One of
the big drawcards to this year’s Melbourne Festival and one of the organiser’s
more leftfield choices, Fuck Buttons are a duo never known to disappoint.
Selling out within hours and playing their first Australian show since being a
highlight of 2009’s ATP Festival, the venue is packed and buzzing for an hour
before the band begin.
Thick,
shifting synth chords hang in the air, the room similarly twilit as the night
outside and the stage hosting a perfunctory table littered with Casios, synth
pads, Fisher Price karaoke machines and dozens of leads running from mixers. A
mirrorball hangs waist height and a large screen stands behind the table
completing the carefully arranged chaos. Andrew Hung and Ben Power wander on,
deliver an acknowledging wave, and proceed to rupture the space-time continuum.
Opening
with the relentless drum loop and disembowelling synth of Brainfreeze, the first track from their latest album Slow Focus, the screen bursts to life
with shimmering silhouettes of the two men looming over fractured images of the
Victorian coastline. Patterns and images come, go, are refracted and mixed with
unusual colours and are never less than arresting. Bass tones shudder up
through your shoes and slabs of synth pad push the limits of what ears can
stand, but Fuck Buttons seem to intuitively know the right frequencies to push
and to which levels. Their complex layers of tones and filtered sounds clash
brilliantly with the visuals; no sci-fi landscapes here, just deep, rich
colours, strange shapes and silhouettes.
Following
up with the immense and blazing Surf
Solar the duo seem to operate without any need for visual communication.
Sounds like tuned fire extinguishers explode over tsunamis of ball bearings
moving through aluminium canyons as Colours
Move melds into Olympians; the
sound of lush, violent euphoria.
The
swaggering beats and pinging melody loop of Slow
Focus highlight The Red Wing announces
the arrival of the mirrorball, splattering shards of bronze light around the
room. Bursts of jungle drums and Badalamenti-style refrains give a melodic
depth to aural assault as the audience begin to dance as only a crushed crowd,
half of whom have their eyes closed, can.
Despite
remaining expressionless throughout, Hung and Power raise their empty beer
bottles, nod, smile slightly and depart the stage to the dying sounds of album
closer Hidden XS. The crowd roar
until they return, whereby they again annihilate us with previous album Tarot Sport’s epic track Space Mountain. Spilling out into the
cool night the lingering sense of a typically Melbournian repressed euphoria is
silently communicated between rapt punters and loudly expressed between friends.
Yet again, Fuck Buttons move onward, upward and outward blazing a path we’re
more than happy to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment