Harmonia @ The Basement,Sydney (16/01/09)

Mon 19th Jan, 2009 in Gig Reviews

CHECK OUT THE PHOTOS FROM THE SHOW HERE.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of German supergroup Harmonia. Brian Eno, briefly a member, famously called them the world’s most important rock band. Warren Ellis, speaking to Faster Louder recently, described them as the greatest band to have come out of the German experimental music scene. Having formed as a kind of supergroup, comprising members of Neu! And Cluster, they produced three studio records in the mid 1970s before disbanding.

Some three decades later they regrouped for an All Tomorrow’s Parties festival overseen by My Bloody Valentine and capitalised on their unimpeachable band’s band cool by releasing a live recording from 1974. Their presence here is part victory lap and part testament to their ongoing relevance. It’s also one of the more unlikely appearances in recent memory: the shiny bald dome, wrinkled features and down-turned mouth of 74 year-old Hans Joachim Roedelius are an unusual sight in an industry dominated by youth.

Before the headliners, three-piece Creeks had opened to an attentive, if threadbare, Basement crowd. Comprising a laptop, electric guitar and accordion, the group also utilise a female vocalist who uses her voice as a percussive instrument, adding indistinct murmurs recalling Sigur Ros and throat-shredding shrieks to the mix. Their best moments came in the earlier, quieter moments, where their collective sound dipped to almost silence, appropriating the slow-burning, infinitely subtle instrumentation of The Dirty Three’s Cinder or Lambchop’s minimalist Is A Woman.

Energy levels rose later in their set, to lesser effect, when the vocals veered into screaming and the guitar sound was produced by striking the back of the instrument. They were nothing if not unusual, featuring as they did an accordion player who appeared so engrossed in her task she was almost comatose. Their curiously short set marked them as a demanding band likely to be favoured by those looking for new sounds on the fringes of Sydney’s live music scene.

The opening moments of Harmonia, meanwhile, were like the countdown for the launch of a rocket ship, each member twiddling knobs, adjusting sound levels and tending to their laptops, intently concentrating on each of the myriad pieces of technology set out across a trio of industrial trestles.

The idea of a musical space station proved apt; the group soon moving into the kind of alien soundscapes familiar to anyone who has heard Bowie’s feted – œBerlin trilogy’: eerie, windblown ambient epics containing just enough humanity to counter the robotic impulses. Such powerfully cinematic music deserved a better visual accompaniment however: the projections of fractals and the group’s name often seemed tired and dated, two adjectives which could not describe their still-vital sound.

It would be difficult to pinpoint stand-out songs, given their fragmentary, even schizophrenic nature. This show was more about moments within songs and despite the group’s reputation as being closer in sound to Cluster than Neu!, their generously long set tended more towards the machnistic squelches and clicks of Watussi than the warm, blissful likes of Notre Dame.

They were also very, very loud at times and uncompromising as ever: Rhythms were repeated until a trance-like effect kicks in, drones stretched out to breaking point. They said not a word between them and dressed mainly in unobtrusive black, appearing more like stage hands than leading men, focusing attention squarely on their machine music.

Bereft of the usual points of interest at a rock show: youth, sex appeal, interaction with the audience, charisma, Harmonia nonetheless produced some hypnotic moments. Having opened up new vistas of sound for rock music and beyond, they could have become a museum piece, often referenced but never heard, more valued for who they influenced than the intrinsic merit of their work. But Harmonia circa 2009 are still great in their own right, and their warm smiles as they departed the stage after an extended encore suggested they know well how miraculous this is.