Music / Reviews
Review: Jojo Mayer & Nerve, The Fleece
Wednesday night seems to have drawn the tech-nerds and music geeks out of the woodwork. That’s what first springs to mind as I glance around at the heavily male-dominated crowd, who are loitering between the indoor pillars of The Fleece to catch a glimpse of cult Swiss drumming virtuoso Jojo Mayer, on tour with his band Nerve for the first time in the UK.
The support act, a collaboration between bassist Chris Hargreaves and drummer John Arkell, both of whom play with bass-heavy electronica outfit Submotion Orchestra, bring the window-shaking wobble basslines of dubstep to life through some heavy effects processing: Hargreaves’ bass is hooked up to an impressive bank of pedals that keeps a group of young men closest to the stage transfixed.
It’s a fitting opening for the main act. Nerve emerged out of the New York based Prohibited Beatz nights in the late ’90s , which were improvised jams featuring musicians, DJs and visual artists. Since then, Zurich-born Mayer has been the turning the logic of sample-based electronic music on its head by using live instruments to recreate sounds made by machines.
The group’s set reveals a broad range of musical influences, referencing everything from broken hip hop beats to house and dub. But it’s their recreations of drum & bass breaks that they are best known for and which are most remarkable. Mayer’s origins as a jazz player are clear: he flits between rigid club-oriented beats and wild, rhythmically elaborate fills. Throughout the night, much of the audience remains entranced by Mayer’s undisputed technical prowess, to the extent that many forget to dance.
Bassist John Davis and keys player Jacob Bergson adapt effortlessly to Mayer’s rapid changes of tempo and time signature. The keys in particular offer dreamlike passages of almost extra-terrestrial timbres, creating an overall effect that is far more hypnotic and mesmerising than I had expected.
The set would be impressive enough if it was based around a rehearsed setlist. But much of it is improvised, and an emphasis on improvisation underpins the band’s whole approach to making music, which is part dialogue between present and future possibilities of sound creation, and part interrogation of the fixed boundaries between electronic and analogue, human and machine.
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