audiovisual catharsis
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Unique hallucinogenic audiovisual noise set by one of the UK most original talents in the niche genre.
- Cinecide
Ryan Jordan’s music is the exact polar opposite of easy listening. It’s painful, uncomfortable and uncompromising noise – and the semi-hallucinatory live experience is dominated by constant strobe lights. Basically, it’s awesome.
- Time Out
Filming a concert or just trying to tell someone else, does not come close to the actual experience...The basement room is darkened, it smells almost suffocating to Palo Santo. It flashes and I jump startled. My eyes first have to get used to the strong contrast of darkness to powerful stroboscope. A few more twitches, then the overpowering, technoid noise - which the light triggers over the solar cells - begins to numb me. I stare into the choppy, flashing strobe like a traffic accident I do not want to see, but have to see. A white spot burns into my visual cells. A little bit I get scared that maybe this one will stay permanent. I close my eyes, but that does not change the mood in the room. The sound frequencies seem to stimulate the eyelid as if I were pressing my fingers with my eyelids. I see after-lights. So do not care, eyes open. The white light changes at times, turning into color spots that circle around me. Then again the lightning seems to be moving towards me. Ryan's profile floats towards me and away again. Extreme - I think again and again, I'll never forget that again. Can I keep it off for 30 minutes? But the fascination of the spectacle is just too big to interrupt, even though my ears are already hurting. My personal highlight is the moment when I begin to see the holographic structures that Ryan reported in his talk. And then the 30 minutes are over too fast. I go on cotton candy, a strange relaxation spreads in my head and I love the silence that reigns in my head. What day do we have today? Monday. Wow. I was shot for 30 minutes from reality into a holistic parallel universe. I hope for enlightened dreams and day visions throughout the week. But unfortunately there is nothing more, except that the smell of Palo Santo in the future will probably remember this trip.
- Veronika Christine Dräxler
He’s an exemplar of the DIY ethos and he’ll have quietly influenced hundreds of instrument builders before our less manoeuvrable musical institutions realise they should have been paying attention.
- Bang The Bore
Just saw @ryan__jordan live and it was utterly fucking terrifying...I've seen a fair few weird noise art acts in my time, but that was something else. It was like being on a hallucinogenic drug. It was not enjoyable. It was an endurance test. It was torture. It was sickening. But it was one hell of an experience. I recommend anyone and everyone who likes music so heavy it challenges them to go and watch Ryan Jordan if he ever plays near you. You will not regret it. Just don't take acid or mushrooms beforehand as you will most probably end up being sectioned.
- Dan Callis
The resulting instruments, though visually crude, are Frankenstein-like webs of copper wire and rocks.
- Geoff Manaugh
Wandering into Ryan Jordan's set was disconcerting as the audience stood uniformly rooted to the spot as this abominable light-show and the sound of industrial breakdown blasted out from the stage. The effect is mentally destabilising as you try and process what you're presented with. Then that lizard part at the back of your brain takes over and you start to hear the throb of something behind the battery, the light show stops blinding you and starts breaking down into jagged images that make you think you can see the tracery of your own retina.
- Charlie Bailey
The performance was simple, theatrical and utterly terrifying. At first, the room was silent, and Jordan had filled the stage-end of the room with smoke. Three strobes were positioned faced the audience; as they started to pulse, they activated light-sensitive circuits (hand-built by Jordan), which triggered electronic sounds. As the lights flashed more intensely, the music escalated until the space was filled with a throbbing white light and an excruciating noise. It was like being in a cloud of sheet lightning.
- Colin Perry
Ryan Jordan can be heard from a mile away and the closer to the flashing core of the strobe light the stranger it becomes. The 500bpm drill in a hypnotic, surrealist and visceral display of the intensity of sound and light. The retro death telegraphy and possession trance are pretty accurate descriptions of what Ryan Jordan does, others may call it a loud noise with a flashing light, but the experience was so intense to watch it was worth spending 45 minutes of the day to stand still and pay close attention.
- James Wootton
He used various synthesizers and he burned incense to create a liberating and dark hypnosis..... Everyone just allowed their bodies to take over and not think about anything other than what we were experiencing. It was incredible and now I finally understand the mentality of raving. He describes his work as an 'audio-visual catharsis' and it makes complete sense because his music takes over you and leaves you in a trance. You don't think. You just act.
- Daisy Johnson
Embedded in wires and circuits, Ryan Jordan beams throbbing, ritualistic recreations of rave musik from some dystopic future place where all recording technology is long since gone and only folk memories of 'dance music' exist.
- Adam Parkinson
I always wanted to try LSD but after this performance, there is no need for it anymore.
- Someone who was at the gig at Lothringer 13 Halle
At times I was genuinely worried I might keel over in the flashing lights.
- Lisa Buckby
White heat strobe emissions; heart pounding kicks; total sensory overload and temporary ego death through the sheer hypnotic power of NOISE. Jordan is attempting mass hypnosis, alongside a single incessant strobe light. His 'beats' - if they can be described thus - are militaristic staccato while the strobe works in hideous unrelenting synchronicity. Looking around the room is highly disorientating - crowd movements caught in grotesque bursts of violent white light.
- Harry Sword
Ryan Jordan throws all-night noise events, and his set was an all out assault. Starting with cracks and pops that sounded threatening, like massively magnified logs crackling on a fire, it built up to a barrage of sound with an industrial strobe light pointed directly in the audience's faces pulsing to match its rhythms and intensity. The only option with this assault was to close one's eyes, which - in the manner of Brion Gysin's 'Brain Machine' - caused geometrical hallucinations. Quite akin to the music of Astral Social club, it became an ecstatic and literally transporting experience, removing us from the room, and was over all too soon.
- Joe Muggs
Disorientation induced, flashes of green and blue stream across the Box ceiling, asynchronous brain cell firing, slow motion backwards movement, Ken Kesey grotesquely fixed facial expression, eyes shielded under coats, a sustained arc - pity the two unfortunates at the front facing the machine straight on.
- Peter Guy
The timing of light and sound is immaculate, and richly textured. Our own circuitry fully descended now from the cerebral, critical, suspicious human being, to a purely biological system, granulating, flipping on and off with the light and sound.
- Nathan Jones
Guantanamo Bay-style techno torture which left me stressed and headachy...... fifteen minutes of epilepsy-inducing strobe lighting accompanied by head-searing screaming white noise (HELP) - so awful that I was praying for a power blackout.
- some random blogger I found
We sit out Ryan Jordan's set on the second stage because it's packed, it's also so very loud it shakes the windows across the courtyard and the relentless strobe can be seen blinking off them too. Even from outside it's intense.
- Hickeysonic
Ryan Jordan draws us in with a strobes and noise set that's unlike anything we've ever seen before. Aiming to create a sense of unease and hypnosis, the darkened room is lit only by the incessant flash of white strobes that pump in time to ear-shattering noises that are unpredictable and we are left disorientated and dizzied by the sheer violence of it. Like driving against a tide of foglights while a cassette explodes in your tape deck at full volume, it's a completely earth-shattering performance that leaves us stunned and speechless. Seek out this act for yourself, seriously.
- Mike Ninehertz