Is this thing on? No, good, yes, please don't think for a second that Mister Internet dot Biz had forgotten about our commitment to supporting the underground electronic music scene. While it may appear that we've been too busy golfing with arms dealers / catching a nice sunburn aboard superyachts to update this blog of late, the truth is that dogsitting duties and illness both mental & physical have all got in the way of delivering the hot fresh content that you, dear reader, crave so much. But having just recovered from a vicious cold, there was nothing preventing n0teeth from suiting up & attending Colombian synthlord Filmmaker's triumphant return to London last night. Here's the 411.
Snap, Crackle & Pop - is there a finer promoter in London at the moment? Since before the pandemic, S, C & P have been putting on exactly the right bands at exactly the right venues at exactly the right time. Unfortunately Facebook issues either at my end or theirs meant that the event page told me the gig had already finished seven hours before it started, so I was unable to glean any information about set times and only caught the last ten minutes of the opening act as a result.
They were certainly a bracing and enjoyable ten minutes, however. I must commend the promoters for putting on a droning, scraping noise act I am going to tentatively ID as Extasis, rather than playing it safe with something light and synthy.
MOTH Club - an old veterans' hall - is a great little venue, incidentally. It seems to attract its fair share of electronic noisemakers (I saw Deli Girls there last year and concluded they were not for me, but appreciated the hustle) and forms an extremely scalene triangle with Hackney's other two hives of semi-independent musical activity, the Shacklwell Arms and the Glove That Fits. And definitely one to bookmark for summer - it was so aggressively air conditioned even n0teeth (always too hot when it's just over 15 degrees outside) had to put on a hoodie.
CorpusMilner, too, was a refreshingly off-kilter choice of support act. A northern-accented, spoken word intro in shades, hoodie and moustache, like John Cooper Clark dressed as the Unabomber; then a stiff disco beat kicked in and the place really started jumping. "If you scratch a Christian you'll find a pagan" repeated like a mantra over live bass and whiplash drum programming. n0teeth suspects our enjoyment of this act will be mostly in the live arena but enjoy it we most certainly did.
Filmmaker, then. We had no idea what to expect: would the relentlessly prolific Colombian producer cast a spell on us with his eerie horror synths or go on a full-on techno-body rampage?
Both, it turns out, and with bonus lashings of acid and electro to boot. His set was relentless and terrifyingly intense and fully engrossing, the sounds driving into the flesh like metal hooks and making the MOTH crowd jerk and spasm like marionettes.
It used to be one of n0teeth's greatest regrets that we never got round to seeing horror-synth-EBM duo Gatekeeper back in the day, but Filmmaker has taken their sinister, John Carpenter-on-acid stylings to such dark and dangerous places I don't feel I'm missing out. The cenobite of synth rained down ordnance that would make your average "terror EBM" act quake in their New Rocks: the wall of sound that hit us was by turns pounding and psychedelic; furiously energetic beats crashing around eerie washes of cinematic (pun intended) atmosphere.
I'm a busy man. I've never bothered to fully explore what is meant by "dungeon synth". But if Filmmaker isn't included under that term I would like to know why the hell not. His set (all blended together continuously, like a DJ set - or perhaps a film score?) turned MOTH club's charmingly careworn wood-panelled interior into claustrophobic walls of grimy stone.
With many impressive but heavily stylised releases under his belt, Filmmaker manages to one-up himself in a live setting by proving he can make a crowd temporarily lose their minds and be transported to another place, rather than carefully reciting the script. If you're bored by the oversaturation of lightweight, Stranger Things-inspired 80s throwback synthwave out there at the minute and want to feel the fear and move your feet, go and see Filmmaker live.