Over the course of an immaculately curated lineup, four artists pushed the limits of sound and genre in Dalston’s grassroots hub, The Shacklewell Arms.
Musical categorisation is something that critics, record labels and pretty well everyone in the industry relies upon to keep things running: to market, to critique, to sell and to organise. It is also almost universally hated by musicians themselves. It is for this reason that artist-led, independent nights like tonight are so important. The ability for artists to break away from tried and tested styles and formulas is absolutely necessary. However, it rarely draws quite such a large, active crowd right from the get-go.
First on is Yottie. The room is packed from the first note of this set, to the last of the headliner’s several hours later, with only the occasional smoke break rendering the room any less than sardine-like. Calling Yottie’s brand of electronic music ‘ambient’ is doing it a disservice. Thanks in part to the use of an accompanying live cello, these unsettling soundscapes are the first sign that the theme of fucking-off musical conventions will be one that reappears throughout the night.
Next up is Mary. Their’s is the music probably most closely identifiable to one genre – and even then, the influences on display are multidimensional. The guitars occasionally have a Gram Parsons country twang, stunning vocals are reminiscent of early XX. To revisit lazy categorisation, Mary could be classed under the shoegaze umbrella, although that would, again, be reductive. Magda take to the stage next and the energy shifts again. They too are breaking out of the genre-cage. In this case by being deliberately abrasive and epic (in the most 80’s, Phil Collins sense of the word) in equal measure.
Magda’s guitars sounds like it’s being dropped off a ten-storey building and the vocals are full 90’s unhinged, think Frank Black with better hair. What elevates however, is the inclusion of haunting, ethereal synth melodies straight out of the playbook of Oneohtrix Point Never or the Drive soundtrack [the original, not the Zane Lowe, Radio 1 rescore-shitshow]. Where previously there was a tight but identifiably ‘Punk’ band, there is now something different.
By this point in the night, the energy has built to a fever pitch. Enter Clayfoot and there are a lot of them up on the Shacklewell’s less than capacious stage. They seem to be bursting at the seams, an accurate physical manifestation of the music they create. Their output is a morass of ideas that, quite easily, could have resulted in a jarring abrasive mess, a warning to artists who decide to push their creativity beyond the bounds of a single genre.
Instead, what follows is an incredibly tight 45 minutes of music that does not once feel self-indulgent. The prodigious musical skill on display is there only as a force to marry disparate creative elements together and so succeeds once again in elevating the group into the realm of ‘actually interesting’.
Indeed, ‘Interesting’ is the name of the game for this show, and why credit must be given to the curation of the night itself. Each artist operates at the limits of genre and influence; an A&R person’s worst nightmare, granted, but who really cares about getting signed when you’re having this much fun? Nights like these give artists the opportunity to hone their sound and find out what makes them unique. Once that happens, the rest of the shit-munchers will eventually catch up.
Clayfoot will play at Peckham Audio on 20th March
Magda will play The Hope and Ruin (Brighton) on 25th March
Mary will play Sebright Arms on 13th March
imagery: Rory McAllister
