Credit: Found On Internet

You might remember us running a news story about the Rage Sessions a while back – essentially they’re a showcase night put on for subscribers of The Rage, a company set up to bring new and interesting music to punters without all the legwork and hanging around in shitty pubs having to sit through god-awful support acts. Which is how we found ourselves in the Big Chill House up in Kings Cross last week, looking forward to their debut event.

Due to a last minute illness, the billed first act, Little Lost David had to be replaced by Joe Driscoll – Music Towers is pleasantly surprised, having stumbled across his ‘Origin Myths’ album last year. Driscoll makes use of live loops of his own beatboxing in order to re-create his album on his own. He’s a one-man-band for the iPod Generation.

This isn’t the Rage Session gig, but it is Joe Driscoll:

Showing a Beastie Boys-esque attitude to mixing old skool hip hop with other genres, the autobiographical ‘Origin Myth’ – hell, the entire of his set – reverberates in our brains still. Flipping between his loops, the repetition of his self-sampling gives Driscoll’s songs the power of a sonic steamroller. Sure, we’ve seen this sort of thing before (Rod Thomas is the name that springs to mind) but Driscoll is by far the performer who makes it look the most natural and seemless. And when Driscoll grins as he tells the story of how he used to be “a ten year-old white boy, thinking he’s Jamaican”, I can’t think of anyone do it so amiably either – the man is both as reverent to his influences as he is self-deprecating of his own humble beginnings.

After that, it all falls a bit flat for the top-billed Christopher D Ashley. Upstaged by the stand-in guy? Most of the attendees are deep under the influence of the free bar by this stage, and even a currently-teetotal Music Towers is finding it hard to muster an enthusiasm for his bleeps and beats.

In part this is because after the performance of Joe Driscoll, two guys standing static behind a laptop and a keyboard just seems a bit….lifeless. Christopher D Ashley and his cohort put on a more than competent performance, but it’s music that doesn’t necessarily reward public performance in a bar. It should be played from a dark corner of a club, where smoke and gloom hide its creators. If this could be transplanted into an environment where the audience had no choice but to engage with the music on its terms, rather than theirs, then Music Towers suspects they’d be paying a lot more attention.