Mamer – The Luminaire, London 23/03/2010

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As great as it was to see the spotlight falling on a part of the musical world which was hitherto dark to me, and despite all the praise it hoovered up last year, there was something about Mamer‘s LP Eagle which I found didn’t quite work. The vast open spaces of Mamer’s native north west China were equated somewhat uneasily with their American counterparts, Kazakh instrumentation mixing with western-sounding drums and guitar, the fascinating folk forms from his homeland meeting a more staid Americana. However, and despite the band’s apparent thoughts to the contrary, I found this live performance to be more interesting: the stripped back nature of the show and an idiosyncratic sound mix somehow revealed new levels of detail, and made for some unexpected comparisons.

Mamer and his three band members arrived on stage, two of them packing dombras, two-stringed Kazakh lutes, with the others on bass guitar and drums. They tumbled into a deliciously abstract and compelling introduction, a long section in which fingers scrambled softly all over strings, while eastern-sounding whistles and bells fluttered in and out of the composition. Already, this sounded quite different from Eagle, the album’s smoother textures replaced by more angular features, with those dombras producing drones and repetitive figures on non-Western scales.

Finally a loud heartbeat riff signified a major shift in mood, a bass-heavy sound mix dominating proceedings for the rest of the night. Bizarrely, the band apologised for this (equally unnecessarily, they said sorry for the time it took them to retune their dombras between songs). But when those minimal bass patterns were combined with a relentless mallet beat, and the extraordinary, otherworldly deep vocals of Mamer himself, they began to sound like a very different band. Like a metal band. In fact, with the low, religious-sounding chants of Mamer (the closest I’ve ever experienced to this would be the Buddhist monks I heard singing in Nepal), the overall effect was not dissimilar to Om. A piece like ‘Proverb’, shorn of the extraneous female backing vocals, became a wonderfully dark incantation. However I can’t imagine Om writing a song called ‘Running Antelope’; sometimes it was only the track titles, helpfully translated into English, which drew you back to the grasslands. Tonight, perhaps more than ever, Mamer seemed a long way from home. And I didn’t mind one bit.