Karbido

Four sombre looking black suits sit across a large wooden table. Their faces maintain a stony ambiguity as if trying to out bluff one another.

But there are no cards at this table and, beneath it, the men's feet are surrounded by a dazzling array of effects pedals. After a meditative silence, they simultaneously hurl a selection of razor blades into the table top, each strike reverberating around the venue. When they begin to scrape, tap and rub their instrument, these chimes echo outwards until they are making as much noise as any four piece band.

The range and variety of sounds that Karbido conjure up make it easy to lose sight of the fact that this is just four men sitting round a table. A nice sturdy table to be sure, but the kind that we’ve all got at home. Using strings, bows, coins and wine glasses, as well as simple fists and fingers, the group achieve more bizarre and complex noises than you ever thought possible from a piece of wood. As the players break into chants and folk arias, it rapidly becomes clear that this is far more complex than fickle experimentation.

Voyaging through percussive trance to soaring epics through some rock’n’roll violence (albeit politely seated), these sonic clowns reveal themselves to be a tremendously exciting band in what proves to be an original and innovative production.