Illuminate. Lion Arts Factory. 11 Jul 2025
Full house of fans and newbies aged 20s to 60s soaked up a brilliant night of four acts sharing one ethos across forms and styles. Break the rules. Leave any expectations at the door (unless you’re already a fan.)
Nidia and Valentina Magaletti know how to deceptively lure an audience into thinking they’re up for something in the house drone realm. It’s a gentle intro to their set, all peaceful, cruising waves until that gets solidly shifted into discordant hard notes in totally off cut slams and beats waking you up fast to the reality you better follow close.
Their set develops into rich battling phrases of live percussion and cut and thrust swarms of techno, house with attendant nips of drone that kept you swaying on your feet. The mix for the set was perfect, allowing gentlest live notes from cymbals and drums to come through.
It’s hard to say what makes this act so wonderfully addictive. The challenge of melding live percussion using the lightest instruments with full on electro is massive. The set would be great even if those elements were played out separately. Combining them has created something incredibly exciting in live performance. Those percussive beats don’t follow any old standards. In a western sense. More towards Japanese Taiko. Alive, vigorous, confident. Intertwined with the electric score working with and against those beats, you get a sound so urgently fresh corresponding to nothing out there, now or the past.
Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia-Crompton presents Los Thuthanaka are one wonderfully bizarre act, most particularly in using a keytar. Yes, that ubiquitous standard of 80s New Romanticism found its way into Unsound! So did the Mexican Band look, featuring blue band tops and hat.
What a wild set, largely based on the off-beat, at first with guitar against an effects pedal keyboard score. It was guitar voiced as violin at a million miles, singing against a sonorously cacophonous tech orchestration where the on beat never featured once. There’s definitely a dash of jazz sensibility to it. The set was absolutely the better for it. It kept the audience hooked into every moment.
The keytar was not used as traditionally expected. This being the moment the set totally changed tack, got harder, faster. No, the keytar was played as a keyboard proper, sans effects. Richer, deeper tones evolved, a greater harmony with the tech score. In effect a classical foundation was shredded, blended, diced, crushed and rebuilt into something completely new.
Aya presents Hexed was easily the slickest set of the night and the only one focused on incorporating voice and body in performance, heavily allied with video.
Transfixing sums the set up. Aya is resolutely bold in using the table holding lap-top and controls,as an extra stage, as well as microphone stand. The voice is commanding, part rap, hard, harsh, melding perfectly with an ardently dark, pensive, yet hypnotically rapid bpm score that soaks its way into your bones.
Pushing the voice into, rather than accompanying, the score is the thing to this act. It amplifies the themes of nightmare, confusion, rage spanning the set, enhances the sense of a bad spell hanging over life. A spell transfixes. A hex curses. Hexed will probably stay in the minds of the audience for quite a while.
Yellow Swans, last here 20 years ago, were delighted to discover fans who saw them then in the 2005 audience reckoned to be about five people. This night’s full house gladdened their hearts.
Yellow Swans are a guitar and electro duo definitely in the drone genre. Two long numbers formed their set in which guitar is sequenced, distorted in rippling waves of alternating bass and in case of first number, lyrics.
Coming in at 30 minutes, the first piece had you rooted to the ground or finding a groove that got you moving. No in between. You could have relaxed in a lounge and let it all wash over you.
To understand the full scope of Yellow Swans approach is to hear the second song’s beginning.
Crystal clear upper range guitar chords are offered. Slowly, they are distorted and subsumed into effects talking them into territory beyond an electric guitar’s capability in a standard effect pedal set up. All operated by hand, not foot, offering capacity for an output wider, richer, and extremely asynchronous.
David O’Brien
When 11 July
Where: Lion Arts Factory
Bookings: Closed
