05) DJ Scotch Egg @ Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, 28/11/2009
The Leeds Student, 04/12/2009
Insane confrontational chiptune with a ponytail from Japan (via Brighton). The opening earsplitting feedback wail establishes the tone nicely for this well attended, well-danced-to set.
Attacking his Boss MetalZone pedal as if it has defiled his woman, screaming down his Poundland microphone until he looks like he’s going to vomit Red Bull everywhere, and running around his in-front-of-stage table with impressive energy, Ishihara thrashes out a collision of convulsing Jap-gabba beats and mass appealing drum ‘n’ bass hooks. His crazy pointing and posing is in perfect sync with the eccentric oscillator/beat-repeat fills that bring to mind Richard D. James at his most sniffed up.
The people here are on drugs. The people here who aren’t on drugs look like they are on drugs. The people who don’t look like they are on drugs are going to take drugs soon. Anyhow, the people at the front are so close to Egg that he can probably feel their booze-breath, and a sizeable portion of them seem to know the radical rhythms of every track inside out; although their dilated pupils and dilated trilbies are more striking than their dance moves, there is far from a shortage of movement in the audience. This is only heightened when Ishihara jumps off his worryingly wobbly speaker stack or throws himself back first into the crowd and moshes with his ardent fans as erratically and aggressively as only a short Japanese bitcore performer can.
Aside from his justified impatience when the power fails half way through the set - appropriately just after he’s joined by a Mac-toting right-hand man, Mr. Egg displays pure stage presence tonight (without once setting foot on the stage), and this is capped off with the showering of the crowd in actual scotch eggs from Sainsbury’s. As the final pounding Nintendo onslaught abruptly cuts off and the Brudenell floor empties, victims of iminent grinding gabba comedowns and the squashed remnants of scotch eggs strewn across it, all other genres seem really quite dull.
