AK/DK + THICK RICHARD + DANALOGUE – ‘BRIGHTON FESTIVAL’, STUDIO THEATRE, BRIGHTON DOME 3.5.26
With the 60th edition of Brighton Festival in full swing after a mellifluous opening night from Beverly Glenn-Copeland, night three promises something entirely different. Drum-and-synth electro-punks AK/DK team up with more-Moog-than-MagicScore analogue synth act Danalogue for a bespoke night of postmodern eclecticism with visuals from Lewes-based AV artist Innerstrings.
AK/DK are local legends: university lecturers and noisemakers Ed Chivers and Gee Sowerby, a duo spiritually committed to Dame Area-style improvisation that sounds like hearing LCD Soundsystem’s soundcheck through the walls of a club toilet. Combined with opener (and member of The Comet Is Coming) Danalogue’s devotion to old-school soundscapes and Overmono-collaborator Innerstrings’ visuals, tonight seems set to be a singular, sensory audiovisual experience.
First on stage at Brighton Dome’s Studio Theatre is Danalogue, with a surprise (unadvertised) short set from poet Thick Richard sandwiched between the opener and AK/DK on runtime posters in the foyer. As the room fills with grey heads, beanies, baseball caps, and the expected out-of-office attire for bank holiday Brighton, anticipation swells as slightly more pints are poured than a typical Sunday.
Danalogue – real name Dan Leavers – arrives on Brighton Dome’s studio stage, hooded like an executioner, with a cheery “hello” to the audience. With wobbling, pulsating synths in an extended ‘Intro,’ ‘Theta Wave Convergence’ comes bounding straight out of the gate. Innerstrings’ visuals immediately match the music with rippling lines on the screen behind him. Layers are gradually added, with twinkling wind-chime effects, creating something atmospheric yet cacophonous, as Dan is cast live onto the rippling AV backdrop. As his opener ramps up with dual-wielding synths, the visuals look like being tumbled inside a diamond, reflecting the chaos of the track as it evolves into a fully-fledged club track built up from scratch in real time.
Throughout tonight, Leavers creates rising and cresting house music (in the loosest terms possible), the way you’d create free form jazz – rhythmically rigid yet unpredictable, it swells and builds without ever dropping. It feels like edging right toward a cliff and breaking before teetering cartoonishly off the edge, causing hips to sway and heads to bounce as two artists work in synergy, aggravating an elderly audience’s Plantar Fasciitis in some dance fever.
While immensely entertaining to watch, the set is so seamless it’s incredibly difficult to distinguish most tracks. In fact, Leavers does not say a word to the crowd until the middle of his set, questioning, “Hello Brighton! What are we doing here?” after ‘Sonic Hypnosis.’ A myriad of responses, including “dancing” or “meeting my mum”, Danalogue gives us his answer: “we’re here to be pummelled by sonic waves.”
Throughout his set, Leavers’ joy and passion for his synths, which he states are “older than him,” before the infectious ‘Juno Interlude’. From tracks that are so cacophonous they sound like discarded Trent Reznor cuts from ‘Tron’ to Printworks-type ravers in ‘Do Anything For The High,’ Danalogue proves that new doesn’t mean better with 21st-century sounds wrung out of 50-year-old equipment. As a Beavertown-chugging bundle of energy, Leavers’ closer ‘Who’s Afraid Of The Heavy Cloud’ pivots into ‘pulverising’ kick-driven hard techno with slight shades of ‘Vroom Vroom.’ Our opener has the maniacal joy of a kid on Christmas Day; never growing out of the phase of finding noise entertaining, just allowing the audience occasional pit stops to the dancefloor.
Danalogue:
Dan Leavers – synth, electronics
Danalogue setlist:
‘Intro’
‘Theta Wave Convergence’
‘Sonic Hypnosis’
‘Juno Interlude’
‘Do Anything For The High’
‘Who’s Afraid Of The Heavy Cloud’
While the back-to-back combination of Danalogue and AK/DK is a promising prospect, there is a merciful reprieve from the barrage with 15 minutes from poet Thick Richard – a self-proclaimed “sweary f*cking poet” resembling Richard Hawley in cosplay as a preacher. Within his motormouthed poems, there’s a middle finger to dickheads, ‘MILFS’ as an unfortunate acronym and a detailed description of his scrotum. Landing as part stand-up, part verbalised journalling, it is pure secondary school rhyming, at times juvenile but quintessentially British, even sipping a tinny throughout. With his final two poems, Richard whips out a knife for a poem about a chef’s heart attack, with rhythmic beats of the knife game forming the most basic of beats. Final poem ‘And Suddenly…’ isn’t much cheerier, delivering a description of a Threads-esque nuclear holocaust that commits to gallows humour. While delivering on the sweariness, his self-deprecation undersells his stream-of-consciousness rants on modern life’s anxieties, providing us with a compère just about holding on to his sanity.
Thick Richard Poems:
‘F*ck You’
‘Leftover Soup’
‘The Hand That Holds The Knife’ (possibly?)
‘And Suddenly…’
thickrichard-productions.tumblr.com
With no moment to breathe, Richard, with the fervour of a trying-to-be-sacked red coat, chants “give me an A”. Forcing the audience to spell AK/DK makes the duo appear on stage, like magic (or a properly planned set if you’re a cynic). Ascending synths signal the opening of ‘Shared Particles,’ with echoed vocals like a howl into the void alongside Motorik drumming as rigid as a conservative father in Fabric. With unrelenting kick/snare momentum, blue strobes, a siren-like effect and Chivers CB microphone, there’s a feeling of police pulling up to a pub fight as the crowd jostles in a middle ground between moshing and dancing.
‘Maxwell Waves’ is more of the same: darting synths and a sampled vocal drowning in fuzz, barely discernible as ‘do what you need’. It only crescendos, as the kick and snare take a pummelling in the name of propulsion. Both Sowerby and Chivers weaponise their respective drum kits for an ear-filling eruption after a steady climb.
After the obligatory thank yous to support and an allusion to seeing them later, ‘Feeds’ is introduced by Chivers tinkering with switchboard-like decks, with vocals only discernible as shouts of “yeah yeah yeah yeah” channel Daft Punk ‘Is Playing At My House’s frantic optimism.
‘Kosmiche #1’ is a welcome slowdown that starts as more sway than thrash, despite Chivers moving non-stop throughout, flailing and tweaking synth knobs. It is an impressive juggling act from both members, giving way to a typical thrashing from their double-drum setup in the track’s final third. “That track is made up. That’s all yours for tonight,” Sowerby announces, as tracks get elongated to tease drops that arrive with a rhythmic fury so hypnotic you don’t realise it’s been nearly 10 minutes.
Keeping their early promise, ‘Nobody Shouts’ signals Thick Richard’s return to the stage as an unlikely frontman. Due to the recent post-punk revival, Richard turns AK/DK into something close to Do Nothing or Yard Act filtered through FruityLoops. Bizarrely, the sarcastic poetry of alienation marks Richard as a compelling presence, stepping into a speech of pissed-off electro-punk.
As the crowd continues to deliver some of the most interesting dance moves seen in a Glastonbury fallow year, the air becomes thick with sweat and Abyss pale ale coming out the pores of every drunken disco dancer.
With ‘Wholes’ prefaced as “let’s slow things down,” their structure is unwavering and deserves all the plaudits: slow build, thrashing middle section, strip it down to just the rhythm, then build back up to an even more hammering close. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, right?
Threatening an early conclusion, Sowerby asks, “Do you want one more song or two?” despite the answer being obvious. ‘Battersea’ is introduced as “this is one of our oldest songs… it sounds a bit like Battles.” It builds on an arpeggiated line from an Akai into an easily chantable melody, with hyper-pop-style vocal effects on Sowerby.
Contributing to the scent in the room, “You know you’re in a classy establishment when the backstage beer is Abyss,” Sowerby states before Danalogue is welcomed back to the stage for the closer ‘Morphology.’ It is an infectious and delirious marriage of synth stabs, Sowerby’s crashingly rigid drumming, weaponising indiscernible vocals as percussive hooks before Chivers picks up his drumsticks to deliver the final release of dancefloor-edging tension.
In the interval between Danalogue and Thick Richard, I hear a steward say, “I’ve had to close the door, we’ve got a theatre show on downstairs.” Tonight’s concert is an exhilarating, earfilling celebration of the prescience of Suicide and Silver Apples’ influence, featuring two acts with less than 20k on Spotify between them. Danalogue and AK/DK are utterly hypnotic, to the point you don’t realise how much you’re moving until you step outside, ears ringing, drenched in sweat and feeling immensely sorry for the audience of Kolhaas.
AK/DK:
Ed Chivers – vocals, drums, synths, electronics
Gee Sowerby – vocals, drums, synths, electronics
AK/DK setlist:
‘Shared Particles’ (from 2020 ‘Shared Particles’ album)
‘Maxwell’s Waves’ (from 2014 ‘Synths + Drums + Noise + Space’ album)
‘Feeds’ (from 2020 ‘Shared Particles’ album)
‘Kosmiche #1’ (from 2020 ‘Shared Particles’ album) (into “Improvised Track”)
‘Nobody Shouts’ with Thick Richard (from 2024 ‘Strange Loops’ album)
‘Wholes’ (from 2024 ‘Strange Loops’ album)
‘Battersea’ (from 2013 ‘Dispatch #3’ cassette)
‘Morphology’ with Danalogue (from 2017 ‘Patterns/Harmonics’ album)
