STORMCROW, PANICSTEPPER, OMLETE & CHIPS (Pilote / Scheme)

THE LIFT,  BRIGHTON,  6th August 2000

Advertised as an evening of "Ill-at-ease", there was always a suspicion that this might be an unusual event. The position of the respective acts on the bill showed a healthy disregard for the reputed popularity (notoriety?) of the artists involved - it was to be the debut live show for the headline act. There were also the rumours about the venue's clientele: a friend had told me that at a recent gig many of the audience were falling over drunk, and one woman had approached Vladislav Delay mid-performance demanding to be allowed to emcee over the remainder of his set. Neither curiosity nor scepticism fully prepared me for the actual events.

Reaching the top of the stairs leading to The Lift, the man beside the merchandising stall handed you a Stormcrow rainbonnet. The tables each had a small votive nightlight amidst an offering of sweet snacks. Two televisions ran silent video clips from The Sounds of the Seventies (one black-and-white, one colour). A DJ transformed a John F. Kennedy speech into a series of self-improving sales techniques for used car vendors by way of V/VM's cover of Careless Whisper.

Omlete & Chips, an improvised anagrammatic union of Pilote and Scheme, turned out a set of buzzes, squealing tones, fractured percussion loops and cut-out-'n'-keep spoken word samples. Not vastly dissimilar in spirit to the recent Schnieder TM show at the RFH, it was proof that you can have key-stroking, knob-twisting fun that puts a smile on your face and doesn't leave you feeling soiled and slightly empty afterwards.

Panicstepper's introduction started ominously: dark, speeding digital hardcore styled drum machinations, feedback solos… and silence. Sixty-odd seconds in, Panicstepper had broken a guitar string. The DJ cued up Gescom's Key Nell.

After this interlude Panicstepper returned to punish his instrument for its earlier failings. He scratched it, slapped it, hit it increasingly harder in the back and knocked the machine heads against the speaker cabinets to create enough white noise to break up the vortex of whirling rhythms. The initial dizzy euphoria soon became little more than an interminable headache, like a nasty headcold whose unwelcome longevity renders it both irritating and mundane. If only he'd stopped before our noses started to run we'd have been left with tears in our eyes. It should be noted that few present realised that the breakdown of noise to a single distorted vocal was due to Panicstepper packing his equipment away.

As we waited for Stormcrow the floor space in front of the stage began to fill with small stubby white creatures that bobbed around to the DJ's basslines. Closer examination revealed these to be inflated medical gloves inscribed "Small Elephant - Mother Cords". (A man who knows later explained that the logo of Moth Records is based on a Small Elephant Moth if that helps). Synchronously, the videos began to play an edit of stark close-ups of clinical bathrooms cut with bubbling mud. To the accompaniment of seagulls and lapping waves, Stormcrow embarked on his set.

Imagine Lady Day and her full string section, all verging "on the nod", trying to rehearse in an echo chamber while in the room next door someone is dropping concrete slabs onto the floor. Fats Comet comes to shelter from the rain. If this metaphor doesn't make sense you have never heard the Stormcrow version of Stormy Weather (and when you do, it will). Stormcrow produces music that originates in the grey areas between plunderphonics, left-field samplerdelia and its more popular variants of trip-hop, techno, etc. He once described himself as the missing link between Stock, Hausen & Walkman and Fatboy Slim. It's close, but doesn't do justice to his skewed sensibility. This is a man whose first single included a hilarious funky amalgam of Marlon Brando's sodomite lines from Last Tango In Paris over a stretched out sample from Pusherman. As befits a character named after the precursor of a particularly nasty infection - the stormcrow was the generic name for the messengers that rode from village to village to warn about the approach of the plague - his music mutates throughout the set in a low-key, almost seamless, infectious strain. If the other acts on the bill could be regarded as fractured, Stormcrow was fractal: he made the others look two-dimensional. The 'Crow coasted it.

Postscript: An overrun meant that the Stormcrow set was cut short, so preventing the playing of Pardon My French, one of the two current singles. Curiously enough, this single is placed at Number Two in the following week's Totally Wired chart (a Brighton radio show on Surf 107 FM). The disease is taking hold.

Review: Nic Lane

Stormcrow also thanks: Bruce (for the videos), Phil (for the guitars)

Colin @ Edgeworld Records (for putting the whole thing together)