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Braw Gigs Food Bank Benefit - Muscletusk, Fordell Research Unit, FUA, WIDT

Bongo Club, Edinburgh

Saturday May 3rd

Four stars

It may not have been Live Aid, but by gathering (some of) the clans from Edinburgh's off-piste but ever-fecund experimental/noise diaspora to play for Edinburgh Central Food Bank, promoters Braw Gigs and the Bongo Club have taken a principled stance against one of the most sadly necessary by-products of the Con-Dem alliance and their criminal banker friends' ongoing advocacy of austerity culture.

The shadowy presence of Warsaw emigre, WIDT (Antonina Nowacka), opens proceedings with a low-key display of synthesised looped chorales put through a spectral dub blender and set to a projected backdrop of impressionistic images. The quartet of FUA follow this with a sax and drum propelled assault that drives the guitar, electronic and vocal extrapolations beneath, while the increasing volume of Fordell Research Unit's solo samples of criss-crossing slabs of sound is pure Techno for airports.

Headliners Muscletusk go full throttle from the off with splashes and crashes of distorted twin guitars, relentlessly hardcore drums and electronic pokes that cast up underlying bass-throbs from the ether that churns, curdles and batters all challengers into submission in a night which, for all its thunder, made the most humane of gestures.
 
The List, May 2014


ends

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