Kælan Mikla (rotten photo by Wyldman)
It’s a bitterly
cold February night and everyone is standing around shivering. I’m squished
somewhere between the bar and the toilet in Power Lunches, a tiny venue near
Dalston Junction that was once a café.
The door to the
room is wide open to accommodate a steady stream of smokers, bands, friends and
acquaintances. I break the ice forming on the surface of my beer and struggle
my way down the stairs to the room below.
The space is
tight and dark and even the mirrored walls do not disguise the claustrophobic
feel of the place. It’s like entering a pharaoh’s tomb.
We start off
with a selection of short films. Without exception these are shot in black and
white and depict something indeterminately unpleasant occurring. Indistinct images
jump and flicker. The deafening atonal soundtrack amplifies the unease and
horror. Probably the best film depicts what might be some ancient hunting
ritual enacted by strangely attired girls hurling wooden spears and chasing
after some unseen quarry.
In order to avoid
their heads getting in the way, half the audience is enticed to duck down or
sit on the floor. We hunch in the dark and it all feels very daring and arty.
The first act
of the night eventually emerge from behind the tacked-up movie screen.
This is CityBoys Band, two musicians who fuse distorted vocals and heavy percussion to create an
unsettling, industrial rhythm that echoes Mark Stewart’s solo work or even
Cabaret Voltaire. As such, the duo’s hypnotic sound is right up my street.
The singer
mutters intensely, his head bowed as he hunches over an electronic console or
clatters away on a drum. The performance space at Power Lunches is so small,
and the stage area so low, that if you stand more than two rows back you are
pretty much stuffed in terms of actually seeing what is going on.
The room is
pitch dark by now and I’m standing on a sea of discarded bottles. The room is
packed and there is a real sense of danger about the place. One moment of panic
and people could die down here.
Cool.
I like City Boys
Band a lot, but I make sure that I’m in a better position for the next act.
I’m here this
evening to see Kælan Mikla, a three piece noise outfit from Reykjavik. Such is
the speed of the internet, I only discovered they existed on Sunday afternoon,
and yet, here we all are two days later.
The band are
young, cheery and sing emotionally in Icelandic.
They have a
very simple set up. A drummer (Sólveig Matthildur Kristjánsdóttir) who also
sings; a thumping bassist with orange hair (Margrét Rósa Dóru- Harrysdóttir)
who occasionally screams terrifyingly off-mike; and the psyched-up singer
Laufey Soffía Þórsdóttir, who is necking a respectable quantity of beer and
whisky and who crawls around on the floor of the stage.
It’s my idea of
heaven.
I love acts
such as this. They are following their own idiosyncratic path to create
something that is important to themselves and if an audience likes it, so much
the better.
As my conversational
Icelandic is sadly not up to scratch, I’m not entirely sure what Laufey and co
are singing about. I do know that it involves a fair amount of screaming and
alcohol. And that is a universal language.
It’s been a
genuinely different and really enjoyable evening. There is an easy atmosphere
of genial chaos – things sort of start when then there is sufficient momentum
for them to do so, rather than to a set timetable. At times, this has been less of a gig than a
Sixties style Happening. It fits in with the tea bar origins of the venue.
Far out.
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