Concert Review: Perturbator – Neck of The Woods, February 4, 2020

Perturbator performed at Auckland’s Neck of The Woods last night, where the French synthwave artist poured almost 90 minutes of unrelenting, metal-infused darksynth into the packed crowd.

Birth of the New Model opened with gentle, raindrop synths as the stage began to fill with smoke, dissected by beams of harsh, white strobes. Perturbator, a.k.a. James Kent, took to the stage amidst a roaring scream from the crowd, before dropping the opening number into a grimy, slow dubstep beat and gradually transitioning into the dark, hard-hitting synthwave sound he’s mastered so well in under a decade.
 
Perturbator works on synths, but the addition of a live drummer to the tour elevated much of the set into something entirely unique from his recorded work. Neo Tokyo was a frantic ride of electronic dread, weaving strings, glitching electronic beats and demonic synths from The Uncanny Valley, and with the harsh, slicing reality of live drums, transformed the song into a ferocious wall of sound.

I’ve long been a fan of Justice, who delivered an immense heavy metal-infused live recording with A Cross The Universe, and the release of both Kavinsky’s OutRun and the Hotline Miami soundtrack drove me toward artists like Kick Puncher, Daniel Deluxe, Carpenter Brut, MegaDrive, Magic Sword, and Perturbator.

Perturbator released two immense recordings in the mid-2010s, Dangerous Days and The Uncanny Valley, both containing a hard-hitting, seedy, and sexualised club feel throughout. There’s also a persistent tone that blurs the two albums together, that addition of metal and a crushing beat which would later form the entirety of Mick Gordon’s 2016 DOOM soundtrack. When this translates to a live performance, it illustrates how an entire discography can be woven together through a common – if maturing – sound, and still feel purely faithful to the original recordings.

Any fan of Perturbator will have been thrilled to hear Future Club performed live, though the standout moments were those slight variations on everything I’ve heard from the artist over the years; the stretched and drawn-out demonic synth keys in She Is Young, She Is Beautiful, She Is Next, and one of the most impressive builds with a live drummer I’ve ever seen in Humans Are Such Easy Prey.
 
Closing out with the relentless drops of Tactical Precision Disarray, the duo returned to the stage for an encore of Welcome Back and The Cult of 2112 – almost bookends of Dangerous Days and The Uncanny Valley – and showed how much potential there is in live recreations of this genre. The limitations of that potential, I feel, are in the choices of venue we have in Auckland; the sound is perfect for a grimy, underground club setting, but the scale and power of performance make me wish it was backed by a larger space with superior acoustics.

That we’re seeing this artist at all is remarkable, and massive respect for Ben and Ingrid from Valhalla Touring for bringing one of the standouts from the synthwave genre to Auckland. It was, after almost 90 minutes, a dark descent into a grimy, pulsating catacomb of metal-infused synths, filled with apocalyptic strobes, head-thrashing riffs, and ferocious drums – the kind of forbidden party you can never find, never want to leave, and never want to forget.

~Oxford Lamoureaux

Click any image to browse a gallery by Todd Buchanan.
 

Perturbator Setlist
 
Birth of the New Model
Neo Tokyo
Future Club
She Is Young, She Is Beautiful, She Is Next
Corrupted by Design
Excess
She Moves Like A Knife
Diabolus Ex Machina / Weapons For Children
Humans Are Such Easy Prey
God Complex
Vantablack
Tactical Precision Disarray

Encore
Welcome Back
The Cult Of 2112