Dark Electronic Body Music genre-benders ADULT subverted expectations in a harrowing White Hotel performance, bringing an out-of-body experience to life in Salford.
On Wednesday, February 12, a raging hole in the time-space continuum gave us a glimpse at another world, where the perpendicular lines of acid house and ecstasy never once met. They lay parallel, eternally flirting, never drifting any closer than before.
In this reality, a biting, jagged, geometrically vitriolic line, a metaphysical embodiment of the socio-political conditions of the last 30 years, split the two, chemically fusing itself to acid house with a spitting insistence.
The raves were angry, abrasive and cynical; the music crushing, pulsing and harrowing; the warehouses damp, cold, and rotten to the core. The people agitated for change, and they were keen to make it known.
At the tip of the spear, ADULT. are a Detroit-sprung perversion of reality, a shrieking yet tender example of contradictory primal expression, hailing from the hazy warehouses of anonymous stateside suburbs.
A married couple turned genre-bending cyberpunks, Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller formed ADULT. in 1998, defying reasonable and rational thought with a discography spanning 26 years of ongoing artistic evolution culminating in the release of their latest album Perception is/as/of Deception in 2020.
At the centre of the White Hotel, a large and structural metal cross imposes itself upon us, wrapped in neon blue tube lighting which forms a looping halo pressed tightly against the rigid rafters above.
We’re almost crucified in its overwhelming presence, contractually martyred to a cause we’re still to witness as the stage sits empty and the martyrs spill through the door. A geometric alignment of obnoxious green laser beams jet through the cross’ centre, sprawling across the entire ceiling like a defence system we aren’t permitted to breach.
Throughout the venue, the theistic symbol is a constant reminder of a vague authority; we’re under an unknown domain, a space away from the outside world inaccessible to any conceivable deity.
Kuperus and Miller emerge from the curtain behind the stage, dropping a large ‘ADULT.’ banner which sits vertically, contradicting the horizontal alignment of the text. It’s a reminder of their acknowledgement that nothing is constant, all is malleable and subject to experiment.
The duo begin to pile their equipment onto the stage, grinning and grimacing at the audience in what is a rare ‘mask off’ moment of approachability.
In a sharp shift of focus, Kuperus has vanished and reappeared, the grumblings of the deep, guttural synthesised bassline of Second Nature rattling beneath her shrieks. She sticks a long piece of sticky tape from the far corner of the room to the handle of the speaker to our left, a distinctive adhesive scent wafting through the air.
The din is inexplicable; Kuperus writhes, pulling her fingers along the edges of the tape to create a jarring, uniquely abrasive atmosphere to begin the set. Her voice echoes and rings around the room, glinting against the sheet metal ceiling before flattening against the concrete floor.
She enters a tussle with the tape, pulling and snarling and jolting against it, finally ripping it away and crushing it into a scrambled mess before handing it to a member of the audience with a grin.
As the opening track draws to a close, she catapults herself to within inches of my face, her harrowing eyes piercing into mine for a brief matter of seconds. Throughout the set, Kuperus commands the stage as her own.
She leans into the audience, her intensity channelling itself into the room and into the music. Her marching bellows are often complimentary of the hard-hitting, rapacious tones of Miller’s programming, though on occasion the music drifts further towards Duran Duran than Throbbing Gristle; the pendulum soon swings back, mind.
Lyrically, the duo touch on nearly all bases of the human experience in almost an hour-and-a-half long set; from the simply destitute Nausea, where Kuperus insists that we “don’t even know” how she feels about what she describes as the “United States of Sh*t-merica”, to the dark, stalker-esque insistence of Hand to Phone.
Idle (Second Thoughts) introduces a lighter sonic element to the versatile duo’s stage presence, harking back to the 1980s exuberance oozed by synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7 and the Oberheim OB-X but with a darker undertone of idolatry and utter confusion; in contrast, Glue Your Eyelids Together brings a grinding, discordant cacophony of social disdain and communicative breakdown.
To and fro, the audience ooze and march from one spot of concrete to another. There’s a biting chill in the air – a stripped-out garage on a Salfordian industrial estate is hardly Barbados – but it fails to dampen the atmosphere, rather it immerses us more in the art before our eyes; it isn’t on stage, it’s all around us.
Kuperus leaps from the stage, abandoning her physical form to those of us at the very front of the pack, becoming a harrowing disembodied voice lurking among us. She reappears in the shadows, stood atop a wooden crate alongside a member of the audience. The mask slips, at the end of the show as it did before we began, with a grin and a grimace to the crowd. Miller stays on the stage, grinning back at her as though one of us.
“We are ADULT. Keep culture weird!” Kuperus bellows, for a final time of the evening before returning to the stage, blowing kisses and thanks to the audience, and disappearing alongside Miller behind the curtain.
I trudged back into the main room for a final time, now emptied and hollowed as though the cross had finally taken its martyrs, a discarded old garage once more. The concrete floor is marked and uneven, scorched with the remnants of ghosts, previous lives, purposes and directions. ADULT. have joined this spiritual realm.
Recent Comments