You expect the opening concert of the Rhythm Sticks festival to involve a touch of overindulgence in the percussion department. Still, walking into the Festival Hall to see three drumkits arranged in a circle with a small bank of electronic equipment was not a sight to raise the spirits. For a moment it seemed that Japanese experimentalists the Boredoms might live up to their name.
The Boredoms have not appeared in London for some eight years; at that show their anarchic combination of thrashy guitar, screamed vocals and rhythmic mayhem was overshadowed by their impetuous gymnastics. At the Festival Hall the quartet's movements were necessarily limited: it is hard to play the drums while cartwheeling. But what they lacked in visual theatricality they made up for in agile, vivid, exhilarating sounds.
Much of the set stemmed from last year's Vision Creation Newsun album; inspired by tribal drumming, its music is perhaps the most structurally conventional of anything the Boredoms have released in their 16-year career - the drum trio rarely veered from a four-four rhythm. But the variety they found within these confines was breathtaking: from the subtle gradations of sound emerged images of military parades and rainforests, fast-motion films of tidal movements and the calm elegance of 19th-century Japanese women taking tea. And as the drumming crumbled into scattershot notes and a clatter of chimes, only to swoop into synchronicity again, the trio made you realise just how satisfying and stimulating a straightforward rhythm can be.
The circle was completed by frontman Yamatsuka Eye, whose improvisatory electronic machinations brought a thrilling element of pandemonium to the gig. Essentially he appeared to be manipulating a single droning note, making it rise and fall, bubble and contract, pummel at the drums then pirouette across them. He could have been playing an organ, an accordion, a snakecharmer's pipe or even a slide guitar. At one point it sounded as though an aeroplane were taking off behind the stage, soaring through the stratosphere until it reached Yoshimi P-We's angelic vocals. Eye's own vocals tended towards the absurdist: repetitively barked chants of "Ai ai ai," followed by a deliciously emphatic shout of "Shut up! Shut up!"
Astonishingly, there was never a moment when this noise spree felt indulgent; the quartet were absorbed by each other's movements, but not at the expense of connecting with their audience. The 75-minute set seemed to pass in half that time, and earned a standing ovation. Rarely has a band's name felt so ironic.
