VIRB

After convincing four friends to join me, in an effort to spread my love of Matmos and Cornelius around a little, I went to see an astonishingly great gig last night at the Southbank centre in London. The place was packed, which was lovely as I always feel a bit protective of bands I like and don't want them to see an empty hall! The stage was covered in Timpani, flower-pots, lots of Macs, synths, tubular-bells and guitars and promised great things.
Matmos were their usual sweet selves and played for about 40min. Slowly building fractured, complex, clustered sounds out of everything they could lay their hands on. They told the story of their recent commission to re-do some songs from Aida and how, when a right-wing Italian minister said he liked what they had done, they felt like they had failed....It was intense and funky...

Then after a short break we returned to the hall to see a huge white sheet descending from the ceiling to the floor and with slowly pulsating coloured lights projected onto it. At the sound of a huge 80's style synth cord I heard my friends let out involuntary gasps...and felt my grin widen....
And then the sheet fell, the band rocked and the whole place went nuts...They had amazing synchronised visuals that, as the band was so amazingly tight, remained perfectly in time throughout the whole gig. They played 'Star-fruit' and '1,2,3,4,5,6' from Fantasma and I nearly had a heart-attack...At times they sounded like the Talking Heads which made me very happy indeed...At the end they got a standing ovation and took photos of themselves with the audience behind them like some over-excited school kids. It was lovely..And he had this young drummer who looked about 17 but she beat the crap out of her drums..and even played flute in the lullaby he ended the gig with..astonishing...