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[petepunk]

The evening rain pours down in sheer defiance of the British Summer Time soon to be upon us, gathered as we are for Shift 2 - an event of growing stature in the Aberdeen arts calendar. While many in the city are attending tonight's Tsunami charity gig elsewhere, the Castlegate is buzzing with those seeking out something just a little bit different - and we are not disappointed.
A spacious marquee has been erected to protect us from the elements, and with seven bands plus a wide range of moving images in the line-up, this free event is on an upward curve. Although I can only make the last couple of hours owing to prior arrangements, the atmosphere is crackling when I do arrive.
I'm greeted by a lively set of chunk funk courtesy of Sound Development Agency, eminently danceable stuff that does nothing to abate the prevailing air of affability - a joie de vivre no doubt aided by the cheapness of refreshments - and the band eventually leaves the stage to rousing applause.
As the rain drums down on the canopy above us, the screens flicker into life with some vintage footage of the city's once great fishing industry. Local artist/filmmaker Monika Dutta has taken two archive films from the Maritime Museum - a grainy sea trip from the 1930s and a washed out shipbuilding epic shot in the Fifties - cut and pasted them into cohesion and overlaid the whole with the same impressionistic deftness that brought a major national award her way last year.
Though originally silent, sound is ably provided for tonight's showing by Pavlov, performing live publicly for the first time. Pavlov are Mark Lawton and Dave Mutch, mavericks of hullabaloo who shape and sculpt a huge variety of sounds through a bank of electronics. The resulting maelstrom of noise, everything from twisted, slowed-down sea shanties to seagull cries cranked through the gates of sonic hell, somehow coalesces into a soundtrack not just highly entertaining but infinitely relevant to the images before us.
Pavlov's uninhibited soundscapes ebb and flow freely around us before finally subsiding into a song of plaintive, unaccompanied Doric, an end no more melancholy than the passing of the life the film portrays. The crowd, however, is anything but lugubrious and expresses its appreciation with some gusto - I have a feeling we'll be hearing a lot more of Pavlov in future.
Headliners tonight are 65 Days of Static - ever heard of them? Me neither. From Sheffield, they march onstage looking like any ten-a-penny guitar band but appearances prove deceptive. With guitars slung somewhere around their knees and a maniac behind the drums, these guys take a hatful of influences - from Radiohead to Godspeed with a serious twist of techno thrown in - add a very large dash of insanity and come up with something both graceful and compelling.
With no vocals anywhere it would be tempting to pass this band off as merely instrumental, but with a wall of sound reminiscent of the late, lamented Ride, hard-edged orchestral terrorists might be a more appropriate description. Whatever they are, 65 Days of Static are going to be huge: catch them at The Tunnels on April 20 - or forever hold your peace!

© 2005 Peter Thomson

[psydoll]

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