aaamusic | On 30, Apr 2012

London, 24th April

Often I find good music at the Old Blue Last and last night it happened again. The upper floor scruffy room with the charming bad sound system was surprisingly crowded for a terrible rainy school night.
I arrived just in time for the second band on the list, Portasound. The young guy on the front line on the keyboard showed a confident involving smile.
Portasound is a 5 piece band from East London playing a very interesting and innovative mix of instrumental electronic that involves upbeat disco moments and asymmetrical rhythms. The progression of distorted melodies and danceable beats flow even into dubstep for a while and it’s all very enjoyable. These young Londoners played already with Metronomy, The XX and Three Trapped Tigers and their new EP is titled Second Renaissance and will be released on the 14th of May. The EP’s opening track Dreadnought is a beautiful powerful song and the video is very cool too: http://youtu.be/BjWG8HLvzek.
They are fun, definitely innovative and they make you dance. What do you ask more?
Pinkunoizu took on the stage after the time of a couple of cigarettes. The name is funny, indeed. Members are: Jaleh Negari (drums), Jeppe Brix (guitars) Andreas Pallisgaard (guitars, vox), Jakob Falgren (guitars, keys, foot pedal bass)
They are from Copenhagen and Pinkunoizu seems to be a Japanese word meaning “pink noise” (that’s what they say in the cyberspace). As their name, their music is pretty eccentric, freakish and, without question, seducing. The band seems to name their music style as an exotic mixture of lo-fi, high-life, shoegaze, Krautrock, nu-folklore, ’60s Asian pop and post-apocalyptic future rock. I don’t really know what all that means.
It must be another joke that follows their name.
They play an ingenious sort of psychedelic pop/rock made of repetitive riffs, a noisy full sound, with a composite drum beat. The noise and the bad sound system (equalisation, maybe?) made the vocals absolutely useless. We couldn’t actually hear the vocals that seemed anyway superfluous. The performance was generally good, unquestionably mesmerising and impressive. I found very fascinating the use of tribal African influences in the experimental knit texture of their quirky musical formulation.
Their debut LP is called Free Time! under Full Time Hobby record label.
I’m pretty sure all this musical chaos will sound different on a record and, well, it’s time to listen to it.

Pietro Nastasi