Dalston

Non-English people won't really get this, but living in Luton invokes a certain reaction in people. One time I met a friend in a pub in Luton and he said 'Oh hey, how come you're here?' and I said 'Well, I live here', and he said 'Oh, I'm sorry'. People from London especially condescend about Luton, which is pretty rich if you've ever been to Dalston. Given that it's home to 3 venues that host my kind of thing (Café Oto, the Vortex, Barden's Boudoir), I've had to hang around there many a time, and if ever a place was to make you feel proud of living in Luton, it's Dalston. Grim, grim, grim. That Jarvis Cocker line about Sheffield, 'a jumble sale left out in the rain', is even more appropriate here. Ugh.

Anyways, I was there on Wednesday for some high-quality musics at Café Oto, which I do have to say, is a lovely little space. I only caught 5 minutes of Konntinent, so I don't really want to comment on it, but what I heard sounded very pleasant. Next up was Simon Scott, and I think that maybe having him and Jasper TX on the same bill wasn't really a great idea, given that while Simon Scott's glitch and guitar drone was very good, Jasper TX's glitch and guitar drone was better. Not really fair. Jasper TX dragged chords over field recordings and static, building to peaks of noise. And then it was all over with rather too quickly. Headlining was Mira Calix, still Warp Records' most underrated. Her performance leaned more on her avant-compositional material than the beguiling electronica of her early albums, though there was a bit of that too. You can kind of divide her work so far into 'pre- really into strings' and 'post- really into strings', and the first half of her set was the familiar work she's done matching up string arrangements to insect sounds, which was really quite lovely, the mournful qualities of the violin coupled with the vibrancy of crickets whistling. The set then worked it's way into her odd electronica, and it's still a bit odd that for all the commissions for pieces that she receives, no-one's ever really asked her to expand on her brilliant way with a beat. It's what stood out last time I saw her too; for someone whose work is frequently beatless, she knows rhythm. I would LOVE to hear a Mira Calix hip-hop album. But strings and insects are good too. Good enough to spend time in Dalston for.