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Review: One Leg One Eye, Strange Brew – ‘Explosive electronic anarchy’
It’s a sultry solstice evening and a year almost to the day since experimental doom-folk duo One Leg One Eye played their illustrious set at the Cube Microplex.
As predicted then, they are playing a bigger venue this time, and it will be bigger still next time.
The assembled crowd at Strange Brew has not been deterred by the heat, nor even the police cordons zigzagging across the centre of Bristol following a gas leak near the Beacon.
Concerts there have had to be cancelled, and nearby businesses forced to close. Luckily for us though, Strange Brew is right on the edge of the evacuation zone, and so the show goes on.
First support tonight is Bristol-born Twelfth House, an intriguing trio comprised of Fohn/Tom Connolly of Quade variously on guitar, violin and electronics; Georgie Cusack, also known as T.T. Vale, on synths and vocals; and Norman Church on dulcimer and electronics.
They set the scene perfectly for One Leg One Eye with a soporific velvet pulse, occasionally melting into haunting melodies on the strings and vocals.
As a relatively new band, Twelfth House is tantalisingly absent from social media, but this is a project I’m keen to hear more of.
Twelfth House ‘came together during the summer of 2025, initially, as an impromptu jam session above the babbling murmur of the Nova Scotia’s beer garden’
Next up is Daniel Foggin, standing slightly hunched over his machines like a medium at a séance, conducting lost souls.
As the drone builds, a candelabra at the front of the stage seems to be roughly shaken by hands unseen, and one of its electric candles is rattled out of its setting onto the floor. Haze from the smoke machine accumulates and there’s a suggestion of an anxious beat under the cocooning noise.
This is not for everyone – some people wander out for a breath of fresh air, perplexed by the barrage of noise, but most stay and surrender to the full, visceral experience, feeling the frequencies in their bodies rather than trying too hard to hear.
Tonight, it is best enjoyed sitting on the cool tiles as your sternum rattles and your eyeballs vibrate.
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Everything slows down as One Leg One Eye take to the stage and the audience drops deeper into its uneasy trance. People sway with eyes cast down, hands clasped as if in prayer.
Ian Lynch lights some incense and places it at the front of the stage as George Brennan takes his place behind an extensive desk of synths. A disembodied voice cutting through the fog of drone intones “This is a place that you can go to make contact with the ancestors and the deities”.
On this solstice night, it’s easy to imagine the deep drone reverberating around standing stones, summoning ancestors, opening a portal to another realm.
Lynch plays uillean pipes and an unfretted hurdy-gurdy type instrument as well as singing and intoning, with all mashed up through an extensive and intricate range of hardware
The raw deep thrum of the synths and uillean pipes together slowly resolves to a muted melody which sounds as if it is being played under water, like church bells from a long submerged village.
There are more sombre incantations, and unsettling screeches seem to be thrown out from behind us. The voice admonishes us gently: “Why ya frightened? It shouldn’t frighten ya child.” But it does, in the most delicious way.
As Lynch sings, his voice shimmering with reverb, that he’d rather be tending his sheep, there is such intensity etched on his face that it seems as if he is channelling the sorrows of all humanity.
The pipes’ true sound is not present until the end of the set, when two tunes are looped and played over each other
He picks up the pipes again and this time the melody prevails over the drone for a few rounds of the phrase before it is submerged again beneath the enveloping drone, and we descend into explosive electronic anarchy.
Finally, here’s the voice again, telling us the second coming is at hand. We are “slouching towards Bethlehem”, and carried on lapping waves to the end of the show.
Daniel Brennan’s modular synth set up adds more layers of electronic complexity
Once again One Leg One Eye have delivered the most exquisitely curated set, drawing the audience along through the darkness and cracking open our souls.
It has been a night threaded through with suggestions of mythology and the occult. As with last year’s show, the heat of the night served to intensify the experience.
It would be interesting to see One Leg One Eye in winter next time, to see how their particular alchemy takes hold without the heat.
The pair play without breaks for 50 minutes, creating one continuous and intense landscape of music
All images: Ursula Billington
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