The ICA pitches down and broad like a tongue. Five degrees. Ten degrees. I’d say more sure if it wasn’t so dark in here. I’ll chew on it some more and let you know later, perhaps.

Of more immediate concern is the terrible din attacking the stale air all around me. More now, swelling in grand reverberating rolls through the floor and walls of the institute, giving burst in bubbles to hidden brickwork.

Fuck Buttons are onstage. They find the sound, as is all to come, perfect enough. Actually it’s probably more that the sound finds them, reaching like it does, precious rock claws, six crystal nails to each gnarled finger. Confusion’s writ on the faces of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power. Seems like they’re struggling to detect familiar sound beneath the waves of current and re-current noise returned to them by the ICA’s bulging cheeks and scolded roof. No way in to the next sheet of psychedelic middle. The walls are sweating as the creators abandon their spew with resigned eyes and a cut from one to the other across the neck. Odd. Surely this independent chaos is the crown of glory-thorns they'd wear way up, above their heads and free hands. If they can’t see that, then they aren’t worth a damn.

Autolux are onstage. The sound is perfect, the ICA conducting bass in ripples down the tongue; guitar’s a leaking, banned pill gagging to be flipped. Drums clank and thudder, sending shocks through legs turned to jelly, all bones made marrow by now. Autolux dangle us in front of the hungry venue like a lucky tonsil. They know they need us to work. Sometimes you wish they’d choose heart for once and just swallow you whole.

Instead, it’s increasingly clear tonight that they’re more content to wear tickers on sleeves. “Kill y(ou)r idols,” shouts some cad in the audience after ‘Subzero Fun’. It’s hard, though, to disagree.

Old sound rules tonight, as it did in the Roundhouse some months before. A three-piece who christens their record Future Perfect in 2005 should be able to sort that future out urgently, surely.

Their inertia seeps like oil from the bully Carla Azar, sat behind the kit with the miraculous metal bone in her arm. Wearing all black, Azar is a bionic spectre, the machine in the ghost in the machine.

I don’t want to be in this mouth with all the other crumbs. I want to be in hers. Bionic girl’s. Seeing if I have to jump teeth and swing gullet like the raising, falling trap-walls in some ancient Egyptian tomb.

If the sound’s to swallow me, it has to be now, finally and three-quarters of the way through the set. But no, the oil has been drunk and Eugene Goreshter coys his way through ‘Turnstile Blues’ like he’s her chewing gum, stripping another track from past, and we bounce on that ICA mouth muscle, chewed but never digested in the noise.

Autolux have been toying with the idea of boredom so long that they’ve gotten boring. As far as I can tell there are no new avenues, inroads, routes through their bright noise; it doesn’t sound like they’ve been doing anything interesting in the last two years, even if what they were doing at Point A was perfect, in its own way. If Autolux show anything tonight, it’s that perfection can’t last for long; action kept locked at the border between dead time and breathing me awake one breath at a time, chewing gum mouth-to-mouth, quickly losing its taste.

Photo: _RedDeath