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Tuesday, 1 April 2025

Strange Little Consequence

I spent Sunday afternoon at Yes in Manchester, a free event with the added promise of a free pint for the first hundred people through the door- Daniel Avery, Syd Minski (of Working Men's Club) and Ghost Culture DJing in the main bar. Two years ago Daniel did a similar session at Yes and it was really good so I didn't need asking twice to go again for some Sunday afternoon/ Mother's Day techno. 

I got there at 2pm and stayed for a few hours. By the time I left it was gathering pace, the bar filling and the music getting quite loud and thumpy, techno's promise kicking in. At the start Daniel was playing ambient techno, a sound he's made his own since 2019, and the bpms were slow. Death In Vegas' 1999 track Soul Auctioneer, pitched down a bit, was played along with The Black Dog's minimal techno take on Bjork. Syd took over and jolted it up a bit with some noisy synth action and then Ghost Culture played Depeche Mode's Never Let Me Down and Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World. The Cure in remixed form appeared and then things got increasingly more techno and intense. It was good fun and I wish I'd stayed longer.

The trio have joined forces to make music too, as Demise Of Love. The first fruits of this are a track called Strange Little Consequence, which starts out very alienated and then goes all dreamy when the synth chords wash in. Everything's up in the top end of the frequency range, with fractured drums and Syd's voice going from spoken to softly singing. If New Order were starting out now, and in their twenties again, this is probably what they'd sound like. 



1 comment:

JC said...

Oh, my. This is very good. I'm a bit of a sucker, mind you, for Syd Minski's voice. I hope, however, this doesn't mean he's calling it a day of WMC.