Part of me wants to think that the insufferable instruMental squall emitting from telephone jim jesus’ on-stage box of tricks is some kind of over-my-head genius. Part of me wants it to shut the hell up. Part of me wishes that I’d got here later and missed tonight’s opening act. Part of me can’t help thinking that if I’d arrived earlier and got a few drinks inside me this’d sound better. Part of me reckons that this can’t possibly help the sales of jim’s (George Chadwick to his mum) new ‘A Point Too Far To Astronaut’ LP, through anticon, of course (tonight is pitched as a sort of label showcase). Part of me wonders if he’s the natural offspring of Four Tet and Aphex Twin. Part of me concludes that he’d be better off sticking to his re$tiform bodie$ day job. How many parts is that? Too many, probably, but not enough to really care about what’s going on in front of me. Please, make it stop.

Thank you.

I’ve come for passage anyway, not his re$tiform buddy fiddling with switches and knobs. David Bryant’s debut album in his lower-case-only guise, ‘The Forcefield Kids’, is totally impressive. It mixes top-notch, fucked-up electronica with free-flowing raps, see-sawing from paranoia to the political. It’s the best album I’ve heard this year to fall under the hip-hop banner, basically. So it’s a little disappointing when Bryant/passage takes to the stage and rolls into re$tiform material (granted, this is a solo and group set – the show’s billed as both passage and re$tiform bodie$). Sure, it’s decent, but totally anticon average, in the sense that anyone with a vauge concept of the label will be familiar with its style. Better is the material from ‘The Forcefield Kids’: ‘the pins in the bowels of the charmed design’ is a riot on record; live it becomes a war, churned up and twisted like scrapmetal sabers stabbing at a spent corpse. It’s ultimately the high watermark of a set that never wholly grabs the attention, to these ears at least. In the man’s defence it’s his first day in Britain, the first day of the tour, and yesterday he broke a month-long abstinence by sucking back on a whiskey bottle. The airport is to blame, so says jim. I can relate.

Part of me simply expected more, y’know? Don’t be a hater.