Todd Terje - Motion, Bristol 10th February
Posted on: 2017-02-14
Our rating:
Simple Things bring Todd Terje, the brightest of the Northern Lights in the stellar Scandinavian house scene, to Motion for an evening of cosmic-disco commotion.
Trawl back through the annals of popular culture and it is not difficult to find examples of its upholders advocating the short over the sweet. The title for the 1949 film Always Leave Them Laughing derived from precisely this sentiment, while it was Harvey Dent, Aaron Eckhart’s character in The Dark Knight, who polemically intoned, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” This adage extends to music: the Stone Roses never played an encore for the very same reason, which is the very same reason for which Bobby Womack famously stated how important it was to “leave them wanting more”.
Todd Terje is evidently familiar with this intent; a little too familiar, it might appear, if a number of the disgruntled dissenters were to be believed as they trooped out of Motion at roughly 11.20pm on Friday night. The Norwegian house superhero had just finished his set in the skate park’s main room, which has since received an amount of denigration on social media based on two main criticisms: the set was not long enough and did not constitute the live show that it had been billed as by organisers Simple Things.
Live it was not - well, not the ‘special live show’ promised, which seemed to suggest a performance with Terje’s excellent live band The Olsens - and short it absolutely was. But it was also so, so sweet.
An hour or so earlier, the bearded genius had taken to the stage with little fanfare, only the ceasing of the music which had followed support Mount Liberation Unlimited. Walking on in front of a packed main room, the best producer produced by Scandinavia’s thriving house scene simply plugs in and cuts loose, tearing into the tumbling drums and the DayGlo arpeggio which herald the onset of ‘Spiral’. The 2013 Italo gem blends nicely into ‘Lanzarote’, a collaboration, released in the same year, between him and fellow Nordic space-disco don Lindstrøm. The assembled react with vocal favour as the introductory back-and-forth is subtly mixed in, giving way to the latter’s characteristically buoyant bass and Terje’s trickly melisma.
It is notable that the horde in front of the decks seem to be having much more fun than the man standing behind them, who remains with his head bowed stoically, his fingers frantically fidgeting with knobs and tickling keys - Soichi Terada, this man is not. ‘Delorean Dynamite’ arrives next with the opening beats hammering home with the same ferocity of the titular vehicle, before the crowd is granted the chance to audibly participate with the easily-sung synth at its crux.
Up until this point, Terje has kept to the crate of his own making, with only his productions getting a look in. This changes when he spins an edit of Stevie Nicks’ ‘Stand Back’, an example of the extensive remix obscura for which he is equally regarded. “It’s all right, it’s all right / To be standing in a line” goes the chorus, though the Norwegian’s added bass and upped tempo ensure that no one in the room does so.
A deeper, darker period follows, taking in his acid rework of Beranek’s ‘Dra Til Hælvete’, which perforates the track with squelch aplenty. Some heavier movers ensue, before from the depths emerge the words “Baby, do you want to bump?”, the growled chorus to his cover of Boney M.’s song of the same name. He keeps to this disco groove for the remainder, as the familiar synth line from ‘Inspector Norse’ chimes into the mix to mixed glee and dismay: the tune is his finest, and is therefore almost always saved to the end of his set which is, therefore, almost at its close.
What follows is seven minutes of the best music that Motion has ever heard, arriving in the form of the Scandi paladin’s magnus opus and that which will last as his legacy. Rarely does a tune more jubilant than ‘Inspector Norse’, the ultimate paean to the good time, get a spinning within these hallowed halls; the slow build of the bouncing refrain to its glorious crescendo, shot through with effects that still sound not of this earth - let alone of the ARP 2600 semi-modular synthesiser on which they were built. As such, it is at once incredibly involved and incredibly simple, with the up-down-up-down of the refrain easily leaping from the larynx of everybody else in the room; it is perhaps with this paradox that he is able to capture, as one critic noted, ‘the elusive feeling of having a supremely, impossibly good time’. Joy abounds.
This bleeds into the only song that could possibly top it: Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’, which also receives the Terje remix treatment and goes off as you might expect it would.
Exiting stage left as it ends, he leaves us laughing, dancing and absolutely wanting more. But perhaps this is greedy: Todd Terje has packed a higher intensity of quality music into an hour at Motion than it would ordinarily be entitled to in a month. And he is therefore still very much a hero in my eyes.
Article by:
An ardent Geordie minus the accent, Sam seemingly strove to get as far away from the Toon as possible, as soon as university beckoned. Three undergraduate years at UoB were more than ample time for Bristol (as it inevitably does) to get under his skin, and so here he remains: reporting, as Assistant Editor, on the cultural happenings which so infatuated him with the city. Catch him at sam@365bristol.com.
