Livestream review: Irish duo Bicep fill the space with bravura display of dance-floor optimism
Matthew McBriar and Andrew Ferguson of Bicep. Picture: Sam Mulvey
The white space that framed Bicep at the start of their streamed gig from London felt like an all too perfect metaphor for where live music is at in early 2021. With touring an impossibility for the time being, the literal gulf between musicians and their audience has become a huge blank void – almost impossible to fill whether you are a stadium megastar or a young band just starting out.
Bicep, aka Belfast producers and DJs Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar, are neither. But they were good value for a 60 minute set that celebrated the recent launch of their extraordinary second album Isles (which hit the top 5 in both Ireland and the UK), and which also allowed their fanbase to at least imagine how thrilling it must be to experience this work in the flesh, rumbling through in cathartic waves.
That was an achievement given that, even in front of a live audience, electronic music can sometimes fall on its face. That was clearly a possibility in the case of these two studio boffins for whom fans had
paid £14 to watch. In an otherwise empty exhibition area at the Saatchi Gallery – think an Apple Store with all the iPads removed – they stood opposite one another, hunched over keyboards, samplers and endless coils of cable. The tableau did not suggest a high thrill-per-second ratio.
This, however, was noodling in pursuit of a higher purpose. On tour, Bicep expand the horizons of their compositions with mind-altering back projections. They did much the same here, as the camera swerved from close-up to overhead and then turned psychedelic and swirly.
The effect was somewhere between watching an old TV testcard have a meltdown and staging a rave in your living room. And it was in perfect harmony with the soundtrack. Lido, an epic highlight from Isles, conjured with the ghosts of 1990s electronica: at various moments, Bicep referenced Orbital, The Orb, Aphex Twin and (a little further back) Brian Eno.
And when a sample of goth chanteuse Afra Haza swirled through Atlas, it was like the second coming of Future Sound of London’s Papua New Guinea (similarly built around a vocal by Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard). The crucial caveat is that Bicep don’t borrow from these acts so much as fold their love for them into their music: it’s a tribute that pushes beyond merely paying homage and alights somewhere grippingly original.
Isles is a rumination on Ferguson and McBriar’s dual identities as Irish-born musicians who have built their careers in London. This performance was similarly several things at once: a bravura display of dance-floor optimism, a thought experiment in sending the fervour of the club down an internet connection and a chill-out session at the end of the world. But, above all, it took you out of your lockdown purgatory to somewhere strange and new.
