#glicthcore

I went to the Planet Mu gig to see him play at the dingy Corsica Records studio in Elephant and Castle. It was wonderfully grimey, you were practically engulfed by the scum of the walls, a perfect venue for this most subversive of artists. Other Mu acts like Ital Tek and Boxcutter excited me too (the former was pretty decent, the latter was a bit disappointing) but to see this maestro of core-core music was pretty damn exciting. So exciting that, despite my having to get up at 7.30 the next morning to give some practice interviews to kids trying to get into Oxbridge as part of charitable organisation called Oxfizz (plug!)– ok yeah I’m a bloody fantastic person because I dally in charitycore on the occasional Sunday, so adulate me bitches! – I was willing to stay up all night till the six o clock climax of this Planet Mu extravaganzacore night of surrealist musical entertainment.

 It was to be a sleepless weekend but such was the intensity of the Venetian Snares gig that my ears were ringing, my head was throbbing and my shins were so blistered that I was able to stay up till 9pm the next evening pretty awake, feeling as though I was being permanently slapped in the face by a spiked cricket bat, as I slipped into the surreal practically high state of post 19th wind ‘awakeness’, in my view the greatest time to listen to music, your mind so tired that thoughts having stopped nagging at you leave your musical pallet at its clearest, there just to be submerged by constant waves of the Dionysian musical elixir – it’s a particularly ideal time to listen to Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works Volume II’ actually (I always preferred the second SAW, there’s more to it and it’s got ‘Lichen’ on which is unbelievably beautiful and I would like it to be played at my funeral please).

Being with friends on my weekend off – I’ve now got a job so I’m ‘livin for the weekend’ in a kind of Human Traffic Dannyyy Dyaaaa way ain’t it – I got truly embroiled in the other Dionysian elixir – a bounty of booze. Getting cheap and decent Sam Smith beers at the Earl of Lonsdale in Portobello (if you’re an ale drinker go here, it’s 3 quid for a pint of good bitter) then moving along the central line through pubs in Soho before stumbling down the northern line to E&C and struggling to find the venue – it’s round the corner and down a dodgy looking alley etc etc – we were – the three of us – pretty ready for a gig of extreme entertainment.

Ital Itek was on first – well, that’s first for us, we didn’t arrive at doors – and he played some decent ambientish electronica stuff before Boxcutter played some fairly drifting 2step and then, a bolt of a blue like an absurdist hardcore musician out of the placidness of Winnipeg, Venetian Snares was there, drooping long hair, mixing some breakcore with orchestral interjections and ambient melodies. The beats get increasingly frantic and the crowd matches the rhythmic fury; moshpits ensue and everyone just scurries to get into it. I barge through to the front with my friend and get properly stuck in, but as the crowd gets more enthusiastic, Monsieur Snares appeases the general moshetite (suck on that portmanteau!) as the music drifts from melodic drum & bass to breathless gabba. It’s mental, it’s frenzy afore me, bodies flung around the dingy dwelling like a horizontal trampolining event, bruises not to be discovered till the elixirs dull, till the Canadian gets told to stop.

The gig escalates exponentially until absurdum begins to become mundanity. The gig should have finished on ‘Welfare Wednesday’, with the immortal lyrics “Victorian Langside, in your punani/I want to put orange juice in your punani” and the repeated refrain “Anal Intercourse in your punani”... beautiful. But to go on after such an epiphany of batshit mental is perhaps taking it too far and the 15 minutes afterward began to feel tedious. Otherwise, the evening was suitably bizarre and frantic.

And as the three of us blundered our way back to my friend’s house in Acton for what would, for me, be half an hour’s sleep, we were left suitably battered and deafened. I’m not sure how the prospective Oxbridge students found my interviewing the next day, but by the end of the day I was pretty tiredcore.