As is our custom, The Quietus is presenting the London date of My Disco’s European tour this spring. The Melbourne-based trio will play Corsica Studios on Tuesday, May 30, with support from Hannah Sawtell and a DJ set of the finest tough leccy music from our own Sophie Coletta, the clever half of Hamburger Ladies. Tickets can be purchased via Ticket ABC and Wegotttickets.
My Disco’s tour requirements are from a limiter-free PA, and we fully expect that their set at Corsica will be, as ever, an exercise in heady, intense minimalism that knocks down the boundaries between art rock and techno. Their previous gigs for us, in 2012 and 2014, have seen My Disco negotiate silence, noise, percussion and power for an experience that marches you towards the rave.
The last My Disco album Severe (listen above) was Number 30 in our albums of the year chart, with Mat Colegate praising it thus: "On Severe, My Disco have taken the boiled-to-its-very-essence art rock of precursors such as This Heat and Big Black and compacted and crushed it into a near expressionless statement of stark terror and sublimity. Through its stripped back rigour and commitment to its own logic, it has managed to encapsulate the moment where the indifferent face of the void sends you running and crying to any god that will hear you. Its palette is tiny – voice, drums, bass, guitar, silence – but it is as focussed and as affecting as any pop song or any symphony."
Hannah Sawtell is a cross-media artist who has previously collaborated with Factory Floor as Sonic Lumps during the band’s ICA Residency. You can listen to that via The Wire here. Writing about her set at the Wysing Festival, Melissa Steiner said, "I am trying my best not to pass out as my skull is invaded and scraped out by a room full of strobe and bone crunching industrial noise produced by London based artist Hannah Sawtell. It’s difficult to decide if the relentless intensity makes me feel more or less like a person; on the one hand I am hyper-aware of my physical discomfort and the edge of panic half an hour of strobe tends to induce, but at the same time the density of the sound, so hypnotic and continuous, seems to delete individuality; I am just another herky jerky body in a room full of them".
