Music PREVIEWS
list.co.uk/music
ELECTRO-GOTH-POP AUSTRA Berkeley Suite, Glasgow, Mon 4 Jun; Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, Tue 5 Jun
Having rated coldwave-disco banger ‘Lose It’ one of our favourite songs of 2011, The List are big fans of this Toronto goth-pop six-piece based around Latvian-Canadian singer- songwriter Katie Stelmanis. A virtuoso musician with classical training, plus stints in riot grrrl band Galaxy and a solo album, Stelmanis puts the lavish praise heaped on Austra’s debut LP Feel It Break down to it being the most ‘normal’ sounding music she’s made yet. ‘I used to write overdramatic, opera- aria inspired songs with lots of harsh industrial noise,’ she explains. ‘I thought it was cool, but it was a bit hard to listen to. Adding a rhythm suddenly turned everything into dance music, and that is something that people understand.’ Stelmanis’s voice – an icily affecting precision instrument –
has won her many admirers. ‘It’s got something eerie and unique about it,’ praises Death In Vegas’s Richard Fearless, who worked with her on his album Trans-Love Energies. ‘I find it quite haunting. It has elements of The Knife, but less Middle Earth.’ (Read our interview with him, page 36.) Both Stelmanis and Austra drummer Maya Postepski are
lesbians and strive to make their sexuality an intrinsic part of the band. ‘I don’t think you need to know that I’m gay to enjoy my music,’ says Stelmanis, ‘but as an artist I chose to speak openly about it because there are too many people in the world that still don’t know how to deal with homosexuality.’ Her point is underscored by YouTube’s censoring of Austra’s video for ‘Beat And The Pulse’, with arty shots of female flesh. ‘I think it’s a clear indication of where North American values lie,’ Stelmanis shrugs. ‘There’s so much hateful and violent content on YouTube that’s deemed acceptable whereas a few boobs are not. Go figure.’ (Malcolm Jack)˚
ELECTRONIC POP MIAOUX MIAOUX Mono, Glasgow, Thu 7 Jun; Electric Circus, Edinburgh, Thu 14 Jun SYNTH-POP COM TRUISE Captain’s, Glasgow, Tue 12 Jun
Julian Corrie sighs when you mention a certain designer drug that people used to swear was ‘plant food’. Come on, counters The List, don’t tell us the name isn’t a reference to mephodrone. ‘Not at all,’ he says, aghast. ‘This project started in 2006, I just wanted a name that was deliberately nonsensical and stupid, that didn’t mean anything.’ The inspiration, he says, was a small girl repeating the word ‘meow’ to her mother over and over again on a train journey, which is a much more innocent tale.
You could quite feasibly imagine getting off your face and dancing all night to
Corrie’s music though. The sound of Miaoux Miaoux is a gorgeous, soulful collision of 80s synth-pop tropes with snippets of crunching dubstep bass and otherworldly glitching vocals. He expresses satisfaction that his live band set (he also has a solo show, ‘more like a DJ set’) uses no laptops, instead relying on drummer Paul Carlin (ex Dananananaykroyd) Mitchell Museum’s bassist Chris Ferguson, Anna Miles of Corrie’s old band Maple Leaves and rapper Profisee. Corrie, who was born in Nottingham and now works in BBC Scotland’s sound
department, prefers having a live band who play his music to being in a band himself. ‘I’ve always thought of myself more as an electronic musician,’ he says, ‘it excites me more than guitar music. And also, I admit I’m a control freak. I just like being fully in charge of my own creative decisions.’ (David Pollock) ■ Light of the North is out on 11 Jun (Chemikal Underground). See review, p104.
Okay, so imagine if Blade Runner was not set in a dark, dystopian, fetid, neon shoe-box version of LA and instead was transposed to a glaring and perma- tanned Miami of the future, drowning in Day-Glo colours; a city as one giant luminous melanoma. And instead of Vangelis on the synths you would have Com Truise. The movie might be unpalatable but the soundtrack would not.
Seth Haley, in his moreish synthjammer role as Com Truise most recently heard on the Galaxy Melt LP for Ghostly International last year, neatly encapsulates what we both love and loathe about the future, the possibilities that are both real and imagined, the bright, brash, shrink-wrapped hopes; tangible, audible but synthetic and unreal. He is the soundtrack to the uncanny valley – we feel almost unnerved by the poppy oscillations, arpeggios, glistening funk and 32-bit soul. They are inorganic, fabricated, not human, but it’s impossible to not fall under their spell. Haley’s tunes are like replicants and although we know their appearance is only synth deep, they have a rich, melodious texture and a shimmering allure, not perfect but doing a pretty close impression.
The mask slips live, and the human side emerges. Haley is a cheery, shaven-
headed, Buddha-shaped Korg-tweaker. He performs with a drummer and it’s not the spectacle one would hope, nor, to be fair, expect. But the tunes still stand alone, each with that almost eerie assuredness, offering a glimpse of a flawless future that will never be realised. (Mark Keane)
24 May–21 Jun 2012 THE LIST 101