Flavour 'n' Texture

We were at Cafe Oto last night for a trio of noisescapes from Daniel Mensche, BJ Nilsen and Oren Ambarchi.

These performances all went to demonstrate an important fact. Performance is a slippery way of living on a stage, and letting that particular eel out of the plastic bag means an artist is suddenly exposed to any amount of critical perspective and questions about their relation to a performance history and a relationship with their audience that their physicality simply isn't configured to engage with.

BJ Nilsen is a bald man sat behind a laptop, which he concentrates intensely on for the duration. He could just as easily be at home, and we could even more easily be listening to a live podcast. However, he simply doesn't even gesture toward anything that'd be called performing, engaging physically, still less "rocking". The sounds are pointillistically detailed, constantly rearing up against the clunk of drinks, Dalston police sirens outside, offering icy scapes, almost-human choir-gasps, elegaic drones and loudly empty atmospheric recordings that he wonderfully corrals and coaxes into some tumbling momentum.

Oren Ambarchi has a table-ful of old skool effects boxes and mixers, and sits with a guitar, whose strings are held and stretched to extract a sequence of harsh, almost pump-organ noises; we enjoy the obsessively controlling and adjusting, as if he is having to engage with a ill-tempered group of sensitive individuals to make the noise he needs.

Daniel Mensche, meanwhile, yells, underlights himself, and contorts with some sort of contact-miked plank, delivering only the most rudimentary and lumpen sound while drawing attention wisely away from it by squatting on his haunches on a table for the duration of the set. Noise yields its secrets the more we listen to it to the exclusion of all else; a guy hooting and preening on a desk is not what we need to get there.