Live Review: Teebs, Polographia

The oddly nostalgic soundscape of Polographia from Sydney duo Moktar Youngblood and Daniel Finn sounds a tad like Chet Faker with a stronger bass line or a slightly less catchy reincarnation of Unknown Mortal Orchestra. The people aren’t here to ‘partayyy’ and a decidedly chilled atmosphere settled amongst the Oxford Art revellers while Polographia rolled out with favourites from their debut EP, Sunsets, including the title track and Righteous Hit. The people here were waiting for the tinkling electronica of Teebs, however, and he entered the stage to cheers and beers held aloft.

LA-based Teebs (Mtendere Mandowa) is from the crew at Brainfeeder, and their influence is certainly evident in his instrumental hip hop/downtempo electronica beats on both his 2010 album, Ardour, and latest release E s t a r a. For the mega-fans, this was an ambient show that required arms in the air, swaying hips and a few ‘woop woops!’ as the night progressed. Others in the crowd felt content to talk throughout or attempted to ‘liven things up’ with completely random crunk dancing, but most were happy to simply stand in awe and enjoy the downtempo rhythms.

Why Like This enveloped the room in its distorted loop of hypnotic drumming and Too Long At The Fair provided a strange coalescence of overlapping and mismatching instruments, creating an aurally hollow feeling of eeriness which the crowd (surprisingly) enjoyed. While Teebs is clearly a passionate performer with stage presence aplenty, his music doesn’t quite meld with the general population of gig-goers and is probably only suited to those who live for ambient electronica/trip-hop. His show, with such a lack of emotive lyricism or steady melodies, would benefit from a visual aid of some kind. Without it, the hallucination-inducing rhythms fall a bit flat and can easily fade into background noise.