CLUBBING


Vector
@ The Process Rooms
March 2003

www.vanguard-online.co.uk

" To me autechre is the sound of rainy days in Blackpool, They're tracks about what it's like living in England today. I don't get all this futuristic shit."
- Random number

A squeak and a bang.

In a social club in Ls6 a spaceship is about to take off. Laptop; check. Turntables; check. Warp speed drive; check. Visuals?
There is a squeak and then a bang. The projector has exploded, the mission looks in danger. And then a crackle over the intercom:
spare tv located, visuals are go! Repeat, visuals are go.
The pilots take their places at their control screens. A cheer and then a silence
We have ignition

Promoter: How many people are in leeds? For fucks sake. What a poor turnout. Dexorsist: it's because I played. This happens all the time. I blame the funky house

There's a girl dancing by herself, all night, swinging to and fro with this beatific smile plastered over her face like a fringe. No lollipops, no sweaty coke face, I don't even notice what she's wearing. She's dancing, and happy. And these sounds, these sounds are demented. Psycho androids proclaim the dawn of new civilizations; Sequencers are digested by "acidic gun funk" ; Somewhere, someone's nose is bleeding. It's a right fucking mess and the venue is half empty. But the fifty people there are dancing. Very very quickly.

New bass spotted, course set to intercept
The spaceship has indeed taken off. The four pilots staring fixedly at the screens in front of them, as beats are interrupted, landscapes are inverted. There is a hum as a heavily filtered voice comes through the PA. Mission control?
"Respect to the vector crew, to all y'all in Leeds"
a new pattern emerges, the sound of the tracking skipping on a video, a Polaroid being burnt, and this guy is chatting like Skibadee. What the hell is going on? And then I get it. This is the sound of the bedroom . It's half spoken conversations and shoe bound proposals. It's a sentence of question marks and ellipsis. Experimentation. Sex and drugs and stuff…y'know? A record is scratched over a hallway of rapidly slamming doors as digital video footage of squirrels is played on a portable tv. No animals were harmed in the making of this evening

Random number has a point. The computers = future equation would appear to say more to marketing strategies than the people either making or listening to laptop beats out of Manchester. They may have done up Piccadilly a bit, but I don't see many people using those internet phones. North Manc Beds have seen those phones too, and think they're quite cool, but they don't turn up tonight clad in silver lycra. There's a prominent dissonance between the image projected onto electro, and it's smelly dandruffed reality, that is continually being redressed. People claiming the music they're making for themselves and putting to bed the cyberpunk wet dream of the late 80's. The sheets being aired tonight are stained with the spunk of that ideal. The squirrel really isn't out of place at all, or the setting; a social club full of people being social. Joining tables, chatting to strangers drinking beer and seeing the music as their personal soundtrack. "where else can you go in Leeds just to hear great music and hang out with your friends" adds toddtheamerican, pretty much summing up the vibe. Its like a fifties diner: North Manc Beds as the jukebox, playing the music you want to hear all the time, in public.

A bass drop that turns the floor into quicksand as the treble skips in front to meet it's friends.
A man in the corner goes into spasm, frenzied arm movements and foot tapping. In his eyes are reflected a huge set of rototoms. He is playing them with the limbs of the dead. And they are loud.

If vector represents the everyday social application of electro, then the Process Rooms is a bomb in a daycare center. Not the psycho with a knife in the shadows but domestic abuse presented in surround sound glory. It exerts the same attraction that playing in sandpits of low grade industrial sillicon that every dog in the vicinity has pissed in holds for little kids. It's a simple equation: Mucky = fun.
I don't talk to the girl though. There's a fear that she'll look at me, open her spilling mouth and say what I know to be true

" I don't care about the shitty disco lighting , or irritating camouflage netting, as long as I have this shit hard intravenous injection of muckyfuckbeats all the time every day until it kills me. I will smell, my hair will fall out and people will spit as they walk past in the street. I want to get fucked up. Darling electro god, I am ready come take me. I'll ride in a spaceship or squashed up with my friends in the back of an escort. I will ascend. And all of you trying to get laid at funky house nights, or off your faces on charlie will never get close to this. This is every day of the week how it should be and how it is. Am i happy? I am fucking ecstatic."

Two dialects of a language, evolving, shaping and never failing to address.

A squeak and a bang.

Paul Geddis