by Joe Luna

The duo of Ali Robertson and Malcy Duff work in the interstices of sound; the clicks, groans and smacks that would normally constitute what one might tune out of a performance but which after a few minutes of intense concentration develop a giddy rhythm and intensity of their own, a deranged momentum that resists at every turn any sustained gesture or cadential thrust and deliberately, petulantly and relentlessly focuses on the marginal grammar of sonic interaction. In his 1956 essay Music and Language: A Fragment, Theodor Adorno makes a convincing case for the essential yet vague correspondence between the two: “Musical interpretation”, he says “is performance, which, as synthesis, retains the similarity to language, while obliterating every specific resemblance”. Indeed, Usurper’s constant play of garbled sound poetry, broken whistles and dead drums seem to suggest utterances whilst simultaneously jettisoning them of any meaningful content. But Adorno also asserts that “To play music correctly means first and foremost to speak its language properly” – Usurper’s set then, is wilful impropriety, a deliberate, luddite refusal to speak music’s language “properly” and instead dwell inside the broken, false and fictitious, creating in the process an improvisatory ethic of stunning veracity. By favouring the sounds other musicians might ignore or avoid – placing a beer bottle on a table, the clicking of a pedal’s pot-switch, the resonant clang of a dropped coin – Usurper, paradoxically, go right through “lo-fi” and come out the other side, the territory that of attention-deficit musicians creating a music so desirous of intense and fixed attention that the audience must become complicit in the awkwardness of the sounds and thus engage with their initially hidden tenderness and charm. It’s this transformative process of enticed attentiveness that produces a genuinely collaborative environment in which focus on the incremental allows us to appreciate the delicacy and subtlety of sound-worlds we normally ignore or take for granted.

A drunk lady in the front row giggles furiously throughout the first five minutes of the set, during which Robertson dribbles water into a contact-mic’d mug, and far from detracting from the set or producing any audience/performer tension, the little squalls of laughter become sounds as strange and banal as those being created in front of us, the focus of attention upon the tiny and particular that the music engenders leading to a levelling, but by no means homogenising, of the apprehensive sonic events. It is also very, very funny watching Usurper, who break up the set with a conversation half muffled by the cloth Duff continues to stuff into his mouth as Robertson asks him a question about the gig. Simple banter perhaps, but in the context of Usurper’s particularly engaging and relevant poetics of acoustic improvisation it becomes another broken string to their arsenal of non-sounds, the failure of the conversation a perfect adjunct to the performance as a whole, a final piece of inversion that confirms the band as the foremost exponents of contemporary post-punk improvisation in the UK.