Review: 900piesek + rbnx - Prague Bratislava

Shortly after playing this live performance in Prague, 900piesek was robbed of all of his musical gear. Not only does this recording immortalise a setup and sound that will no longer be attributed to 900piesek in the live environment, but it also captures this equipment in unknowing swansong, instilling those spurts of analogue electronics and shafts of cathedral echo with sense of pained, somewhat mournful farewell. The noise becomes an erosion, a decay; sound in a state of deterioration, breaking into clumps and shards of static matter and bass frequency, scattering into imperceptible particles amongst silence’s enveloping void. Its feedback and synthesiser grumbles are signifiers of process, not object – not just sound but the action of sound eating itself, eagerly bringing on its own death.

In direct contrast, the first half of rbnx’s performance in Bratislava sends time into an eternal loop; the crackly, lo-fi noise of the previous second lurches into the now, collapsing into forever cycles of repeat, overlaying the past on top of the present. Delay doesn’t follow a linear, degrading fade out – it recedes and swells, occasionally finding phantom impetus within itself to surge into the foreground again. It’s an endless corridor, hurtling constantly forward while never going anywhere, tuneless and somewhat hallucinatory. The second half sees the sound retreat to the back of the room – a distant stream of electronic rain, distortion grumbles and (most unexpectedly) guttural screams, emerging as the walls of rbnx’s tunnel of repetition collapse.