Oliver Rivard gets warmed up for Sonar with Buraka Som Sistema and the Gaslamp Killer at The Roundhouse.
Spring is here. The temperature is rising, the sky is clearing up, and there are a billion upcoming music festivals all competing for that roll of dough you stashed in your sock drawer for the summer holidays. If you’re broke like me, you can afford to attend just one of them, so this time of year is spent obsessively comparing event rosters, and posting them to your friend’s Facebook walls until the early hours of the morning. Barcelona’s Sonar festival is deservedly recognised as one of the holy grails for electronic music blow-outs, but even a monolith like that can smell the competition, which is why they held the Taste of Sonar gig at the Roundhouse. If you were undecided, Saturday night will have sent you running back home to throw that wad of cash straight at the Ticketmaster site while there was still time.
Buraka Som Sistema is a blast of hot Portuguese electro, channeling the blue waters, tall palms, and sky-high stacked soundsystems of Lisbon. Blaya, the sexy lead female vocalist of the group, rocks a leopard-print one-piece, and radiates energy as she leaps effortlessly from one end of the stage to the other, singing, “Quando eu entro, o palco se move…” (“When I enter, the stage moves”). And to be fair, it practically does.
They have two DJs simultaneously running instrumentals and samples (one of whom is also on drum pads), one live drummer, four MCs and at least three giant water guns. The heavy kuduru-house rhythms, sometimes clocking in at 150 BPM, are almost more than the English crowd can comprehend, leaving most people to just move their bodies involuntarily to the bedlam, like confused jellyfish. At one point, the group invites as many girls as they can possibly fit up onto the stage to booty-shake along with the group as Kalaf demonstrates his kuduru footwork skills behind them. The result is not exactly successful, but everyone is in high spirits, and we all get doused with a Supersoaker before the act is through.
Just as we're starting to catch our breath, Gaslamp Killer stalks onto the stage like a mad scientist, fiddling with his extensive rack of equipment. Before we can speculate on what the hell he’s doing, he starts manically detonating rhythm after rhythm with no regard for tempo, genre, or consistency of vibe. He doesn’t so much mix, as dive face first from one tune to the next, doubled over and triggering bass hits from different songs on an iPad like he’s shredding on a guitar.
He ties up his wild hair, he lets it back down again, he tells us to all love each other, and then stares the front row menacingly in the eyes, moving like a short-circuited robot to a Chase and Status drop. We move from James Blake to Mono/Poly, to The Beatles, to the opening score of Enter the Void as he mutters something about punching and kissing the moon, and somehow, it all kind of makes sense. By the end, he's lying on a half stack, whispering into the microphone about how he “fucked this girl last week” in LA, before playing the first ten seconds of an East Coast hip hop anthem, and then walking off stage. In short, we leave the room with a deep feeling of satisfaction and a sore neck.
Oliver Rivard
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