event - salem at the russian club, london

23rd november

Salem are famously shit and apathetic live. In fact, they're not shit live. Granted, they're pretty apathetic

in their demeanour, and aren't as edgy as you'd hope or expect. The hugeness of King Night isn't really captured in its live reproduction. But what they make doesn't require a great deal of technical skill so they're fighting a losing battle night after night in that sense. They do have a lot going for them though. Heather Marlatt's vocals are trippy and pretty, harmonising with the deep electronics and muddy beats on standouts Redlight and Sick.

It's in keeping with the studied carelessness – actually a lot less studied than many would have you believe – that vocalist Jack Donoghue can come

from sitting under a keyboard for a large part of the set to rap in slow motion right in the faces of the people at the front during Trapdoor. What's even more bizarre is how he can pull it off with a straight face. On record Salem really are quite a bit better – there's not much point trying to pretend otherwise. The fact that they sometimes even make music over the internet, living in different cities and putting the parts together digitally, gives us a clue that some of the organic feeling of a live performance is bound to be lost on them. However, this faintly self-aware, shady vocal style is presented much better live than on record. It doesn't feel incongruous at all, and there's an immersive darkness to it that Salem do very well, and use to make the actual experience of seeing them live better than listening to a record.

The atmosphere of the gig is very dank and heavy, managing to make do with a fairly small PA system. The whitewash of the small underground

space and the simple stageless set-up of electronics show us just how grimey Salem can get without any real squalor in sight. But you can probably guess that their real lifestyles aren't this pristine. Yes, the myths and the image of Salem are probably working their magic just as much as the music, but they do have some great songs, and they do it their own way. The attitude is so anti that they couldn't be aiming for success in any real terms, and that's a trait we'll never have enough of. Instead, we're taken on an intimate and dark journey into Salem's unique world of murky hedonism without actually having to suffer for it.

event - liars at heaven, london

11th november

Though he's probably better known for working with the likes of Yellow Swans, Wolf Eyes and Merzbow, it's interesting to hear John Wiese's disarming sounds on their own, freed from the full-on noise of his collaborators. He hovers over a range of unsettling images for the first half of the set, punctuating his layered frequencies with the smashing of glass and the shaking of prison doors. It's intense without being overbearing, and quite uncomfortable to hear in a live setting. The attention to detail is the really impressive thing, with Wiese often bringing motifs back into the mix as he heads towards a wild and clamorous finish, pulsing and rattling through laptop-generated waves.

Sian Alice Group are something of a break from a harsher opening slot, and they play gorgeous, edgy pop with subtly forceful instrumentation and just a hint of darkness. Sian Ahern isn't a naturally possessing stage presence, but her voice is strong and she has no problem holding the higher notes. They play a dreamy collection of songs that gets a good reception, with some interesting riffs and drum patterns, but it's only at the end where the instrumental finish verges on post-rock that they really impress.

Liars are visibly comfortable playing live, giving a well-balanced set that, more than half a year down the line, doesn't focus too much on their

recent album Sisterworld. Playing with two extra musicians they are now five, and make enough of a racket to justify it. They start with It Fit When I Was A Kid, one of the singles from Drum's Not Dead, which sets the bar high with its low-key pounding and almost-spoken vocals. They handle its stark outro brilliantly, showing the sensitivity they are capable of. It's in direct contrast to this when they play Loose Nuts on the Veladrome, with its spiky, jagged guitars and unashamedly punk delivery. If anything it gets an even better response just because singer Angus Andrew can throw himself about on stage, the audience soon following suit.

The songs played tonight seem to fall into these two camps. The first is one of tribal drums,

ghostly vocals and humming, chiming guitars, drawn largely from Drum's Not Dead. The other is an unhinged, twisted noise rock that creeps towards anthemic, taking reference points from every stage in their colourful back catalogue. Angus seems comfortable with anything, jumping around with the frenetic crowd during a raucous version of Scarecrows on a Killer Slant, but showing a gentle touch for The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack. For an album that's had a slightly mixed reception, it's amazing how well the songs from Sisterworld slot into the set, though Liars could make even the most average music sound exciting live.

During the encore the band play as a three piece again, returning to the stage one by one. An extended version of the eerie and actually quite alarming Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack! is followed by Broken Witch, the epic opener from They Were Wrong So We Drowned that is equal parts punk and no wave. These are the highlights of the concert, but that's not to criticise the touring musicians – it's just that Liars' music relies on energy and creativity as much as instrumental complexity. Luckily we get all three tonight.

event - london openframe 2010: day one at café oto

4th November

This year's OpenFrame marks ten years of ROOM40, the Brisbane-based label led by composer and sound artist Lawrence English. The festival arrived in London for the first time last year, and this time is taking a few stops up and down the country. Tonight there are three performances from a range of collaborators with the label.

Primarily a drummer, Italy's Andrea Belfi wires

cold ambient in and out of his sparse, dry rhythms. Neither component dominates the sound, instead they ring around each other with thudding precision. His approach is improvisational, drawing subtle changes from his synthesizers on one hand, and from his careful assembly of percussion on the other. His otherworldly metal discs are intertwined with microphones and stranger metal objects still, foregrounding the hazy kick-drums. The entirety of his short set is an exercise in looping, the sounds he makes tangibly being fed into his electronics. The overall effect is one of calming balance.

Next up is a rare performance from David Toop + Scanner + I/O3, the last itself being a group comprising Lawrence English, Tam Patton and Heinz Riegler. Having five musicians on stage is something of a shock after

Belfi's quiet and restrained performance, but they don't compete for space. They use their different talents to bring in an incredible palette of sounds, as showcased on their album A Picturesque View, Ignored. Sometimes David Toop leads at the front of the sound, pouring what look like seeds from a jar into a tiny dish, shaking them with precise movements. At other times it's Scanner, pitched at the front, who responds to this heady mixture with methodical glee, looping and sampling with his novel array of tabletop instruments. Lawrence English's spacious, wavelike sounds form a considered backdrop to the onstage dialogue, giving a constance to the piece. Trip-hop beats emerge from time to time, as do Toop's electronic flute, which he nonchalantly picks up from time to time. Towards the end guitarist Heinz Riegler injects some more obvious emotion into a performance that, while not exactly studied, is never overwrought.

Chris Abrahams' solo piano performance comes in three parts, getting progressively more interesting. It begins with lush, unwinding melodic cycles reminiscent of Philip Glass, which cascade gracefully up and

down the keyboard of the baby grand before falling on a single note. This note is played out for the middle part of the performance, testing out different tempos and rhythms, conjuring up different notes in the ear of the listener as the intensity varies, but resting ultimately on this one note. It takes great skill to come across like a virtuoso on the basis of one piano key, but with careful control over the intensity with which he plays, and the creation of complex rhythms Chris Abrahams gets away with it. Moments after reaching an incredible speed, more and more notes start to return, and the performance culminates in a cacophony of dirge-like minimalism. It's mesmerising and overwhelming, and a great shame when it's over.

event - ariel pink's haunted graffiti at hoxton square bar and kitchen, london

2nd november

Ariel Rosenburg has had, and probably still has difficult time playing live. His musical beginnings are far from the kind you'd expect to be workable in a live setting, having been in isolation when recording most of his output, and his solo concerts as Ariel Pink were by all accounts pretty challenging. It's no surprise then that since signing to 4AD last year with his full band Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti he's come a long way. What's interesting though is how much of his personality and his refusal to conform shine through. He's charismatic and sometimes charming but he's also awkward and at times set on making the crowd feel the same way.

Intended to be a secret fan show, tonight's show was organised at the last minute to mark the end of his European tour, and still makes heavy use of recent album Before Today. It's a blessing in disguise, as his newer songs stand up to his earlier work without relying too heavily on Ariel's instrumentals. They begin with Bright Lit Blue Skies, first performed by the Rockin' Ramrods in 1966, but a great example of Ariel's ability to channel the past. His voice is deep and soulful, but with enough irreverence to remind us that this isn't the real thing. It's a lot more fun than that.

After just one track he has a problem with his microphone, worried that the 'echo thing' isn't prominent enough, and has to navigate his way through the crowd to the mixing desk where he has a quiet word with the sound man. On returning, he checks to see that this echo thing is working, and happily his voice is now subject to lengthy delay in spite of

the band's tight and funky backup. They play a fair few from the new album, including a great version of Friday Night (Nevermore). His ability to write fantastic, psychedelic pop music doesn't feel like any kind of compromise from the less structured focused sounds of his bedroom experiments. It's the best of both worlds, and he seems to be having a good time, temporarily abandoning his contrarian stage persona to declare: "it's time for some French kissing". He lives up to his promise and I don't see a single boy or girl in the crowd – just previously heralded by Pink as a 'bunch of poseurs' – do anything to refuse his bizarre advances.

They close the set with lead single Round and Round, one of the year's catchiest songs, and rare among his

catalogue in that it tightens that gulf between dancey and actually danceable. A few people try their best amidst the four-part harmonies of the chorus, and when it's over the band retreat to the side of the small stage to cries for an encore. After a beer and perhaps a little bit of haunted graffiti they come back for a trio of songs that ends with For Kate I Wait, a highlight from The Doldrums. It was originally recorded on 8-track, but is unharmed by a four-piece band treatment. In fact, it's probably the best song of the night.

event - merzbow at xoyo, london

27th october

Not sounding anything like the warped noise of Merzbow himself, the first band on have presumably been plucked out of East London for the volume they create. Their music is noisy, but born out of rock traditions and

instruments, and with no laptops in sight. They come onto the small stage very casually, and start with Shellac-esque atonal riffing that takes a few minutes to grow into something more catchy and conventional. The transition is carried out expertly as they move through noise rock, sludge, stoner and doom and all the way back again. What's even better is the way they strike a consistent tone – the singer's distorted, angry screams do most of the work, and hint ever so slightly at the angst of Harvey Milk's Creston Piers. It's hard hitting but captivating and a lot of fun to watch, and much better than the few recordings available online at this point would suggest.

Next on are Nadja. Aidan Baker is a very busy man, releasing several albums a year under his own name but a finding the time to collaborate with the likes of Tim Hecker and as with Nadja, 'bookbinder' Leah Buckareff. Things start well, fierce guitar and bass drones being processed through a tabletop covered in samplers, effects pedals and mixers, some looping the sounds while others play progressive drum patterns and spoken word samples.

Sadly, the reliance on technology takes its toll when the power shorts, cutting out everything. Obvious frustration from the band is greeted with a we-know-it's-not-your-fault round of applause and calls for an unplugged show, but the sound man comes on and seems to get things back on track. They abandon the loops they'd been building for the past fifteen minutes and try a different song, but this only lasts about five minutes before everything trips again. They soldier on, and move into a haunting piece with murmuring samples and rich stringed harmonies. Again the sound man comes on to sort the next power failure but the recurring problem is really starting to interfere, and after a few more outages Aidan says they'll have one last go until it cuts out for the final time. They don't last thirty seconds and a gutted Nadja leaves with a great and very understanding reception. In better circumstances they'd surely be sublime, but it was hard to get totally involved with the fear that everything could stop at any moment.

In spite of the venue's best efforts, Masami Akita has been recording under the name of Merzbow for over thirty years and it'd take a staggeringly bad set up to stunt him. He senses that a large amp on the left isn't working and sorts it out well before starting, and with that there are no more technical issues. Joining him is Hungarian metal drummer Balázs Pándi, who gives extra bite without laying down too tight a structure over Merzbow's often searching sounds.

And it's an absolute onslaught – Akita rarely pauses, with Pándi spending most of the time pounding away somewhere in the middle of the mix. He plays his strangely assembled guitar-like instrument resembling both a

defibrillator and a dystopian Japanese landscape. It lives up to its looks, producing all the harshness and dissonance you'd expect from someone who sticks so rigidly to a formula of white noise. His interest in BDSM definitely comes across, appearing calm and collected as he does, sat at his office desk while subjecting the entire audience to the most nightmarish aural monsters he's collected and built over the course of his career. When it finally does come to an end there's a sense of relief, especially for the sake of tortured ears, but there's an unsettling desire for it to continue. It's not quite victim's guilt, but a longing for the intense, carefully structured extremes that he conjures up so readily.

Originally posted on Rare FM

event - health at ec2 warehouse, london

16th october

Coming on just after midnight, HEALTH were the main event at the first night of Lanzarote, a new club night and live music venture in London. The idea is to put bands and DJs on at hours

normally expected of clubs and to do it in mostly improvised venues. Tonight's event took place on Great Eastern Street in the basement of what looked like an office building, and featured several DJs including Hounds of Hate, Richard Fearless and Andrew Hung. There was also a support slot from upcoming post-dubsteppers Dam Mantle, who built up a fair bit of atmosphere in their twenty five minutes on stage.

So the night worked. Sort of. It was a sloppy conversion, with minimal toilet facilities and a simple paint job. But the worrying part of it was the set up of two lighting rigs and two speaker stacks. They looked precarious, placed on either side of the small stage, and later pushed to their limits during HEALTH'S set. Either through inexperience or laziness, or maybe the fact that the only act anyone was here to see were coming on after midnight, the place had a sterile atmosphere for a long time, only really broken up by Dam Mantle's funky, energetic shuffles. All that was about to change though.

About fifteen minutes after soundcheck, HEALTH returned to the stage, and singer Jake explains that there was nothing rock 'n' roll about their

disappearance: "we walked up to the top of the stairs, and then I started crying, and..." But he suffers an aural ambush from the rest of the band and never finishes, instead hurling glitchy, violent tones into the burgeoning mosh pit. What was a tame, slightly bored crowd has been turned on its head, and quite literally for those taking part in the projectile crowdsurfing that begins straight away. Hours of no readmission have taken their toll, and people are snatching the opportunity to lose themselves in HEALTH's onstage intensity.

The songs from their latest, Get Color, just feel so much more important live. The breakdowns in Nice Girls are tight and ominous, giving John a breather from his sinusoidal bass-swinging and letting his hair calm down. The dynamics are fully accentuated in such a small live setting, and it's the range of volumes, tempos and instruments playing at the same time that really excite, not just the fact that they can recreate their spooky sound perfectly in a whitewashed cellar.

They play some new material, which sounds very promising, and close the set with Heaven from their debut, recent semi-hit singles Die Slow and We Are Water and USA Boys from their latest release, remix album DISCO2. The speakers look like they're actually going to fall over on many occasions, the light fittings rock around from time to time, and inevitably the band decides the crowd is 'pumped' enough for an encore. Finishing up at about half past one, HEALTH are certainly a band worth sticking around for.

event - oceansize at koko, london

1st october

Playing a one-off support slot for Oceansize on their current European tour, Yndi Halda are an unexpected treat. Sadly though, time constraints mean that what was intended to be a swift two-song set is cut down without the band's

knowledge to a meagre one-and-a-half. By the standards of most this wouldn't be much stage time but Yndi Halda get around half an hour, managing to showcase what they're most widely praised for as well as giving a taste of what's to come. After a good stint in post-rock done to perfection where the band move in sinuous, tectonic synchronisation, they introduce a new song, which retains only some of these elements. There are vocals now, and acoustic guitar tapped at the harmonic intervals. It's still as spacious and complex as the first song, but it's more delicate, using subtler dynamics than changes in volume. It's a real shame to see it cut short, but the band promises to play a full set next time. Let's hold them to it.

Next up are This Town Needs Guns, and while they stay true to the math-rock sensibilities of fellow Oxford bands Youthmovies and Foals, they have all the technical abilities of the latter without the pomposity.

When playing tracks from 2008's Animals they do have the tendency to lose themselves in complex rhythms and self-regarding finger-tapping, but on new material they recover the crunch and the heart of their earlier sound, making whatever they release next something to look forward to. The announcement that they'll play old favourite 26 is Dancier than 4 is greeted with many cheers, and they go so much further than on the studio recording, Stuart Smith looking like the moment means everything to him, and moving his torso accordingly. Their ability to convey emotion alongside obvious proficiency is what marks them out from their peers, and they don't do it any better than when they're on stage.

Taking the stage at a slightly premature ten past eight, Oceansize waste no time introducing themselves and dive straight into Part Cardiac, the opener from recent full length Self Preserved While the Bodies Float Up, which you can read about here. It's intense, it's frightening and it's the only song they'll play that sounds at all like this. But that's what makes Oceansize such a fantastic live experience, constantly changing what they do over the course of their 90 minutes. They create huge swells of distortion, intricate three-part guitar patterns, and show they can do anything the two bands we've already seen tonight can do.

The loyalty among their fans is obvious, with practically every song getting a cheer in its opening moments, but the reception to their latest album is just as warm as for the old favourites like Ornament/The Last Wrongs. Singer Mike Vennart says the new one's their

best album and, maybe realising the faux pas he's just made, simply reaffirms what he's said. And for the first time in musical history he may actually be right. In any case, everything they play is a winner, and the only noticeable discernment among the audience is when someone shouts "play something heavy". They do, of course. Highlights include Paper Champion, which builds over funky bass riffs into a menacing climax, and the encore of Women Who Love Men Who Love Drugs, the mostly instrumental saga from their debut Effloresce. It's as this song ends that they depart for the last time, one by one, until three guitars remain, repeating lush, melancholic notes that gradually quieten as enormous cheers see them off stage.