In his parallel career as a highly accomplished visual artist, Marco Fusinato is known for his bold, visceral style, drawing inspiration from the confrontational energy and spirit of punk music.
While this set was probably closer to the sound of a jet plane taking off or a jackhammer than any punk band you could name, it was fuelled by the same nihilistic fervour as many of the punk originators.
Fusinato wrangled chaotic bursts of noise from his guitar as waves of machine-like noise ebbed and flowed with violent randomness throughout his set, an unbroken single noise assault.
When he finished, the silence felt strange for a moment after so much cacophony. He received a healthy applause from the crowd, but looked almost disgusted at the positive response and left without a word.
Billed as a Thurston Moore show, this was really an early outing of his new band, Chelsea Light Moving, which also features the considerable talents of Keith Woods (of the more folky Hush Arbors) and Samara Lubelski, a member of bands such as Jackie-O Motherfucker and an interesting solo artist in her own right.
They began with the tribal, pounding ‘Groovy And Linda’, a song which revisits a grisly double murder in New York’s East Village and again reflects Moore’s fascination with the dark side of the hippie dream.
They then made three attempts at getting through the menacing new song ‘Lip’, with Moore’s perfectionism on display as he stopped mid song, read the primitive lyrics from a piece of paper, then returned to the beginning of the piece a second time. After a third, finally successful, run at the song, he leaned forward and said “that song was ‘Lip’ ” – completely deadpan.
More new songs followed, again showing a darker, more aggressive streak than the relatively mellow feel of last year’s Demolished Thoughts. The corrosive krautrock rhythms of ‘Frank O’Hara Hit’ won the audience over through sheer pummelling force, while ‘Burroughs’ was a machinistic beast, its screeching guitars and irrestistible momentum eventually stopping on a dime.
While mainly focused on his new outfit, Moore also reached back to the 1995 album Psychic Hearts for the lurching ‘Pretty Bad’ before returning to fresh material with ‘Empires of Time’; which began in reflective, droning style before expanding to take in a furious a guitar workout and maniacal drumming from John Moloney.
The set proper ended with the ghostly ‘Ono Soul’, with Lubelski’s eerie violin line and insistent guitars stretching out the song into something epic, before an encore of Demolished Thoughts standout ‘Orchard Street’ brought to an end a satisfyingly noisy, sweat-drenched show.
The career trajectory of Thurston Moore has rarely been predictable, but the formation of Chelsea Light Moving seems a logical progression, uniting the alt-guitar hero with similarly idiosyncratic players capable of fleshing out these dark new visions.
The next chapter of one of art rock’s most towering figures is just beginning.
