in 2001, there are not many gigs i am really looking forward to. mogwai at the prime club,
cologne, germany, was one of them. i got to see mogwai for the first time.
the rather small and low-ceiling prime club is infamous for having an awful sound. this has not been avoided for this gig, either.
the bass fuzzzzzed in almost every song; the guitars were pitched were aggressively in mids and highs that you could not listen to
the bands without using some ear-protection. and it was loud! lllllllllooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuudddddddd! one of the saddest
bits of news for me in recent times was the death of douglas adams, author of 'hitchhikers guide to the galaxy'. now i know
how the disaster area must have sounded like.
bardo pond were terrible. their songs are over-streched, empty, noisy attitudes. while other bands create interesting structures
and combine the elements of a song in suprising relations (have you listened to "couch"?), bardo pond just f**k up in their noise.
they don´t care if there is an audiece, i guess. the amps hummed and suzzed all the time. and to be even more heretical: they
disguise incompetence at the instruments as art.
it took about 40 minutes to change over between the bands, and the club played aggressive, loud music all the time. an
aggressive atmosphere emerged. the club was over-filled. you could have been stabbed and no-one would have noticed because
you would not have collapesd. during the whole show you had someone touching you.
dancing or even moving to the music was barely possible.
then mogwai came up. i was in such a frustrated mood at that time i
swore to my friends i would leave if they weren´t great. i stayed the whole show!
i didn´t like the whole show, though. there were great moments, 'christmas steps' or '2 rights make 1 wrong', for example.
'sinewave' was excellent. i cannot recall all the songs they played, and i did not recognize all the songs. maybe someone would be
kind enough to provide a full track-list. sometimes i took the liberty to guess a title. "katrien" was great
(unlikely they played this? - rob). mogwai mixed two songs; the first had a "querflöte" (-pipe) and
linked into a moody, tender second song. i dreamed away. still, some things i quite disliked. did i tell that the show was
lllllllllooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuudddddddd? it was! therefore the slow/silent to fast/loud structure of the songs sometimes didn´t
work because it was always loud. on record, the songs are mostly (obviously there are some that are just white noise) very
differentiated in their harmonic architecture. live, you couldn´t tell one fuzzzzzz from the other. quite a pity!
i often read that the band is not really playing for the audience. this is true and, frankly speaking, sucks. on several songs
mogwai overdid this. strumming a single chord for several minutes while facing
the amp is not cool or inspired. art and therefore music exists to create a emotion inside the recipient. many
mogwai songs "touch" me and invite me to journey somewhere in my mind. during the show i
sometimes just felt bored, and i hoped the song would end. i also prefer a band interacting with the audience. otherwise, i could stay
home and listen to a record (with a better sound i have to say!). i think there were two "thanx". it´s not cool to sit down while playing
either.
anyway, i liked mogwai live.