Holy Fuck x Tounge Dissolver @ Curtin 27/2/24

645pm: It's hot. Really hot. No one in Northland has shoes on. Everyone has forgotten how to drive. Today I nearly died twice on the road, some sort of menstruation haze or maybe my behind the wheel recklessness is finally catching up to me. Waiting for the bus a man follows a seagull onto Murray Road with a look in his eye like maybe he’ll kill it if it stops long enough for a lunge. Desperate times. I'm perspiring beneath my jeans as I watch the time tick down and wait for the little orange ptv demon that could to swing itself around the corner. I can barely keep my eyes open, borderline straight arming this pocari sweat into my gaping maw. Were off to war and the battleground is the curtin hotel bar grill and footspa.

727pm: approach curtin. See Al, but it actually isn’t. Vodka. Soda 730pm: its a good fucking summer baby. Tongue dissolver are back on ‘strayan soil after spreading the good word of inner-west industrialism to the waiting denizens of camp a low hum. It striked me that this is the first tongue dissolver show where I have been able to make out the figures of the band normally cloaked in the shroud of pinny red LEDs or moonee ponds pigeon shit vape haze. Al swaggers like a cowboy-pharaoh beneath the pitched ceiling, flanked on either side by the egregiously percussive ruby and any resembling the gates of truth, piercing beats at the brave warrior Atre(you) from which we barely escape unscathed. It's bizarre to watch this lot rip in such a formal context but all of a sudden the mix balances out and all is forgotten. “Shout out to lachy on sound” and yeah bloody shout out to lachy on sound this shit sounds amazing. Tongue Dissolver - ((neu)-rosis) metal, in the words of the poets: ITS ON. Suddenly the bass goes down. I'm panning the crowd: who’s moving to the noise, who”s moving to the noise, who’s moving to the noise . 2…3-4…6. The sitters around the opening of the stairs aren't moving to the noise. The sitters are too far behind us, we’re in the devotional portion now, something like black unity trio’s opening prayer played back-masked to the devil on a calvin klein. The drum mics in the blue light look like candles at a funeral where you’re too hungover to keep from swaggering as you light them. But as soon as we went down we’re way again. I'm watching people I barely-but almost know reduced to a proto-gabber on a Tuesday before the sun has even gone down and it's no thoughts no thoughts just dance daNce DANCe ! Andy’s hovering a beer over the equipment but its ok its ok and 1234! The cowboy hat has gone sour, turned from mountaineer to Hadean preacher as Al leers out over the dero underworld. This is a good fucking band !

8pm: toilet. Someone I met on the weekend follows me back (everyone doesn’t hate me !) Vodka. Soda. double. Enough cash for cat food. Outside. Ciggies ciggies, sucking down a pack of Esses which taste like a poisoned water supply in the Laotian wet season. Man in an old Holy Fuck tshirt strikes up a chat but there’s work to be done. He asks if Tongue Dissolver has anything released. I say no but that I do have a Scum Dissolver shed-set voice memo’d on my phone i’ll press onto tape with the KilsythDuplicator if he’s like. He ! is ! not ! interested ! i say see you inside but i won't because i don't want to.

830pm: up the front with the nerds. The tallest man I know is in front of me but this is not the time or place for shop talk. Show me the stems. The lights crash down and up and suddenly all my mates’ dads are on stage.

There's dad who drinks oat milk now absolutely beasting at the noise table having the time designated to the pedal-boarded, which is to say the best time. Rock collection dad is on the bass, meticulously in line with waiting-before-the-bell dad who’s playing like a metronome that has had a particularly intimate time with Tathagata. Cool dad’s rounding out TheBoys, glasses hanging from a black cord. Cool dad has the crowd IN LINE, he’s bought beers for everyone but makes sure to come outside at 10pm to make sure no one’s smoking too much pot by taking a hero’s hit for himself through a cupped hand before he heads back inside to put the kitchen cabinets back together.

Holy Fuck: the Canadian band with Californian sensibilities and enough Dunedin sleaze to cause an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Treading the boards between Massive Attack, Klaus Schulze’s Deus Arrakis and Gong, Holy Fuck are true electronica alumni. Ten years after their appearance at Harvest Festival rewired the brains of the Scene they’re back.

There’s math rock in the mix from CoolDad Brian Borcherdt’s time helming Nova Scotia’s mathed-out 90s scene as both a member of Burnt Black and the guts behind Dependent Music. Underneath the electroclash gleam of their time schmoozing it up with M.I.A and !!! is the fuzzed out production work OatMilk has lent to Ottowan noise-punks METZ and Viet Cong. There’s more bits on stage than on my front porch. The stems are showing. Film synchronizer at the ready. There’s a precarious power board dangling, each socket loaded. The stage has the energy of that house show i ran one time where I reset the power to the whole house before I realised someone had just kicked two extension cords apart in a drunken stumble under the Hills Hoist. Oat Milk has some sort of home-soldered device meticulously chromatically tuned to intervals alternating between C and D which bristles with what looks like bright blue Kmart aux cords from each vertex. Priding themselves on glitch-without-glitch, the gang have enough gear to keep the hands of Kali Mother Goddess of Time busy until the Yuga.

The mood is set and suddenly the big dogs launch into Luxe. This is the only band brave enough to open their second ever release with a live track and you can see why. Everyone is tuned in, listening and reacting to the other in a way only hours behind a multi-effects can give you. ‘This is aeronautical rock’ i say to you as we lay in bed for the fourth day. ‘This is sputnik groove’. Everyone is smiling, you cannot be not smiling. Cool is grinning so hard he will soon go on to complain of face-ache. Everything is moving all at once. They’re playing maybe Red Lights ? I could check the voice memo which has been running for twenty minutes but then I might cry. There’s a guitar. What’s it doing ? Is it doing anything ? there’s condenser mics in mouths so does it even matter ? The condenser mic clips Borcherdt’s vocals off from both sides, creating this space as though he is placating you from deep inside a barrel rapily filling with water, alerting you that he might perish but it’s all gravy because the toy phaser gun will live on.

We’ve changed tracks seamlessly and what’s this being unsheathed over to the left? None other than a butter knife rapidly taking up its place to bow on a jerry-rigged guitar neck. I wonder how the knife gets chosen. Do they travel with one, perhaps in a road case, or was each curtin butter knife tested for maximum sonic potential prior to the band taking the stage? I see myself in ten years, married to a man with a record store, picking my four ducklings (children) up from Diamond Creek Primary, probably in the same old Subaru. My eldest turns to me and says mum not this album again and i say honey you don't understand, they strummed things with a butter knife !

We’re dialling in now, I think for Royal Gregory. A bass guitar is getting played through a keyboard getting turned into an effect. Someone has let out the most atrocious cool dad fart to ever grace my nostrils on the dancefloor. Suddenly the smell is overtaken by the singular record scratch of the synchroniser and I’m reminded of the outro on Loungin where Guru subtly flexed a diss on the suckers who do it busy when all he’s doing it scratching over the DAT. It’s a weird flex because it works. Hands are surfing the twin wah pedals. They barely speak for the next forty and then they disappear as soon as they came. But wait, here they come, drummer towelled off, and all of a sudden the breathless encore comes, pitching high up with The Pulse, synth pipping like a Russian shortwave announcing impending nuclear annihilation for twenty years to a group of asthmatic nerds behind receivers. And as soon as we came we are released.

10pm: beelining for a pot at the Builders Arms the bats in Carlton Gardens chipper and flap overhead and the fountains collectively giggly in the crackling air. The synth still swells in my brain, thronging behind my ears, feet pounding the same beat I have left behind me now. I feel like I have thrown myself from the Echuca wharf into the blissful shocking cold of the Murray but this time I have closed my legs and there’s no sting. There’s just relief, and the momentary opening of the reserve tank that comes when a hot body hits cold water. Holy ! Fuck !