Long Range // Audio

I must admit sometimes watching DJ’s is a tad repetitive. So I love to see something extra, something new and different. Like watching the chemical brothers play live, or even Orbital!

I gotta say this – I’m fed up with breakbeat at the minute. I can’t stand hearing another run of the mill twisted electro bass heavy bootlegged track. Everything is seemingly put together without any real emotion and passion behind it. So this ‘Long range’ project genuinely excited me.

The main reason I have to say is purely Phil Hartnoll. With Orbital, his tracks like Halcyon proved to the world the beauty that was possible within the dance music spectrum. Chime showed everyone that the English had taken the ‘Chicago’ based house phenomena assimilated it and taken it over. All the time with the tracks of Orbital I’ve found you get the desired emotion and belief of the artist. So I was dying to see what a passionate house music pioneer could inject into an at times seemingly soul-less breakbeat scene.

Until this night the only ‘Long Range’ material I had heard was the collaboration with Aquasky (To which I was indifferent). So I was very much surprised when they started the Mac’s looping in Audio.

The opening tracks were much unexpected. Slow beats framed a delicate singer with an angelic voice that hovered just out of the reach of some vibrant electro sounding strings. Two nice melodic opening tracks, made easy listening. But I, like the rest of the crowd had whipped myself up to hear something heavy and massive straight away, so the slow start proved a little disappointing.

The main question I pose is gonna have to be was Audio a big enough venue for this sound? Standing too close to a speaker lead to missing a whole lot of range (And I’m sure the bass frequencies could have been set a little higher)…Maybe the sound they were producing would have been suited to bigger places. But this is a first live gig. So I’m sure that will come in time.

Will White performed on a set of Roland V drums. He was solid and played genuinely well. But at times I found these beats a little repetitive. Surely the main thing about breaks it the drum breakdowns? And when you listen to a breaks record anything by the plumps etc – its driven on patterns of massively varied and intelligent drums. Which leads me to ask, does the repetition of house music transfer to a live breakbeat act?

Long range’s sound comes from three Mac’s a set of roland V’drums a live Violin and a synth or two. A long way from the banks of analogue machines that the chemical brothers and Orbital of old set up with. Maybe its unfair of me to keep comparing Long Range with Orbital – but because of Hartnoll’s past this is always gonna be the obvious comparison to make.

Id be interested to see how a Long Range record would sound when dropped in the middle of a breaks set. And I’d also like to hear the project as an album and listen to the whole thing, track after track.

They definitely saved the best till last – the final track harping back to the intelligence of Halcyon, which is just what I wanted to hear.

In all honesty I enjoyed what Long Range had to offer. And I believe that they are gonna do things their way. They will bring a sensibility to their own part of the breakbeat scene which I am sure will be welcomed by old house heads and Nu-Skool breaks purists in equal amounts. I look forward to hearing the album and definitely seeing them again live.

Word – 3 0 3 t i l l i d i e X

Audio
http://www.audiobrighton.com

10 Marine Parade
Brighton
East Sussex
Tel: 01273-624343

info@audiobrighton.com

Marek the Czech

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