This is a plan we’ve been in the process of hatching for a while: we’re excited to announce that the Quietus have teamed up with our friends Colony, who’ve hosted hands-down some of the most belting and (hazily) memorable London parties of the last few years, to host a Quietus vs. Colony session in Hackney Wick’s The Hive Project (aka The Yard Theatre).
It takes place on Friday September 27th, fitting neatly into our fifth birthday celebrations next month, and over many ales and deliberations we’ve assembled a line-up of some of the most unique and adventurous electronic music the UK’s currently got to offer: Mark Fell as Sensate Focus, Beneath, Dom Butler of Factory Floor, and Broken20 boss TVO. Tickets are £5/8 advance or £10 on the door, and can be purchased from here.
Heading up proceedings is none other than Mark Fell, with the debut London performance of his dazzling club music project Sensate Focus. We’ve long been massive fans of Mark’s music, both for his whirlwind rhythmic dissections as one half of glitch pioneers SND and his playful and varied solo work, including a blazing new 12" for Mute’s Liberation Technologies, N-Dimensional Analysis. His Sensate Focus 12" series from the last year, though, has rewired our brains entirely. A common fixture in tQ’s Rory Gibb’s Hyperspecific column (read about it here), it’s astonishing, using a bare minimum of components to construct some of the most infectious yet fiendishly complex club music ever disseminated. We’ve been itching to see him blast this material out on a dancefloor, and now it’s happening: expect razor-wire two-step, shimmering house reductions and scrambled funk to tie your legs, minds and nervous systems in knots. For more on Mark Fell, read Quietus editor John Doran’s recent in-depth interview with him, Mark Fell & The Quietest Room In Europe.
Next up is Beneath, the now London-based purveyor of bare-bones UK funky clatter and throbbing bass-weight. Following a pair of killer white label twelves through his own No Symbols imprint, he’s taken things up a notch lately, releasing explosive plates via Keysound, Pinch’s Tectonic and Niche N Bump. They all pinpoint a chest-rattling sweet spot between ’05-’08 dubstep, techno and the undulating, grimey grooves of early UK funky, as do his DJ sets, which drag you along by the scruff of the neck in a swamp of tarry subs and clanking drums.
Broken20 co-head Ruaridh Law, aka TVO, is one of the UK’s foremost alt.techno experimentalists and a long-term ally of Colony. Following a storming late night set at Colony vs Broken20 back in March and an acclaimed split release with Shifted/Covered In Sand (the awesome, brooding Red Night Variations, one of tQ’s albums of 2013 so far), he’ll be making the journey south from Glasgow to play a ‘floor-oriented live PA that promises to meld UK techno, dub, drone, Raster-Noton fixated electronics and no little post-UKG bass swagger in a way that makes utter, enthralling sense. Click here to read Rory Gibb’s in-depth interview with TVO from earlier this year.
As one-third of London-based shapeshifting dance/noise/industrial collective Factory Floor, meanwhile, Dom Butler has caused his fair share of havoc on dancefloors these past few years, with his gritty modular synth explorations and chattering drum machine rhythms a crucial anchor in the trio’s sound. Fresh off the release of the band’s long-awaited debut album, he’ll be bringing his all-hardware set up to The Yard – last heard on record in his pummeling, cowbell-riddled remix of Forward Strategy Group, a long-time secret weapon in Colony ally Perc’s record bag – for a set of acidic thrum and buzz and freaked-out, noise-scrubbed dancefloor mutations. For more on Dom’s music, click here to read John Doran’s recent Factory Floor interview.
In support will be Colony residents Tengui – who "will be playing it deep and heady early on", as well as Colony’s MB & CB and the Quietus’ Rory Gibb, who will be digging through the record bags for a back-to-back mix session to close the evening in suitably thunderous style.
Colony vs. The Quietus takes place on Friday 27th September, from 10pm until 6am. The venue is The Hive Project, The Yard Theatre, Unit 2A, Queens Yard, Hackney Wick, E9 5EN. Full details at the event Facebook page.
To buy tickets, click here – and see you down the front.
