Our verdict: three-and-a-half stars.
A gig that involves passing a remote control round a crowd on instruction from the artist playing to 'mash buttons' to help procure 'noises' has a tick in my book from the start. Hey - I like suspended reality. And, apparently, quotation marks.
Remote controlled artist #1 playing in Broadcast is the night's support act Tall Tall Trees. He packs the best parts of an Amish male's aesthetic and Bruno Mars' likeability (go on, admit it) into the mix with his own robust talent until a genuinely sound performer is born.
Mr Trees has the kind of beard thick enough to hide things in, which makes sense as 12 different noises seem to be emitting from his person and playing back again. From a companion I understand this is called a loop. Or loopy. I can't be sure. It was awfully noisy.
Kaoru Ishibashi, of the night's highlight Kishi Bashi, is another keen purveyor of the loop, due to the fact that he plays much of his act's sound by himself. Previously he has been involved in musical ventures including of Montreal and Regina Spektor. Esteemed company, if a little specialist for some.
Tonight, though, there is a band. And what is produced sounds like music from some expensive advert where a Dalmatian sticks its head out of a car window and a Swedish looking woman with strawberry blonde hair crochets a gilet for it. Oh wait! Because Kishi Bashi's song Bright Whites has indeed been used as the background music in a commercial for Windows and the Xperia Tablet S.
It's easy to see why his tunes are attractive to people who want to use music to sell things from. Violin - played by Ishibashi - is taut and winding enough to make you feel you're being slowly, inextricably wrapped up in a bow-full of horsehair. Percussion lingers with the unpredictable non-precision of an unknown instrument that is designed to be shaky. There are layers of sounds and vocals. And Tall Tall Trees, so good they named him twice, is back on stage and naming his clan (McEwan) as per the demands of Ishibashi to the pleasure of the crowd between songs.
There is a temporary trauma half way through when a pedal is feared dead (loopy, right?) but is slickly recovered with a medley of songs drawing on oriental origins interspersed with that virtuoso violin.
But is it, for the most part, good? Sure it is. Why is it that 'advert music' automatically yields negative connotations? Is it because we think we're more savvy than to ourselves be the people who are fooled by commercials? Er, hello? Who doesn't own a laptop or iPad?
There is an argument that suggests if your creative product is used as as a background - a distraction - for something else then that might be a negative thing. But then again, some of the most notable tracks in history have been used in a commercial sense.
Whatever the conclusion, there might well be some ironic justice in the fact that this review is brought to you via a portable new piece of equipment much-begged for by your writer.
Perhaps in some way we have the likes of Kishi Bashi to thank for that.
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