Edinburgh promoters SLVR play a clever trick tonight. Upstairs in The Mash House they’ve got DJs spinning a fine mix of deeper stuff – some tech house & deep house – at a volume high enough to get people dancing, but low enough to chat, pass the time, relax after work – whatever. It’s a false sense of security, and a stark contrast to what lies beneath in the dungeon of this place…
Like I said, it was a clever trick, luring the crowd into a false sense of security, because it makes the storming techno assault of Neil Landstrumm even more incredible. This guy has been on the Scottish scene for over twenty years now, seen fads come and go, and combines all this experience into an incredible live set. Rather than your regular club night, with a DJ spinning records, he is using computers, sequencers, and other mad scientist gizmos with knobs, filters and dials all over them to create a set of original material that he can easily improvise over – responding to the crowd in a way any other kind of musician could.
Disjointed voices and vocals flux in an out of creepy acid bass lines. His Analog Elektron (the Rolls Royce of drum machines) pounds out industrial beats, and top lines that are abrasive and strange all flux together making the low and wide ceiling of the place bow and wobble like the string of a bass guitar. An incredible night from one of Scotland’s best.