Fuck Buttons / The Haxan Cloak, SWG3, 10 Sep

SWG3 is packed to the gunnels. Having played here with Liars, The Haxan Cloak is tuned in to the system and the space. His live set, performed on analogue gear, has been honed over months on the road. Where before, he focused on the crepuscular, largely beatless atmospherics of his stately, slowly coalescing compositions, tonight he brings brooding slabs of electro, dubstep and techno drum patterns into the mix.

The precision he achieves on tracks like Consumed and The Mirroring is astonishing – individual bass frequencies can be felt in the bones, seeming to emanate from the walls and the floor, leavened with echoing, sampled strings. There is a rich, organic feel to his music, underpinned with brutal industrial noise as blue laser lights sweep the crowd like scanner beams. His performance is jaw-dropping in its intensity, majestic in its scale, building to two successive peaks of focused, transcendental white noise.

Fuck Buttons, in contrast, lose a little of their dynamic range live, eschewing depth and texture for punishing, ear-damaging walls of static noise and thundering industrial drums. Their performance is in many ways incendiary – facing each other across a table of analogue gear, they push and push, screaming into pedal-effect-drenched mics, pounding on MPC pads and building towering edifices of brutalist techno.

However, even when the more meditative passages of Slow Focus are brought out to play, the shuddering intensity of layered sound obscures all beauty and complexity in their music. They sacrifice detail in favour of all-out sonic assault, and suffer by comparison to The Haxan Cloak's considered, precision-tooled electronic explorations. The crowd leaves satisfied, but it is The Haxan Cloak's performance which creates an indelible impression.