DJ Liam/Cyberstruct/Black Lung/Velvet Acid Christ
The Bakery
Saturday, June 14, 2014
The Bakery seems to be the standard venue now for all of Perth’s industrial/EBM/goth gigs. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is a wonderful venue, with a great sound and the right atmosphere. However it’s a venue that’s always much larger than the crowd. The small crowd may leave the venue feeling a little empty, but the acts didn’t let this put them off.
DJ Liam opened the night. Having years of experience playing at nearly every goth/industrial night in the last decade, he knew exactly what people wanted to hear between the live acts. This guaranteed that people were always dancing.
Since retiring Dominate, the monthly night at Gilkisons (where he was both promoter and resident DJ) Cyberstruct appears to have increased his focus on production. Moving away from hardstyle and gabber, the few early arrivals were treated to his first ever live set with sounds that sat in the lower 80 – 100bpm range. Having recently released an EP on Belgian label Traumatic, the set consisted of edited tracks from this release as well as a host of new and yet-to-be-released tracks. Very doom orientated with reverb laden kicks, piano and heavily distorted vocals, Cyberstruct’s productions are quite rightly getting noticed in the Industrial/Hardcore scenes.
Clad in a pig mask and with a backdrop of kaleidoscopic children’s visuals, Dave Thrussell displayed why he has been a fixture on the IDM/EBM scenes for over two decades. Having over a dozen releases on such seminal labels as Ad Noiseam and Ant-Zen, what followed was an hour long, analogue-effected DJ set. With cuts from all over the Black Lung catalogue (Population Control, Full Spectrum Dominance, Succulent Bruises And Bruised Roses, Sinister Control Minority), as well as a couple of choice Snog remixes. The set finished with a track displaying Thrussells famously subversive humour, a modular synth remix of the Benny Hill theme.
Taking the stage for Velvet Acid Christ’s first ever Australian tour, Bryan Erickson (lead singer and only remaining original member) looked like a maniac clown with smeared corpse paint. What followed was half electro/EBM live set, half stand-up routine, with Erickson stopping between songs to inject levity by mocking himself and the crowd. It seemed he was goading those watching to heckle him, but the level of audience participation was high and heaps of fun, which was reflected by being told how we were a much better crowd than their Sydney show.
Musically the set was everything that was expected: aggressive songs about drugs, feminism, gay rights and animal liberation. Although playing off just two laptops and a few MIDI keyboards, the two member band were able to perform all the VAC classics including tracks such as Pretty Toy, Malfunction, The Dark Inside Me, Caustic Disco and Fun With Drugs.
SEAN DRILL
