Live: Haxan Cloak, Birthdays, London
- Written by Robert Freeman
From the opening drum beat and resonating bass note, it is clear that rather than a Haxan Cloak ‘gig’ this is more of a Haxan Cloak seance. Behind Bobby Krlic, who stands at a laptop wreathed in shadow, is projected a series of images - flashes of black and white and repeated refrains hinting towards the subject matter of new album, Excavation. A camera tracks forward through large ornate gates, a rolling bed of fire, layers of rock, layers of hell. And even stranger, a loop of a duck swooping down to land on water. It is the image of the duck that is most haunting. As these images flash up on the projector, the synth and the sampler rattle around looping screams, feedback, muttering - echoes of life mixed into noises of death.
This is however still a sell-out gig in a club, and it’s busy in Birthdays, really busy. In fact, Excavation is well suited to the venue. Rather than an emphasis on the creaks and rattles he wrung from acoustic instruments on his self-titled debut, Krlic’s newer material tends far more towards electronic sound, and the yawning space between each beat. The beat is no longer of a heart, and the metronomic ticking jostling with the filmic sounds almost serves to upend its own purpose. Rather than marking out the passage of time, these frenetic clicks and beats change time signatures and serve to create a more oneiric climate, a stopping and starting, moving through air and water.
Krlic’s audience sways unsurely, and occasionally unites in a kind of bizarre primal scream – less a noise of appreciation and more of a death rattle. The room is bathed in a flickering white light, and as everything not nailed down begins to shake, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the artist’s ultimate goal is to produce a sound that vibrates enough at exactly the right frequency to make you shit. The whole room buzzes in fact (including one's internal organs), taking us through a series of tracks that mimic layers of the afterlife (although he has been careful to keep conversations about Excavation’s narrative secular). In the rattling discords and cavernous sub-bass combined with the juddering halo around the audience, one feels not only disorientation, but almost dissociation – stepping out of one’s body, following the character downwards through the earth and upwards through the cosmos. As monochrome fire rolls in the background and a dark figure makes his way up a hill, the man in front of the screen with his fingers on the buttons seems almost to be channeling something, rather than playing it.