Rival Consoles
By the third verse of Flight of the Concord's ‘Inner City Pressure’, having already sold his tooth-brush jar and camera phone, and considered purchasing second hand underpants, the singer’s situation is so desperate that he turns to prostitution in order to fund his flute lessons. However there is little demand for his services and he is forced to give up his concert flautist dreams. Dejected, he concludes that ‘no one cares, no sympathises’ and that he will ‘just stay home and play synthesisers.’
Since the early days of electronic music’s existence there has been a trend amongst some of its most dedicated practitioners to use the developing technology to create detailed, often beautiful, evocations of contemporary life. Understandably this endeavour does often entail a significant amount of staying at home and playing synthesisers, a situation exacerbated by thepandemic. There seems to be a current trend for meticulously assembled, introspective records conceived and created during the various lockdowns, from Nils Frahm’s three hour‘Music for Animals’ to Rival Consoles’ latest: ‘Now Is’. Rival Consoles is London-based musician and producer Ryan Lee West and Sunday night’s performance at a packed Norwich Arts Centre concludes his tour in support of that album, which was released in October. It's a fantastic, contemplative record that rewards close and repeated listening. It is warm andwelcoming music that occasionally achieves a comforting, hypnotic glow in a similar manner to the minimalism of Steve Reich.
Live, however, it is transformed into something entirely different. At least, I assume that it is tracks from ‘Now Is’ that form the majority of the set, it’s hard to tell, as the scale and pace of the performance is of a completely different order to my experience of the album. West seems to know his audience well and is able to provide them with what they want with a remarkable deftness: the introspection of his recent recorded music becomes a virtuosic display in propulsive, fascinating noise, ably augmented by an excellent light show and the customary clouds of haze.
It’s a stunning performance and rounds off the evening excellently; earlier we’d been transfixed by support artist Loula Yorke using an array of modular synthesisers, arranged on a table in the centre of the Arts Centre, to create an incredible thirty-minute sound collage. For all the skill and panache of Rival Consoles’ performance, it’s actually Loula Yorke’s improvised set that is likely to stick in my mind the longest – this, and her recent album ‘Florescence’, deserve a much bigger audience.
