Dead Space Chamber Music / Futures We Lost / Slow Knife @ Peer Hat, Manchester, 13th April 2025

I once saw a quote that said, ‘music is kinetic, as it has motion and feelings that comes from the motion, so you are showing them how to feel’, I wrote it down to use it one day in a review and now seems like the perfect time to use it.

Since writing album and gig reviews for The Sleeping Shaman, I’ve found myself being pushed into different genres of music that I would usually have ignored. I’ve gone to shows with little or no expectations and come away being quite mesmerised by what I saw, think Amigo The Devil, Smote and The Utopia Strong, to name a few, and tonight was another such experience.

The Peer Hat is a curious little venue, underneath the streets of the Northern Quarter in Manchester, but it’s rapidly becoming one of my favourites. Upon entering the Dark Alchemy promoted night, we had a quick chat with Ellen from headliners Dead Space Chamber Music, before being asked to leave as the first support band needed more time to soundcheck. This allowed us time to have a chat with Salford’s own She The Throne, another band who really impressed me when I saw them supporting The Body & Dis Fig last year.

Now, I’d never heard of Manchester’s Slow Knife before and as I sit here typing this the day after, I’m still scratching my head about what I witnessed. They had an assortment of instruments, including gongs, penny whistles, an accordion, a guitarist and a drummer who also played banjo. The most curious amongst them was the James Dean looking wannabe frontman, who played the nails, rubbing it against a can of mojito, I think. They were blowing into the mics, using cowbells, and I stood there quite bemused for thirty minutes.

They are inspired by no-wave noise jazz and are extremely experimental, pushing it to the limit. The keyboards were cool, with one track sounding like a German oompah drinking song but it all came across a bit surreal, with echoed vocals, as the guitarist wandered around the crowd hitting a gong and singing in people’s faces. There was lots of incoherent warbling from James Dean, as more knobs got twiddled with the words of ‘Disobey Your King’ ringing around as the bongos were played and they departed.

Futures We Lost is a dark post-industrial, cinematic techno soundscape from artist and producer Doug Gordon. Stood there with his Korg MS-20 and keyboards, he transports you to another time and place, which for me, was back to my clubbing and rave days of the early to mid ‘90s.

Starting off with Blood Of Labour, he builds the tension in the room perfectly, with big beats creating an eerie but intoxicating atmosphere, and when that beat drops, he’s headbanging along with the rest of us in the tiny room. He’s constantly busy, plugging leads in and out of the punky, snarly sounding Korg making it unpredictable, so it never sounds quite the same as on the brilliant self-titled album.

He manages to switch tempos, pace and rhythm effortlessly, never losing the crowd once, as he’s in perpetual motion, switching between two more songs called Liminal and Wreath with ease. Accompanied by the space age projection on the screen behind him, it goes a bit trippy and my feet are bouncing. I felt lost in time and space and Gordon in clearly enjoying himself.

With the floor vibrating around me, he slaps the cymbal of the drum kit behind him as he ends his set with Artificial Spectres,a nod perhaps to the industrial scars of the northern English landscape, but nonetheless, it was an enthralling spectacle to witness first hand, with dark ambient noise creating a memorial to all those futures we lost. I had a chat with Doug afterwards, I even ended up buying a t-shirt and look forward to seeing him again soon as this is what live music is all about, putting a smile on people’s faces.

After a short interval, it was time for Bristolians Dead Space Chamber Music, with a dozen candles placed on and around the stage, I was stood in anticipation about what I was about to witness. With Tom Bush on guitar, Ekaterina Samarkina on drums/percussion and Ellen Southern on vocals, the three piece begin with the gently strummed opening of Bryd One Brere. The song is the earliest surviving English secular love song, and it has that Game of Thrones ambience, almost spiritual experience to it, with Southern’s soothing vocals accompanied by her playing of the bowed psaltery to add to the atmospheric nature of the song.

Going straight into Mari Llwyd/Morfa’r Frenhines, we listen to bells and tambourines that enhance the sound of the traditional Welsh Wassailing song. Southern, carries the skull of a horse and continues the lively ‘pwnco’ and Bush has his guitar going through a Roland sampler to create some magical and mythical sounds that help take you back to that ancient time. After witnessing this, I put my pen and pad down for a while and simply watched what was unfolding in front of me. The crowd was transfixed by the splendour unravelling on the stage and upon finishing John Dowland’s Flow My Teares, what followed was even more wonderment.

Sinister and sombre sounds were fashioned by using chainmail on the snare drum, Southern, adjourned in a black knitted veil, drops spent matches onto a silver tray, Samarkina strums the bow of a cello up and down the cymbals, creating clinks and crashes that were mesmerising. This was the beginning of the final song of the evening, the wonderfully titled The Pit/Dissolved in Ashes which is an arrangement of the Dies Irae Latin chant from the 13th century. Southern used her thunder drum to great effect before hitting the outside tambourine with a drum stick to summon unique noises.

Meanwhile, Samarkina is stood behind the drums, hitting the snare with her hands, before the guitar from Bush, explodes into life and the powerful vocals take over. Southern screams away from the mic, before returning with an almost middle eastern style vocal, wailing at times. It’s accompanied by military style drumming, and there is just so much happening that my eyes and brain were in overload.

They create something so beautiful from something so simple, and at the end of the song, nails are dropped onto silver trays by both Southern and Samarkina as the former wonders around the audience. She returns to the stage to say ‘thank you’ in a soft voice, to bring an end to an evening of soul-stirring and tender melodies fused magically with doom laden rhythms that showcased a different approach to music and what is possible. Thank you one and all.

Dead Space Chamber Music

Futures We Lost

Slow Knife

Scribed by: Matthew Williams
Photos by: Lee Edwards