Arriving at Jack's on Friday before midnight to find that Chris Clark was going to be on at 3:45am, and Ceephax Acid Crew was on at 4:30am was not exactly what I wanted to hear. Maybe I should have done my homework before hand, but I didn't really expect them to 'save' the two stars of the show until most people had either gone to bed or dropped a pill and fucked off into a state where they would dance to the sound of the traffic outside

So we waited patiently through the frankly unbearable crap that was on before, garnished with Candice Breitz-lite visuals using looped snippets of old cartoons, only to find an apparently pissed-off Clark playing a 45 minute set of distorted noise, followed by a DJ set by Ceephax that I couldn't really stay awake for. Great evening...

As the music wasn't up to much, the visuals got most of my attention, and it made me think whether they are necessary, especially after hearing about Autechre's recent gig, at which they just turned the lights off allowing everyone to experience just the music on its own. All this half-thought-about frenetic nonsense that we are bombarded with in clubs when we paid to hear the music is symptomatic of the ADHD-inducing advert culture we live in, and if anything it just detracts from the experience of listening to music rather than enhancing it

Anyway, on to today's post. Somatic Responses are a Welsh outfit producing fairly dark, fractured, almost industrial sounding music that could almost be a distant relative of Autechre's stuff. For a comparison in terms of sound, think AFX's remix of Nine Inch Nails' At The Heart of it All, played at double speed

Somatic Responses - Leek Soup.mp3
Somatic Responses - Replicant Dance.mp3
Somatic Responses - Tachicardia.mp3