Boss Grooves: should twisted circuitry and adventures in stereo be your thing then go East, advises David Belcher.
WHILE East Kilbride owes its current size to the fact that it was for a spell an officially sanctioned post-war new town, you might be forgiven for supposing that it's perhaps not the ideal locale for cutting-edge new sounds or, to be more specific, for an evening which is built around the heady promise of ''experimental audio research, meta-musical improvisations, and circuit-bent sound generations''.
After all, East Kilbride's lowly standing in Scottish musical history is probably best exemplified by its having been the distant Glasgow satellite from which local post-punk noiseniks the Jesus and Mary Chain fled at the earliest opportunity. Sure, East Kilbride has got roundabouts a-plenty. But it don't swing, do it?
In fact, you'll feel all the better for binning such repressive preconceptions and journeying tonight with an open mind - and open ears - to East Kilbride Arts Centre. There, you'll be wowed by MAU - otherwise known as Musicians and Artists Unite - as they stage their latest multi-media journey into what we might rather fancifully label the avant-aural omniverse.
Put more simply, tonight's your night for imbibing some tasty colours from the audio-visual palette of the sound-sculptor who styles himself Sonic Boom.
Hitherto best known for his work at the beginning of this decade with Spacemen Three, Sonic Boom is these days the head of Experimental Audio Research. This free-wheeling collaborative audio-visual combo will tonight be stimulating all the senses with their performance of Data Rape 2000.
EAR's written manifesto pledges that Data Rape 2000 will demonstrate ''a revolutionary type of sound and music generation called circuit-bending. This process involves taking cheaply-available electronic sound-making toys, in this case mostly Texas Instruments' Speak And Spell human voice-synthesising toys, and adding extra wires, knobs, and switches to make new connections between parts of the internal circuitry and chips.
''This sends data to previously unrelated circuit-board points, inducing a strange sort of data rape - astounding new sounds; chance-evolving compositions and textures; phoneme freezing and looping; random glottal pulse and phoneme generation; complex lattice-filtering, and unique pitch-shifting techniques.''
In other words, it should be a bit different . . . a bit surprising: out of the memory banks of childish toys, what Sonic Boom trusts will be a mind-expanding adult pastime.
Over the past 18 months MAU's East Kilbride devotees have grown used to such bold new kinds of sound. ''This is our first live-music show, but we've been successfully bringing up DJs from London for our club-based events,'' says MAU's founder, David Whitelock, who works full-time as one of East Kilbride Arts Centre's arts assistants.
''They've all sold out to date, and in fact I'm forever getting hassled on the street by East Kilbride folk desperate to know when the next one is.''
So far, East Kilbride Arts Centre has been rocked by the advanced disc-spinning abilities of English DJs from the Skint and Ninja Tunes labels, as well as sundry members of oor ain Teenage Fanclub, Arab Strap, and Mogwai. ''I'd hope in the longer term that we can export what we do to the Glasgow club scene.
''We already do a monthly night with three or four DJs, plus slide projections and inter-active percussion, at MacChuills in Glasgow, but it would be interesting to bring the fuller MAU experience to a larger venue.''
Perhaps Glasgow's more adventurous clubland overseers should check out MAU's next full-scale show. Provisionally entitled Various Artists, it's due to take place in East Kilbride on May 1.
''It's the opening of a four-week art exhibition. Within a club environment we'll have poets, spoken-word performances, slides, installations, light-works, sound-works, sculpture, and painting from a wide range of young Scottish artists: Sarah Tripp, Julie Parker, Billy McCall, Sue Grierson, Ann-Marie Copestack, Sarah Felton, Will Bradley.
''We see it as being a similar event to the Flow nights that are held every so often in Glasgow at the CCA. Looking further ahead, we also plan workshops for young people in East Kilbride, showing them how to put on a night, and we've just received some Arts Council money to enable us to create a MAU compilation concept album.''
It's hoped that EAR might feel able to donate a track to the album, while other contributions might come from Scotland's own fearless sonic explorers, those scions of the experimental Via Satellite label, the Mount Vernon Arts Lab. The latter will be supporting EAR on both their Scottish dates this week, having been instrumental in enticing Sonic Boom over the Border for the first time in years.
You'd be advised to move quickly to secure tickets - attractively priced at #5 - for Sonic Boom's East Kilbride show because his critical stock has never been higher. ''Mogwai cite him as a major influence,'' says Whitelock.
''In addition, his back-catalogue has been reinvigorated by the success of Spiritualised, with whom Spacemen Three used to share a record label, Dedicated. In fact, it might be said that Spiritualised's Jason Pierce now owes a large debt to what Sonic Boom was doing eight years ago.''
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