Double Avery

As well as my ambient/ cosmische gig on Friday night I spent much of Sunday in two different venues enjoying DJ sets by Daniel Avery. The first was at Ramona on Swan Street, an indoor/ outdoor venue with a DJ booth inside a large teepee. The appearance, billed as The Morning After, was part of BBC Radio 6's weekend long festival in Manchester. Avery is riding high on the back of four albums since 2020 (Illusion Of Time, Love + Light, Together In Static and Ultra Truth) and a career high in the single Lone Swordsman (written and recorded in the immediate aftermath of Andrew Weatherall's death in February 2020). Lone Swordsman got an airing at Ramona and the chilled industrial ambient sounds were a part of the lunchtime set but by the time we'd finished our pizza he was upping the tempo and found a sweet spot of lovely 110 bpm thump, big warm basslines and fizzing topnotes, entrancing grooves- intense and hypnotic stuff.  

Daniel had agreed to play at Yes too, a venue a hop across town in a converted three storey Victorian house near the old Factory offices/ Paradise Factory building. Free entry and a five hour set from 5pm through to 10pm. Daylight raves are a thing now. We wandered across town, stopping off in Ancoats for a drink, in time to see him start his second set of the day, tipping his hat to the city by starting with Everything's Gone Green, New Order's 1981 classic melding of rock and dance. The crowd, a mix of the young and the middle aged, were onboard straight away and the room became a mass of dancing. He followed it fairly soon with Peak High's Was That All It Was, a disco/ chug/ Balearic highlight from the end of last year and not much later spun a very chunky edit of Primal Scream's Don't Fight It, Feel It, presumably his own work. Both venues were graced by what sounded like his own, as yet unreleased, remix of Depeche Mode along with lots of modern acid techno. Avery sets have plenty of thump- this is techno after all- but with peaks and troughs, moments of euphoria and release. 

We left around seven, it being Sunday and a school night (and having been out for several hours by this point). Somewhat amusingly, while on the dancefloor at Yes, clutching my pint and jigging around, I was approached by a woman who said hello and then asked if was 'Mr Turner'. I nodded. 'You teach my child', she said, and we both laughed, a little nervously. 

Lone Swordsman