Kieran Hebden And Steve Reid - Live
[Sheffield Plug]

Tonight is Friday night at Sheffield’s Plug, and the line-up for tonight is a strong one, mixed too, with headliners Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid pulling in most fans, and Luke Vibert and Kids in Tracksuits adding a little more eclecticism to the bill, as if the pairing of two such distinct genres wasn’t variation enough.

Surprisingly, it’s not a full house tonight, but it’s no matter, because all sense of external reality slips quickly away, sliding into nothingness as the pair begin to play. Watching Hebden and Reid onstage is a wholly hypnotic experience; it is glaringly obvious why this collaboration, usually the sort of thing to last one album and tour, has spawned three studio albums in less than two years. Tonight showcases the most recent, Tongues, out on Domino in April, but its hard to follow or identify where one track ends and another begins in the beautiful mess of percussion and electronics.

Hebden plays boss man, guiding the improvisation with skeletal beats, before giving way to Steve Reid, who once in his swing, creates scenes of such percussive magnificence that the crowd is mesmerised. Hebden too it looks like, is excited by the effort of keeping up with his counterpart, head bobbing manically over laptop, tearing up samples, and occasionally we hear familiar beginnings, taken from a prepared base, but just letting the sounds flow freely, egged on my Reid’s rhythms over polyrhythms and god knows what else.

Despite the fast flow of the juxtaposed cymbal heavy jazz drumming and processed samples, the pair remain totally in sync with one another, with a look or a wink, a nod or a grin to signal a progression in the sound. The meeting of two such distinct genres, two such prolific figures, is clearly a marriage made in heaven, and a pleasure to experience.

Needless to say, the pair dominate the evening, blowing the other acts out of the water, their live set even showing the album recordings up. On the closing beats of the set, they ooze mutual respect for one another, grinning from ear to ear, one, the drummer who played on Martha and the Vandellas ‘Dancing in the Street’, the other, the original ‘folktronica artists, the current king of organic electronica, the best example of perfect opposites, of a total blurring of genres.