the two people above are the members of a musical duo called Lucky Dragons. i saw them play sometime early in 2010 at Auto Italia in Peckham, in South-East London, an art gallery housed in an old car show room. they played in the spacious, dingy back room, the band hunched over equipment on the floor & surrounded by about one hundred youthful bodies who were encircling them with shadows, eager to get in on the action.
after a while i noticed that wires were being passed out from the centre of the room & were stretching into the dark huddle of bodies. the people near the centre were writhing & pressing the wires against themselves, shaking a little in joyful waves & shudders. it was close to evangelism. eventually it dawned on me that everyone holding the wires was actually helping to create the sounds by moving in certain directions.
in fact afterwards i learnt that Lucky Dragons use a computer system which causes sounds to be generated when one person touches the skin of another. so a large part of the ecstasy i observed was the joy to be found in the communion of bodies.
Lucky Dragons don't really sound like any band born before 2005- although their website states that they have been recording and performing for more than ten years now. splicing together many varied sounds, they create weird concoctions which are generally utopian in character, childlike in their gleefulness, clearly urban & computer-generated, yet also intimimately related to folk-art and the natural world.
they use jaggedy electronic noises, slowing & looping & moulding sounds into strange new shapes. often woven into this are acoustic folk elements- banjos & whistles & breathy warm vocal harmonies. they employ tinkly bright melodies which sound as if they have emerged from fragments of remembered 1980s childhoods of cartoons & television programmes.
at the show which i attended last year they first spent a saturday afternoon hosting an edition of their side project Sumi Ink Club- which involves collaborative group drawing sessions. when i arrived at five o'clock the enormous windows at the front of the gallery were entirely covered with black ink drawings which their hipster audience with thick spectacles & exagerrated fringes had been working on for hours. every last inch of glass was host to different tributaries, with long thick drippings & trickles of ink melting from hundreds of strange creatures, odd patterns & lost scenarios.
perhaps they sound like the tropical landscapes of tiny fictional countries. luminous psychedelic food colourings & late night cable TV transmissions may also be apposite points of reference here. it could be argued that they merge together postmodern irony with a certain sensibility of hope & health food shop friendliness.
see what you think:
