Notes from a set by one of London’s most exciting new live performers.

Black Fondu is one of the most exciting new artists on London’s live circuit right now, quickly building a cultish following through visceral and unique live sets and  fast becoming a favourite of bookers at The Windmill and The George Tavern.. Little else is publicly known about the artist, whose only online imprints amount to a handful of fan-made live videos and a pair of singles up online. Joey Hollis reports from the front line…

Scene 1 George Tavern 4/10/24

No one, nowadays, should stick rigidly to what they ‘can’ do. Strength lies in improvisation. The blows that count are all landed with the left. You want to go AWOL from yourself. But you can’t… So you stay and enjoy it. The broken syntax of the beat strobes your scattered brain. A certain kind of electricity is switched on. It screams for a fraction of a second and then cuts off again. Vulgar lightning exposes a palinopsic-throbbing-collapse on stage. A folded spectre stalking between two mics.

Momentarily unexposed in the black sun of the no/strobe a frenetic-industrial-animism is chasing itself across the surface of your eyelids; a psychedelic dread shadow of a body entering its own periphery;  a fragmented  form in stop motion animation; an impossible presence pulsating in the interval – always in the break. The human body is virtualized in the motion capture technology of rhythm: a refracted shadow derived from a relentless frequency. The sadistic capture of quantitative time is humiliated in this hyperpositional skank – this shattered self. In this ghostly hollering that far exceeds the broken monitors, Black Fondu’s uncaptured shadow is always lurking between beats. As the MC’s fractured form is spliced across the stage, rearranged in this long scattered score of broken intervals, the cartoon at the heart of the matter, (the truth!), is glimpsed only as we blink, in the dark reaches of the stage, the blackness of the between, in the light when there is no strobe. 

There has been a crack up at the love in. The beat collapses. You take a last look at your lingering self – this is music to deform your life to – and it is gone as soon as they turn the lights on…