Live Review: Ambulance v Ambulance

“Can we turn these lights off?”, asks Robin Stewart,  “It’s the sky!” Someone in the audience shouts back. “Just shut your eyes then” Stewart replies, determined to ensure a fully immersive experience as Ambulance v Ambulance initiated a night presented by Music to Come with the Jordanian label, Drowned By Locals. 

Uncertain whether the command to close my eyes was serious, I took a quick glance around to see that much of the audience had complied obediently. As Robin Stewart and Jeffrey Lee Hearse (Ambulance v Ambulance) began their set, I understood why. 

Vinyl crackled and a distorted harmonica, warped and wailing, gyrated as recordings of thunder rumbled in and out of the soundscape. The duo flipped records, rotated cassettes and twisted these sounds through a labyrinth of equipment that included various synthesisers, sequencers, samplers, mixers and more noise-boxes. What emerged was a barrage of noises that shouldn’t have made sense, but somehow did: each bending note, shift in pitch and sudden vocal fragment glued into a collage of meticulous manipulation. Accurately described as “psychotropic lamentations” by Music to Come, Ambulance v Ambulance certainly provide an ethereal experience, one that requires the imagination to be fully realised, hence the request for closed eyes.

When I thought it safe, I snuck an eye open to investigate the architects of the agitated ambience at hand. The two men stood hunched over the table packed tightly with wires and soundboards, making careful adjustments to the output. They looked like sci-fi fanatics translating extraterrestrial  frequencies through a bootleg radio telescope, and what they were receiving was scarcely intelligible. The sound of Ambulance v Ambulance is not meant to be understood literally, but to be interpreted through active listening and experience where the audience perceives meaning through the textures, rhythms and emotional intensity rather than conventional musical narratives.

Overall, the sonic duo Ambulance v Ambulance offered a great introduction to what promises to be a night of brilliant auditory experimentation.