wellington
05 August 2008
Photos & Review by Pete
The venue set up at The Duke was minimal, just two bar room tables lifted on the stage to hold everybody’s kit and absolutely no lighting rig set up. In fact no lights were on at all except the usual dim bulbs around the sides and back. For a low-overheads tour that had just taken in Liverpool and Newcastle on the previous two nights it made the point this was all about the sounds and nothing but the sounds - and the superb mixing all night was testament to that worthy ambition.
‘My name’s James Smith and I don’t give a fuck’ lured the 60 or 70 emo-esque teens up the stairs
Big Chip piled in with rattling arcade gaming effects balanced on top of weighty percussion. (It kinda reminded me of early Gorillaz, but stripped back.) Uninhibited and imaginative dance moves were a bonus throughout as was the final number, ‘the one I always finish on’ which glowed like a big glowstick with childlike fun, including cute vocoder vocal. This hinted at the origin of what was clearly now a serious music-making compulsion for Big Chip. Good stuff.
Falco Lombardi and Combat Dave showed that the benefit of teamwork as they worked together to
Casio Kid - oddly named for a duo - were equally effective at getting people moving but musically it all seemed bitty, too full of either ambient prog or 90’s disco styles, leaving it unsubtle, squirty and lacking the essential kid-fun factor. Vocals were surprisingly good, though as were the occasions when the music tipped over into quirky silliness rather than when aiming to replicate some slightly naff Club Ibiza techno/house/trance sound.
For whatever reason, my preconceptions are invariably rubbish as I thought Henry Homesweet looked unlikely to hold on to the crowd or me - but I thought I’d stop for two numbers, enough to base a lazy review on and then grab me stuff and get off home - but it turned out a wrong call as the music was about to get super-compelling. As he moved from setting up and tinkering about to tearing into the first tune everybody surged back up front and set about dancing non-stop till the perspiration was running off the windows and a stage invasion was called for. Very quickly even to me, this was clearly what chip music is all about - stunning, intense synthetic-tech sound play. Wild Gameboy tunes floated on rib-bruising beats which were massive but never allowed to overwhelm the simple zany chipset joy. The retro Nintendo muso sources were not tucked away or incidental here but absolutely central to the meaning of the set and a load of effort was put into pulling as much as possible of the
As music-making goes this chip tunes thing should in theory be the least cool of them all. But geek-driven or not there’s an unexpected world of rich possibilities within the simple sound-cards buried in those handheld gadgets - totally outside what the manufacturers would have ever imagined possible.
More pics at www.shine.clara.co.uk/gigs webspace.
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Henry Homesweet |
for opening act The Tin Foil Hat Brigade. That badass attitude and some effective early monster power plays shone through a short set that was thumping with passion while a bit lacking in any clear direction. It also proved insufficient to quieten down the nattering going on - as well as the two girls having a laugh smacking the hell out of each other’s hands. 
blend numerous fab layers around numerous peppy micro electro melodies at speeds normally only a girl’s texting thumb could attain. There was real depth to their work and everything fitted together to spell-binding effect. Somehow illuminating their equipment with glowsticks the timing of the variations in intensity was especially smart; it takes real insight to get people responding like that on the dancefloor. A 45 minute performance finished with what was for me a slightly misjudged guest shouty metal-esque vocal - which sent the crowd mental, so hey what do I know.
sound together as part of the live performance. A couple of technical glitches tore it all apart and into momentary silence reminding us how precarious it actually was but each time it bounced back into life with squealy, dizzy animated cartoony wildness, spinning us into playzone mayhem. This page was last updated Wednesday, 06 August 2008
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