Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
Concert date: 16.06.2011
Attendance: 800
Ticket price: 10 € (presale) / 12 € (day of show)
Sky-high expectations can wreck the pure enjoyment, and disappointment is the currency so many gigs get paid in, the kind I’d happily wipe from memory even though my soul was aching to see, hear and devour them beforehand. With Moveknowledgement, my wife and I had so far been treated to downright baroque levels of satisfaction, the peak of it surely being the closing act of Animateka in 2007. How do you top that, and is it even possible? That was the question we carried with us as we fought our way through the stream of people packing the inside of the venue.
The clock struck half past nine, the stage lights came on, and a cannonade of sound from Electric Manland thundered out of the speakers as an invitation to jointly test, empirically, the power and energy of the new material. The opening rhythm of drums and bass recalls The Knack and their My Sharona, but this time the quantum leap is something else entirely. Electro pop, in a sparkling, infectious funky way, whisks you off into a parallel reality where the energy of the five on stage, singer N’Toko, guitarist Wein, keyboardist Miha Šajina, bassist Dejan Slak and drummer David Cvelbar, sends them from the very first moment on a mission to fully discharge the demons smoldering inside. The elevated heartbeat of a narrative that builds on how to resist the temptations of this world in your own way and stay true to yourself tips over into total contemplation with La Droga E Il Buio. Moveknovledgement sound solid and rhythmically explosive, full of emotion and an uncompromising, punchy hunger for total group ecstasy and for fusing what happens on stage with the crowd. Slick and in their own neurotic yet tasteful way, they shift the proverbially static Slovenian audience toward more and more nodding, hell, even dancing, so that after a convincingly delicious run of new stuff they rock you into a state of more comfortable and damn familiar past.
Chemicals recalls Nebukadnezar’s dictate of dark blackness. N’Toko’s vocal is like an extra instrument, and the salvos of words, even if often not quite intelligible, fill your ear canals and put the cherry on top of the swaying rhythm of fat bass, drums and keyboards loaded with effects and atmosphere, while the charismatic frontman, armed with a mic, slides deeply and obsessively into a state of total live ecstasy. Music is the engine, and onto the steel bond of fat rhythm and the bricks of an incredibly full sound, everyone who came to the show with open ears and souls gets built in alongside the musicians. The satanically apocalyptic 666 fills the vaults of the hall with a funky dub trip back to the seventies, but with truly eruptive sequences of cathartically hot guitar distortion. A slightly quirky intermezzo sneaks into the set in the form of a brilliant take on Kidz R Fresh, which weaves vignette-like guitar riffs in between beeps that sound like computer glitches, placed there to fool you and, after a ritual build-up, lead you into chanting the chorus “Kidz R Fresh!”, while Switch It Up satisfies with poisonous goodness, ingeniously complemented by the newly released 36 Lakes. It’s as if you’d really ended up in the twilight zone, and amid the stomping of flying saucers run into a manically depressed serial killer who lures you down a godforsaken dirt track in a dark forest, drowns you in each of the thirty-six psychedelic lakes and stuffs your mouth with a full dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms sprinkled with a cocktail of every forbidden substance imaginable. What you absolutely didn’t expect at this gig was such a thoroughly shuffled spectrum of songs, penetrating the membrane of your eardrums in a completely mixed-up order and rocking your brain into total resonance with the mystical plateaus of the Moveknowledgement universe, and this time part of the stroll through the labyrinths of perception is truly otherworldly. As if you were stuck in the cosmic sphere, the purely suggestive U.F.Oh. stirs your cerebral waters, and then once again an echo of the recent past and of a long-dead despot of Babylon.
Nebukadnezar is mighty and downright addictively hypnotic, and behind the name, which in the Akkadian of Babylonian orthography, Nabûkuduriusur, means “Nabu, protect the crown,” or else “the borders” or “the heirs,” and is Nabu’s favorite, a whole array of rainbow emotions sneaks in again, boiling up from the very navel of creation. Moveknowledgement then shift the proceedings into a totally unexpected gear. Sandra Tomović steps onto the stage, a former member of the alliance of penetrating and fresh musical masterminds, who was part of the collective until 2006. What could introduce this likeable singer with the angelic voice better than the title track of their debut, the melodically sweet Sun Sun. A thoroughly dubby, playful tangle of pop melody floods the hall with the radioactive radiation of total positivity. Sandra sounds like she was borrowed from Morcheeba, and what makes it even lovelier is that she doesn’t strive for the poses of self-absorbed divas, but expresses the beauty of modesty in a truly lovely and honest way. N’Toko’s reggae rapping adds itself, in a raw, masculine way, to the pile of emotions from which Monolyth rises into the sky. A desert wind couldn’t carry the pearly voice of the guest of honor any more naturally across the expanses of the urban jungle of globalization, whose silhouettes the unbeatable N’Toko lays out. The experience wouldn’t have been complete if all six on stage hadn’t built it constantly, while the crowd could only gulp down big mouthfuls of sweat and pheromone-saturated air.
Standing ovations reward a truly exceptional stage fusion of the present and a past that will never come again, and after Zorro from Nabukadnezar it’s time for the rock’n’roll of Hands and the stripped-down form of Moveknovledgement’s present. That present is closer to the definition of a pure-blooded punk-dub outfit, sent to this world to teach even the hopelessly stiff and rigid how to dance and move. Rage Against The Machine would envy the punchy cannonade of Stop / Continue, after which the title track, stitched together from all the titles and bits of lyrics from the latest record, Pump Down!!! fittingly rounded off the regular part of the show into a complete experience. Thunderous applause gives no hope of an early surrender, and the persistent crowd squeezes out two extensions of this exceptional live experience. After Average Bear, the first single from the latest record, it’s time for repeats of songs in a somewhat rougher, primally thundering form. The honor of the reprise goes to Electric Manland, with which beginning and end shake hands, and after an even rawer version of La Droga E Il Buio than the original, the visibly satisfied and exhausted quintet of knights of perfect musical aesthetics thank the crowd for an exceptionally synergetic show and leave the stage.
The curtain may have truly fallen this time, but in any case, not a single flaw can be pinned on what we saw and heard. Moveknowledgement have successfully launched their fourth record and fired it into the intergalactic field of the vast universe as perfect proof that they can hold their own against all the world’s competition today. A gig that was in many ways even better than plenty of sexual experiences easily counts as one of the best experiences of this year and several years back, and in the minds and hearts of the satisfied crowd all that can echo is the fact that Moveknowledgement are more than capable of serving up excellence and refined perfection. Let’s hope we get offerings like this, at least as far as they’re concerned, for many years to come.
Setlist
1. Electric Manland 2. La Droga E Il Buio 3. Chemicals 4. 666 5. Kidz R Fresh 6. Switch It Up 7. 36 Lakes 8. U.F.Oh 9. Listen To Nebukadnezar 10. Sun Sun 11. Monolyth 12. I Am Zorr 13. Hands 14. Stop / Continue 15. Pump Down!!! —- ENCORE: 16. Average Bear 17. Electric Manland 18. La Droga E Il Buio
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