Clinic, Errors, RememberRemember @ Cabaret Voltaire, 27 Apr
RememberRemember's (***) Graeme Ronald chose his new musical moniker wisely, because by the end of every 'song' (in the loosest possible sense) the minimalist sequences and percussive noises are not live but recorded, looped, the stuff of memory. He may not be the first to compose and perform in this multi-layering manner, but with his use of a holepunch, bubblewrap, a plastic shark... oh, and a guitar, he is certainly the quirkiest. Joined by sax and violin, this trio is wilfully avant-garde in a kraut-rock style, and not as pretentious as you might imagine.
Upholding the leftfield Zeitgeist - with added electro muscle - Errors (****) emit bone-shuddering waves of synth, chiming, resonant guitar and a buzzing haze of glitch-core that sparks around the stone walls of the Cab. Salut France and set-closer Mr Milk are mesmerizing in their shamanic intensity, but their finest moment arrives in new single Toes, an elemental math-rock-out that shows that Errors are as tight as any of their more conventional contemporaries. Expectations of greatness, brilliantly fulfilled.
The scene is set for Clinic (***) to provide a rockier outro to Triptych's Edinburgh curtain call. The Liverpudlian eccentrics appear in Hawaiian shirts and their trademark surgical masks; a rather bamboozling visual statement, given that their music is more in line with '60s psych revivalism than conceptual performance art. But any semiotic confusion is obliterated by their klanging riffs and organ-led energy. It does all get a bit homogenous in a set that regresses from new to old, but tracks like The Second Line and Winged Wheel affirm their truly unique appeal.