An old review from 2002 - V/V-m & Jansky Noise, Techno Animal

V/V-m and Jansky Noise, Techno animal, (& Stockhausen and Walkman?) 29.3.02 medicine Bar, custard factory, birmingham

In flip-flops, white creased slacks, pointed collar, crushed velvet jacket and fedora the louche jazzman wields his trumpet and slumps on a stool. He fiddles with the microphone interminably, always only about to speak, a John Lee Hooker impatient with the failings of junior technical Angels, his Freddy Kruger mask oddly unincongruous. His mouth opens and emits a voice so synthesised the speech patterns of humanity, as still-discernible as the words themselves are not, are a cruel parody of conversation. After the chatter of chaos, the trumpet is lifted to lips; cheeks expand and an unending barrage of noise bursts forth like the music of Stalin’s organs to the ears of Berlin, 1945. It too, is nevertheless still-recognisable as a song; this, like our host’s oscillating helium soaked/robotic/growling chatter, a few clichéd words (….. ’the great sir Elton John’, … ‘to all the ladies’…) discernible, is an awful satire of the nature of what we think of as music. This is not m.o.r. soft rock ‘put through a blender’ as my mate had it, so much as Vic Reeves’ not just singing a song in the style of a club singer, but providing the whole instrumentation as well. During a hiatus in the assault someone shouts ‘Very poor.’ Comparisons with US performance artist John McCarthy or E4 tech-comics Noble & Silver are perhaps more pertinent.

Funnily enough the tracks V/v-m rape throughout this, and their second set, when they adopt latex pig masks, become more recognisable as the night goes on. Perhaps we are becoming used to the ‘sound of nausea’ (John Peel’s description), or perhaps the ‘crackliness’ setting on the speaker stacks has been turned down from 11. The sight of an entire crowd waving their arms and lighters in the air and singing along to the puke-inducing ‘I wanna know what love is’ makes me wonder if by midnight it’s booze that has made most of the crowd see the joke. One of their number tells us they’re just filling a gap in the market with their endless sick renderings of everything from lady in red to love will tear us apart, and will continue to do so until someone does the job better than they do. Perhaps they should market the application of their techniques to different spheres of music as a franchise.

The djing in between V/v-m and techno animal is a little disappointing – flying between twin stools of arty continental noise/gabber and electro, and crashing. But when Techno animal eventually start, all is forgiven, as the icebreaking Titanic pleasureboat of ‘demonoid’ crunches into harbour, 65 years too late. Their jackhammer groove is not so much underground hip hop as cannibalistic Morlock funk which it is difficult to imagine on anything other than the mille plateaux label (their new lp, ‘Brotherhood of the Bomb’, is on Matador). The thickest strawberry smoke ever is the subterranean fug from Dante’s hookah. I throw wild shapes on the dancefloor to ward off the beady eyes that loom from the gloom. I have lost my glasses again.

I was deep in antidepressants when I saw this. I think I write music journalism like Paul Gambaccini with a pillow over his face.