Mai Mai Mai, Luke Mawdsley and Bog Butter, Lupini: Kazimier Stockroom, Liverpool

Mai Mai Mai bring their metallic noise to the Stockroom and Getintothis’ Rogerio Simoes wonders where it all comes from.

Where does music come from? That’s a fairly simple question when the subject is a pop-rock tune about lads out on Saturday night or the teenage girl with a broken heart.

When it’s industrial instrumental electronic noise played by a masked man, the question gets more difficult.

That’s why it was helpful to read on Mai Mai Mai’s web page, before tonight’s gig at Liverpool’s Kazimier Stockroom, that his inspiration comes from “different cultures, atmospheres and sonorities of the places he was involuntarily taken to” when he was growing up. It’s a start.

Mai Mai Mai is Italian electronic maestro Toni Cutrone, and his artistic name means “never, ever, ever” in his native language. So we get a feeling that his music is somewhat a negation of the ordinary state of things, taking us where music would probably never, ever go unless a daring experimentalist takes it there.

So far, so mysterious – and exciting!

There are exciting people warming things up as well. DJ Lupini is the perfect fit for the experience waiting for us later on. She’s playing atmospheric, evolving sounds that have the opposite effect of what any DJ aims for, which is to make people move.

Tonight Lupini’s music makes us stand still, quiet, so whatever movement there is to be made is up to the music itself. We stand here, and if we move at all it’s not us, it’s the low, deep and slow sound that’s naturally repositioning our legs or arms. If there were sounds in space, it would be what Lupini is playing for us right now.

The slow pace is reinforced by the images of fish swimming under the sea fill the screen behind the stage. We just drink our beer and let our mind go.

Lupini eventually puts her music down as Luke Mawdsley and Bog Butter take to the stage. Mawdsley on guitar and vocals and Butter – aka Waffle Burger – on bass maintain the mood of the evening, but with very special words.

Luke Mawdsley comes from one of the most interesting groups to have appeared in Liverpool in recent years, Cavalier Song, a troupe influenced by the likes of Philip Glass, John Coltrane and King Crimson. So tonight we witness the talent that made Cavalier Song such an intriguing – and unfortunately short-lived – act.

Mawdsley explores all pathways he can find on his guitar – even dead ends –, producing chords that start soft, then get massively heavy. Burger then increases the intensity through her profound bass playing, which we can feel under our feet – and which reminds us of what Sunn O)))’s music does to our body.

The sound is not, however, where Mawdsley puts most of his energy. It’s his spoken word act that takes centre stage, with verses about pain, suffering and “favourite smells”, as if he were telling terrifying bed stories aimed at giving us nightmares.

He delivers them passionately, with drama written on his face, with his voice going up and down as in a rollercoaster of deep feelings. “Men are vile / All men are vile”, he says as he leaves the stage without his guitar, his arms up in the air, up-close with the audience, in his last statement of the evening. Bravo!

During the interval, Lupini is back on the decks, and she seems to have read our minds, by playing Sunn O)))’s Between Sleipnir’s Breaths. Perfect.

European Music Festivals 2020: guide to line-ups and best Summer festivals

And here comes Toni!

Mai Mai Mai is performing Nel Sud, his 2019 album whose five tracks are associated with images taken from Italian documentaries from the 1960s. While the films are played on the screen, with their images of death and sadness slightly distorted, reinforcing their nauseating feelings, we’re thrown right into Mai Mai Mai’s metallic noise.

His music’s components seem unnatural. It’s as if pieces of different tracks had been put in a blender, without anyone pressing the stop button.

What we hear does not seem to be the result of some composition process, but the process itself. It’s the difference between a film portraying deep space as it is now, and a film showing the Big Bang. Mai Mai Mai makes the Big Bang of music.

That continuous explosion, however, has a purpose – otherwise everybody in the audience would not be, like we are, glued to what comes from the stage, hypnotised by its fabulous brutality. Mai Mai Mai presents to those in front of him a true electronic assault, turning the unpleasant into bearable, and the bearable into captivating.

The music gets better and better the more we allow ourselves to be taken by it. From the outside, the first reaction is of awkwardness, but the more we hear it the better we understand it, and the more we like it. As with any new language, we need to understand it before we can engage with it.

Quite appropriately, we cannot see the artist’s face. Toni Cutrone performs wearing a black cloak, while his facial features are covered with a white veil, offering an extra dose of menace to his performance. Here is another proof that, in the age of Goat, Ghost, Slipknot and Daft Punk, the mask is the new face.

Dave Haslam, Searching For Love: Courtney Love in Liverpool

The imagery played behind Cutrone is crucial to the whole package. The films show women from poor communities wailing after someone’s death, with many Catholic images and references composing an environment of faith and spiritual conflict, with their suffering mixed with their love for God.

Some original sounds of the films can also be heard, so we are occasionally directly touched by those women’s misery.

Mai Mai Mai’s music evolves throughout the performance of Nel Sud, in a 45-minute set. It grows, and when we get to Il Pianto (“crying” in Italian), the drum gets louder and faster, like an increasingly nervous beating heart that eventually stops for good.

We can finally answer our question. Mai Mai Mai’s music comes from the places Toni Cutrone was taken to as a child because it’s a mixture of everything that’s out there.

It’s as if all that exists around us has been put together in a sealed room, all at once, as if the Big Bang had actually never, ever stopped, and we’re still in the middle of it.

We realise now that Mai Mai Mai was playing for us the world as it really is, chaotic, noisy, vicious, menacing and provocative. Music has rarely been so real.

[paypal-donation]

Comments

comments