Ian Street, Gigs Correspondent

Heinous Whining Presents...

Dolmen Dweller
Dolmen Dweller
And now for something completely different!

What a way to start my live music adventures for the year, taking in a Heinous Whining Presents event for the first time. I’ve been aware of the Heinous Whining events for a while but had not been to one. As a goal for the year, I went to Wharf Chambers in Leeds in the freezing weather for the first event. All I knew about the events is that they focus on the weird, experimental side of things, and it’s fair to say that they definitely do that. As someone who has grown up seeing bands with guitars and drums, this was definitely different; the only actual instruments that were in evidence in the night were a recorder and a cymbal; more on that later.

Mosquito Farm and their crazy home made 'instruments'
Mosquito Farm and their crazy home made 'instruments'
First up was Mic & Stand, described as a mic on a stand making the sounds of a mic on a stand. Many years ago I went to see Bob Dylan perform; unfortunately, he was so drunk that he couldn’t actually adjust his own mic stand. The performer's struggle with the mic stand brought this memory back to me. As he moved amongst us, the mic constantly (and deliberately) fell apart and was put together again. He began by giving a talk on public speaking. What was I watching? It could have been a comedy piece, a performance art piece, or a spoken word creation. Honestly, I don’t know. As the piece developed, the voice began to be electronically manipulated in pitch, modulation, and tone until it ended up in yelps, feedback, and noise. I couldn’t work out how this was being done as the guy continued to wrestle with the mic stand; there was no obvious control or trigger to the sounds. It was all rather mystifying.

Wild Rani
Wild Rani
Then Wild Rani took the stage. She sat at a desk, intently staring at a laptop as projections of underpasses and concrete flickered behind her. It almost looked as though this was an imitation of someone working from home, even down to the can of pop next to the laptop. I couldn’t work out if they were creating the sounds as it was happening or playing a recording whilst checking their emails. Either way, an electronic swirling feedback was developed over which, every few minutes, she occasionally gave a few bars on the recorder or whispered the odd lyric. The noise reminded me a bit of My Bloody Valentine and their notorious blasts of 20-minute feedback. What I began to realise was that these compositions were more akin to sound paintings; they conjured images in the mind. I asked my friend what he thought, and he described it as someone intermittently playing a recorder over the sound of waves crashing against a garbage pile. We need more of this, and we got it.

Wild Rani was followed by Dolmen Dweller, who twiddled with something on a table whilst making sounds into a mic that they then looped into the mix, building a sound that started as those of the waves gently lapping upon shingle to a powerful, all-encompassing drone. Or, as my mate described it, the sound of a snoring man on a raft in the ocean unaware of his wife’s rising anger while the couple is oblivious to the oil tanker bearing down on them. Exactly!

Mic & Stand
Mic & Stand
If I thought that this was all very experimental (and it was), then we crossed the Rubicon completely for Mosquito Farm. In over 40 years of gigging, I’ve never experienced anything that has come close to this. A large mat (about the size of a bedsheet) was dragged out onto the floor, on which I can only describe what looked like a large version of something resembling the kids game Mousetrap built by Heath Robinson and created with bits of stuff that had been foraged from your dad’s garage. There were actual mousetraps! handheld fans dismantled and mounted on wires that wobbled in the air like cyborg bees and all sorts of other odds and sods that had been turned into an anarchic ‘instrument.’. Grace and Maddie then moved around, turning bits of equipment on/off, amplifying sounds made whilst accompanying them on a bow scrapped across a wire, or mousetraps being set off by vibrations on a cymbal. They produced a composition piece out of this chaos that was truly unique, and I found it utterly mesmerising. I’m convinced that I’ve already seen one of the best live performances of the year in the first week of January.

Mosquito Farm and their crazy home made 'instruments'
Mosquito Farm and their crazy home made 'instruments'
One of the most fundamental takeaways of this night was that music, like art, is a unique form; it’s not something that really lends itself to the written word; it sits outside that and needs to be experienced in all its messy glory.

I left feeling utterly alive, excited that there are people creating stuff like this—experimental, on the margins, genuinely innovative, and unique. When was the last time you experienced those elements? It’s challenging, and I’m not necessarily going to like it all, but I’m so glad that it exists, that boundaries are being pushed, and I’m definitely going to be dipping my toes tentatively into the Heinous Whining world across 2025. It’s going to be a crazy journey, but I’m up for climbing aboard and hanging on.