Last month the superb Berlin electronic and experimental music label PAN Records presented showcases in Boston and New York, but Chicago was pretty much left off of the U.S. itinerary. Luckily, there’s a little bit of salvage occurring on Wednesday night at the Empty Bottle, when two of the acts involved with those east-coast events will perform: Lee Gamble, from London, and Kouhei Matsunaga (performing under the moniker NHK’Koyxen), from Osaka, Japan.
Before turning to experimental electronic music Lee Gamble was a jungle adept, and his PAN debut from last year, Diversions 1994-1996, is a collection drawn from his jungle mixtapes, heavily edited, distorted, and reimagined. In fact, it’s hard to hear any trace of jungle music here, with atmospheric drones, ghostly rhythms, and digital noise interacting and floating in time like some kind of space junk, lost and functioning like memory fragments. The intro to a piece like “Razor” triggered plenty of my own memories, with paranoia-inducing two-beat figures that seem to set up an explosion of breakbeats, but in a grand exercise of restraint and denial Gamble holds back to create something else. You can get a strong sense of that sensation below with the track “Emu.”
