Live Review: Borderlands

Sweden's wunderkind Klara Lewis has already made quite an impact on the international circuit with her studio efforts and tonight it's safe to say that her live show delivers on their promise. The immersive intensity of her sound is heightened by a resourceful use of low-fi visuals, which are splashed over the entirety of her rig and backing screen. Glitch sequences of a variety of digital movie files are lined up side by side and married to a chaotic assault of ambient noise for a stunning effect. It's as if the tension between past and future collapse within the simple snippets and glitches of the technological present, creating deep wells of audio-visual delight.

The first half of Grouper's set is, unfortunately, plagued by the incessant talking of audience members. Eventually one particularly disgruntled gentleman jumps out of his balcony seat and bellows, "All of you, shut the fuck up!" After a quick round of applause, Grouper is given the quietude she deserves, and all of the subtleties of her sound are finally able to permeate the room. From here on in, the gentle touch of her music exposes a great deal of vulnerability, while simultaneously cradling the listener in the nurturing embrace of its dreamy haze. It's a space you could happily rest in for hours, and it's over all too soon. Hopefully next time the audience is polite enough to shut the fuck up from the get go.  

Analog wizard Alessandro Cortini may be most infamous for studio and touring stints with Nine Inch Nails, but it's under his solo moniker that his radiance shines the brightest. Instead of facing the audience, his rig is setup side on, enabling him to respond to video projections, which fill the back of the stage. A sense of deeply-emotive nostalgia runs throughout the set as a gorgeous selection of vintage home videos underscore a focused journey down a deep well of analog aesthetics.

By the time Brisbane based composer/artist/curator/label boss Lawrence English ventures into the final sonic explorations of Borderlands, we have reached the most ungodly hours of the early morning. And what better way to approach this dreaded time and space than with an experiment in... well, dread. Haunting photographs morph into one another, creating an abstract narrative of suspended fear, as bass frequencies rattle every fibre of the building and the bodies within it. These intriguing dislocations of bodily movements through time and space become disturbingly fitting counterparts to English's sonic investigations, which at their very core, survey the spatio-temporal movement of sound and ideas through anatomical and architectural bodies. By the time the deep vibrations come to a final halt, Borderlands has satisfyingly showcased some of the far-reaching diversity within ambient practices.