This Chant Is God Voice

Justin Robertson took his Five Green Moons on the road last week for a trio of gigs, in Liverpool, Manchester and Todmorden. On Thursday night he was at Rainy Heart in Stretford, a new South Manchester venue with some fearsome speaker stacks, in a retail unit in what used to be Stretford Mall.

 Five Green Moons may not be the most unlikely thing to have ever happened in the former Stretford Mall- that would probably be Muhammad Ali's visit in 1971. The three time heavyweight champion of the world was on a visit to the Stretford branch of Tesco (when it was Stretford Arndale) on a promotional tour for Ovaltine, a visit that had to be closed down by police due to the sheer number of people that arrived hoping to see the world's most famous sportsman. Ali was backed into a corner by an ecstatic mob and had to be rescued by the police. But, Five Green Moons may well be a close second to that. 

Justin stands behind a bank of equipment- laptop, drum machine, synth, theremin, FX pedals- dressed in ceremonial robes, horned headgear and hood with guitar and e- bow. What follows is as much ritual as gig, a slew of influences fused into one- pagan poetry, the bass and drums of dub, weird folk horror, post- punk, gnomic lyrics about ritual, repetition, sense, form and beauty, fuzz and sci fi. It's a fully realised hour of music, no gaps between the songs, a one man excursion into rite and the occult via music, everything drenched in the space of dub- 'everything's a song in the sound world', he chants at one point, his right hand wafted round the theremin and the bass kicking around the concrete walls. 

Towards the end he plays Boudicca, a track from last year's Moon 2 album (Brix Smith is on vocals on the recorded version, a presence from 1980s Manchester, The Fall being one of the main reasons Justin arrived in Manchester to study in the mid- 80s). Boudicca is a trippy collision of post- punk and dub, a celebration of the Queen of the Iceni, sung by Brix. After an hour of Five Green Moons ritual, of Justin's spoken word vocals, the rubbery bass, the skittering/ thudding drum sounds and Space Echo, the distorted guitar and FX, come to end. Justin holds his arms forwards bringing the invocation to a close. 

This Chant Is God Voice is one of the prime cuts from Moon 2 and was a highlight on Thursday night at Rainy Heart. 'Repetition is ritual/ Form is beauty/ This chant is beauty'.