Gig review: Craven Faults at Thwaite Watermill, Leeds

It’s an evening of firsts. It’s almost certainly the first time the historic surroundings of the Thwaite Watermill by River Aire have hosted live music. It’s definitely the first live performance in front of an audience for Craven Faults, the much-acclaimed (and anonymous) electronic musician who records for revered Leeds label Leaf.

It’s also likely to be the first time that the sizable bank of equipment that covers a considerable chunk of a wall in the low-lit back room of the old watermill building has ventured outside of Craven Faults’ HQ.

At a time when convenience is key and increasing amounts of complex technology fits on the palm of a hand, Craven Faults’ uncompromising dedication to chunky analogue technology provides an admirable USP and musical mission statement: at one point, the solitary musician (or operator?) on stage has to tape down a note on the keyboard to sustain a drone as all available hands are needed to rewind a tape to the required segment.

Apart from a few tape reels (for loops), a mixing desk and a keyboard, the dense yet delicately textured, intricately detailed drones that constitute tonight’s hypnotically compelling one-hour performance originate from what can only be described as a wall of analogue modular synths, equipped with enough cables and blinking lights to suggest that the sold-out audience could well be observing the control panel of a 1960s sci-fi film spaceship.

It’s certainly fitting that an artist whose sound is reported to draw inspiration from the post-industrial landscape of Yorkshire has chosen this particularly well-preserved old industrial hub (built between 1823 and 1825, and now preserved as a museum) as the location for their first live shows (the initial Saturday evening show sold out immediately, leading to three more sets during the weekend).

As well as echoing such German pioneers of proto-electronica as Harmonia and Cluster, the repeated patterns and insistent yet gentle rhythmic thuds of opener Hurrocstanes (off this year’s sublime second LP Standers) are evocative of the relentless mechanical sequences of arcane industry.

Add the day’s humid heat, and it’s not too much of a stretch of the imagination to envision that we’ve travelled back in time to the bygone days when this space was an important cog in the wheels of local industry as the machinery escalates into ever more insistent levels of hypnotic, austere beauty.

The arresting visuals projected at the wall add to the spellbinding impact of tonight’s powerful performance: whether intentionally or by accident, it occasionally appears as if the bank of synth is cruising down narrow country roads projected on the wall, almost as if the now-famous motorik chug of European electronica pioneers had been transported from Kraftwerk’s autobahn to the windy asphalt arteries that cut through Yorkshire Moors.