A Very Dark Show- Moderat @ Akvárium

Every now and then you like a film so much you take it with you pretty much everywhere- in one such development, whenever I listen to German electronic music of the Kraftwerk variety, I have a, well, let’s call it acid flashback of The Dude in the Coen brother’s Big Lebowski distrustfully staring at a record cover for the imaginary album Nagelbett. The look on his face gives us a hint he’s doubtful about the piece, to say the least, and the name of the album itself is thought up to suggest something carefully crafted but ultimately pretty damn uncomfortable.

The imaginary band is of course called Autobahn, an open reference to Kraftwerk, whose perhaps most popular track bears that name and is taken from the album Man Machine-it all relentlessly leads to the point that these are beautiful artifacts to be admired for the technical skill with which they are crafted, but ultimately, of course, machine music has no soul.

Moderat come in the picture pretty nicely then: they are a ’super trio’ of European electronic music, hailing from Berlin, Germany, crafted from the members of Apparat (German for appliance, right) and Modeselektor and going as far as to have a song titled Rusty Nails- a bed of rusty nails, well that’s the epitome of uncomfortable, right there.

So the really amazing thing about them is that, in the middle of the pixel and cable wilderness, their music makes you feel something. I might go as far as saying that that is actually the border between crap electro and good electro- the degree to which it elicits a response in the listener, going beyond jumping up and down and flailing your arms to a beat.

The show is visually impressive too- I really can’t fathom why you would squish yourself in the front row with the sweatiest vandals of the crowd instead of taking in the whole stage from the back, but that’s material for another post. It isn’t however, a gimmick, it’s not there to compensate for the fact that the music itself is empty- it’s there to compliment it and make sense of it. Machine music this may be- but it has both brains and a heart.

June Random #1

June should be about getting used to summer, but this year it arrived in Budapest insisting very much that  it’s all about scorching, hot summer, giant icy lemonades and cocktails, people lounging in the shade and windows open to all the noises of the night. I always felt there is a change in the texture of things as real summer arrives, the outside world invades the inside, and there’s a very typical hot stillness, best felt on Sunday mornings, when the city is almost deserted.

7 AM at the market becomes the peak period, as I learned last Saturday, along with a detailed diatribe about the difference between two types of peonies. For I made the honest mistake of calling some pink buds being insistently hydrated by an elderly gentleman ’pünkösdi rózsa’, which as far as I am concerned is the Hungarian for peony. As it turned out, these particular buds were, however, ’bazsarózsa’.

Wikipedia and Google failed me,  and came up with the Latin Peonia officinalis for both. Looking at my buds, now turned into full fledged flowers, they do seem a bit different from ones I purchased before, they are less fluffy, more contained and quite insistently pink bordering on purple. The whole naming drama is  of course beyond the point, but in summer the days are longer and I guess you have time for more non essential stuff as well. Which is kind of cool.

Trentemøller@Akvárium

In retrospect, it is a real pity that I did not manage to sneak in a shot of First Hate, whose singer looks like a first level IT support helpdesk agent whose body has been inhabited by the ghost of Ian Curtis, voice, moves and all.

The real business started in a very Scandinavian manner at 9:20 sharp, and lasted for another sharpish 90 minutes, which is of course quite brilliant for a club concert. The danger with electro wizards is that they come off as borderline- or straightforward- bland in live shows, for you can’t be all brimming with life and excitement in front of a Mac. The Mac wizardry itself basically undermines the concept of live show- so it’s wonderful of Trentemøller that he comes with a full band of four magnificent guitars, a drummer and himself with the little gadgets. The performance comes through as utterly entertaining and confident, with the crowd responding well to both the faster and the slower tracks. At this pace, this autumn club season will definitely be a blast.

Hangmás@ Nagy-Szín-Pad

Oh Lord! Not another talent show- well, it isn’t, it’s something a bit more exciting than that: 15 already (mostly) popular bands fight it out to make it to the main stage of this summer’s major Hungarian festivals, with the winner getting to open for none else but the magnificent Arctic Monkeys at this year’s VOLT. The TOP 5 will also headline the MR2-Petőfi stage on Sziget and the top 3 are planned to be exported to festivals abroad. To make everything even cooler, the events (semifinals and final) take place in that beloved staple of Budapest nightlife-Akvárium and the whole thing is beamed into outer space by Petőfi Radio and m2. And it’s also sponsored by „my” bank’s Junior account, which I was passionately sapping for money to spend on Sziget when I was younger and, I would say more restless, but penniles is the better word. So a bit of nostalgia there too.

And since the semifinals are taking place this week (May 20-22), here is the photo coverage of the band I’ll give my vote for, because they’re amazing as a live act- and I kind of think their style would be best matched to the Monkeys. Which should be a criteria, though I assume it won’t.