Beatrice Dillon / Lucy Railton at Wall & Wall, May 30th 2023

 

This year’s Mode Festival ran for about a week at the end of May and the beginning of June. The first edition was held in London in 2018, curated by Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also performed. This year the festival is dedicated to his memory and gathered some big names from the electronic underground scene. 

I went to two shows. The first one was at a venue I was not familiar with, Wall & Wall in Omotesando, an upscale area of Tokyo. Once inside my suspicions were confirmed, this place didn’t feel like the kind of joint you’ll see some music experimenting going down. The vibe felt more like a kind of a fancy club. I thought it was weird.

Feeling already out of place as the only ojisan with cool-biz clothes in the building, I decided to go right to the front and focus on the performers on stage. The first one of the evening was Lucy Railton. She started her fifty-minute set creating percussive sounds with small mallets lying on her table next to her electronic rig. The whole set was a mix of simple percussion and atmospheric sounds coming from her laptop. All very sparse, pointillist, without a sense of intensification, very cerebral.  I have to admit that I couldn’t crack the code. She concluded her set playing a violin positioned vertically, like a cello.

YPY played basically a drum machine set. You could tell by his reduced gear that this was going to be a minimal set and it was. There were really good ideas at first and the kind of techno approach was refreshing in contrast to the first performance, but as it went on it became kind of repetitive without much progression.

The headliner Beatrice Dillon hit the stage forty minutes before the ten o’clock curfew and finished exactly at ten. Right from the get go there were no doubts on whose show was this. Her sound design was otherworldly, surrounding and enveloping. I loved how she incorporated non-western instruments timbres and styles in subtle ways throughout her set. Not for nothing her 2020 album Workaround was Wire magazine’s album of the year. That’s how I discovered her. Her set matched and even surpassed my expectations. 

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