Reviews

And with Manchester being next to Berlin in terms of being the place to go to hear some of the best electronic music around nowadays, it’s quite fitting that the city should host Futuresonic, a three day festival devoted to “sonic pleasure and the audio arts” featuring performances from the seminal and the not so seminal alike in venues across the city.

Thursday’s events don’t get off to the best start when it is discovered upon arriving at Academy 2 to see the remarkable 65daysofstatic that the lovely security people there aren’t letting in wristband holders due to the venue being packed to capacity with ticket holders. Which is all very well and good, but not particularly fair when you consider the amount of touts outside attempting to flog tickets in the rain for extortionate prices.

But no matter, the night is young, so it’s off to the Attic to go and see competition winner night Rare as a Green Dog. First act of the night is Shirokuma, who are a three man-one-laptop-one-guitar-one-808-and-one-very-jumpy-Japanese-girl-lounge-act-combo who manage to be delightfully cute, shambolic and poppy, without every straying into the horrible nether regions of twee.

Plus they don’t let some frankly terrible acoustics get in the way of them having what looks like a damn good time. By the time their much too short set judders to a halt, it’s a good bet that most people there have fallen in love with them.

Caro Snatch, like so many things in life, is a concept which works better on paper than in real life. The alias of Caroline Churchill, she has been described as a "Debbie Harry with an 808." Blimey. With a write up like that, what's not to like?

Well, a fair bit actually. It's very easy to get all excited because it's a girl making a load of beepy noises with a couple of samplers in what is undoubtedly quite a male orientated genre, but that doesn't excuse the fact that there's something lacking. Whilst her beats are impeccable, what goes over them just sounds like a hell of a lot of atonal groaning in a contrived accent. Certainly the sound doesn't do her any favours, but although she's certainly got a beat, and you certainly can dance to it, it becomes very very tiresome, very very quickly.

Hybrids is billed as a "rare collaboration between a minimal techno DJ and an opera singer." Sound contrived? That would be because it is. Perhaps if the opera singer in question knew what to sing beforehand instead of sounding as though she's just warbling away with the first thing which comes into her head, it wouldn't be so bad, but as it is the sound of the number 86 bus home rapidly comes to sound like a much better prospect.

• Next