OVERKILL II @ ELECTROWERKZ, FRI 7 APRIL
Somewhere, deep within the palpating, battered heart of North London there lurks a beast. Folklore suggests it visited our civilised world (well, Islington) once before. “Careful, young traveller”, suggests Bogart, the fearless overseer of Wetherspoons, “for it has the mind of Bernard Manning, the head of Wayne Rooney, and the groin odour of Rik Waller”. Unwisely, we press on, until we find ourselves in a deplorable hive of sin, an Orwellian nightmare directed by Nathan Barley and the bassist from Necrotic Nasalraping Goat Carnage. We’re deep within the belly of the beast now. It’s Overkill II.
A festival dreamt-up in the clearly tortured minds of the Adaadat label, LittleBig, Brighton-based Wong Music Crew and ‘hardcore party makers’ Sick & Twisted, Overkill more than lives up to its name. It crudely staples-together spleen-pummelling laptop death-glitch, performance art, ultra-‘iwonic’ zaniness, and the kind of unbearable extreme-metal wank my ex-flatmate used to play. Set in the Electrowerkz – which comes-on like Laser Quest crossed with the set of Red Dwarf – it’s an impressively claustrophobic sci-fi nightmare, and is as close as you’ll get to one of Blade Runner’s shoddier drinking-dens. Computer scientists mingle with bin-bag-wearing metallers, who rub shoulders with ‘resting’ British artists in sub-Nazi regalia, all collectively trying to pay no mind to their HSBC jobs. You half-expect one of them to tap you on the shoulder and murmur, “I like lots of music. But you wouldn’t know it”.
In the murky swamp of the LittleBig room, a Cassette Boy DJ-set crams-together Clangers noises, booty-bounce bass, horror-techno and bastardised versions of The Soca Boys’ ‘Follow The Leader’ and the theme from Ski Sunday. A crowd of ‘eccentric’ chancers – some with ironic crutches, one with a stuffed-parrot sewn to his shoulder – gaze in awe at cut-up visuals, featuring Felicity Kendal workout videos, wrestling and men engaging in anal-battery with robots. Before I can ponder retreating to my hovel with a cup of Horlicks and a Gene Pitney retrospective, Details show-up and play a set of serrated broken-glass noises on homemade instruments. Cheers.
In-between rooms, I politely pass on the offer from a bug-eyed, rabid woman, who attempts to sell me an album recorded in Estonia, featuring “harsh and grating sounds of distortion” and “hypnotic, pseudo-melodic figures of noise”, and head for the sonic diahorrea of DJ Shitmat. Both Shitmat and follow-up act Romvelope dish-out steaming carcasses of souffléd shite, and clearly spent their teenhoods hunched over laptops making photocopier-malfunction noises, when they should’ve been doing something useful like downloading that Paris Hilton stuff.
Still, this cannot deflect from the epoch-making main attraction, Gay Against You. Two subterranean creatures dressed in primary school P.E. kits, complete with charcoal-stained eyes and badly-concealed erections, howl unintelligibly over spaz-core electronics. They ricochet into walls and career into one-another as if playing a game of paraplegic hopscotch, before handing torches to the audience to illuminate their mic-swallowing feats. Even their follow-up act - a DJ dressed head-to-toe in tweed, like some Norfolk cattle farmer – fails to out-weird them.
By the time Japanese knob-twiddler KK Null arrives, spinning tectonic eye-scraping test-card sounds over footage of a man experimenting with a penis-enlarger, I’m holding on to the last remaining shards of my sanity. I consider removing my kidneys and grinding them slowly against a radiator, if only to hear some remnants of a tune that night. Still, Overkill II successfully scared the living shit out of my indie-centric arse, and for that alone it deserves credit. It certainly left me with something decidedly ‘experimental’ in my trousers.
AIDAN JAMES