The New Blockaders - Live at Sonic City

The New Blockaders - Live at Sonic City
Cold Spring. CSR261CD. CD + DVD



The most astonishing footage of this forty minutes and exactly no seconds bout of TNB destruction comes at its very end; as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata escapes from a very battered and out of tune piano we get a slow-motion close up of [presumably] that very same instrument. A claw hammered finale that is a slow blow after blow after relentless blow that disintegrates the key cover into plumes of dust and countless fragments of wood. Its a controlled performance but no wild, smash it to bits bout of pissed up artistic indulgence on someone else’s expense sheet. This is The New Blockaders slowly and methodically going about their work, banging out a head syringing noise with a hammer in each hand, feeding a cement mixer with self made detritus, sawing and hammering and generally reducing everything in sight to splinters and misshapen metal.

Using several cameras and overlay effects you get to see the dust vibrating out of that upright piano, the cement mixer being fed with a gramophone horn as the gramophone itself plays records in a way that its makers never intended it do. The backdrop shows the flickering static as created by a blank VHS cassette with TNB instruction words like ANTI, NOTHING, REJECT, appearing. A table contains a mixer and small metal boxes that have turning handles on them. One Blockader studies a small reel to reel recorder with an intent that's almost disturbing. The resultant noise is of course suitably intense, destablazing to the senses and offensive to those of a weak nature. 

The biggest benefit from having this live footage is that you can get as close as the front row did without having to inhale the dust or suffer hearing damage. It also shows how in control the performers are. This performance being enacted by two Blockaders, a Rupneus and a Niemand, though which Rupenus remains unexplained or Niemand come to that. Each methodically going about his work; rubbing metal on to that cement mixer, throwing metal rods in to a galvanized rubbish bin, hammering said galvanized bin in to a useless shape.  

The CD part of the package is the soundtrack to the DVD. While on the DVD the soundtrack doesn’t match the action on stage. This leads me to believe that the audio may have been put together in the studio. Moonlight Sonata is not seen being played either at its beginning or its end, there’s also audience chatter during the rare quieter moments which seems hard to believe and synth-like sounds, none of which you can pick out in the DVD. This detachment gives the visuals an arty, cinematic feel.

Of the live footage that exists on the internet none compares to what we have here. That live show at the Broken Flag Festival? A drunken riot. I’m guessing that The New Blockaders wanted something that truly represented what its they’re trying to achieve. This is it.  


Cold Spring