Tonight the audience enters into a room with a projected video loop of a camera going through an empty underground subway line.
This accompanies a Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire) DJ set, a set which happens to actually be better off for the fact that there’s no-one dancing to it.
Mallinder makes an art-piece of the DJ set, drawing on an eclectic and shocking set of samples, spanning from pure 90s R&B to Boards of Canada-esque sci-fi ambience.
It’s a truly haunting effect to walk in to the video of the infinitesimal subway line alongside Mallinder’s melancholic, eerie and brooding sounds.
Headliner LoneLady draws on all the sounds of Talking Heads circa Remain in Light, Julie Ann Campbell’s jagged guitar providing a harsh, pointed counterpoint to her more delicate, fluid vocals and tonight this effect is most impressively executed.
The act firmly revolves round Campbell, the three other musicians far enough away to leave her firmly centre stage, all musicians facing inwards towards Campbell, and though she only speaks a few lines to the audience, she’s still a captivating frontwoman.
Songs feature bass lines of only a few notes and simple drum riffs that patiently repeat, while we are made to wait for spiky guitar licks that enter in and untamed, intentionally overblown synth effects.
The two musicians either side of Campbell play synths, drum pads and percussion that is all ornamentation to some degree, but it’s a welcome feature to see a project that could easily be a one-woman show expanded out so all the sounds made can be accounted for.
LoneLady’s set is accompanied by projections of still and video images of fences, barriers, demolished and empty houses, with kitsch animations of barbed wire and banners that read such things as ‘the concrete mass was a premonition of my own movements’.
There’s obviously a concern represented through these images (a concern that is shared by the projection accompanying Stephen Mallinder’s DJ set) in space and its use, in claims to space, territoriality and industrialisation and the disarray of industrial regions.
It’s perhaps a little ironic and unfitting that these issues with abandoned or disarrayed space are vented out at the cushy and modern CCA, to what seems, with tickets at £12, a fairly well-to-do audience.
All the subversion of the post-punk and new wave artists that LoneLady draws on so well seems lost in such a safe environment, though the sound is crisp and the songs near-flawlessly executed.
Words: Tony Boardman
