Landscape Body Machine, a project known as Craig Joseph Huxtable to his friends, played "The Void" at the Atlantis night Club. "The Void" is the term Atlantis uses to describe their Wednesday night lineup that costs them as little as humanly possible. Let's be honest, Wednesday nights are not big nights out for the gainfully employed, so most clubs would qualify as members of "The Void."

Atlantis is an amazing location, and is a club I'd never been to previously. Partly because as I'm just not drawn to the typical Hip Hop fare that they tend to host. I am not, as they say, their target demographic. It tends to appeal most to the best dressed in Vancouver's hip hop community, and the DJs are given to long, drawn out, boring sets with no soul if this week's DJ set any indication; mindless downtempo tunes mixed together by the house DJs...

Where many primarily solo acts in the industrial genre are fleshed out with additional bodies for live acts, to provide bass or drum or another pair of hands on keyboards, LBM sticks to the one man band. It's likely one of the dangers of a genre that can be played, sung, and mixed entirely in one's bedroom or at the kitchen table; that it's hard to play live without additional hands on stage. Some would say that many industrial acts DON'T play live, but that some of them merely appear to play live. That said, Huxtable does play live.

It appeared to take a couple songs for the act to hit its stride. I'm not sure if this was a feature of the songs themselves, that Huxtable hasn't played to an audience in a while, or maybe the downtempo music got to him. Whatever the case, the show overall was quite good.

Interesting tunes without being more of the same generic industrial I've been seeing a lot of locally. There was a nice mix of live keyboard, digital samples and found sound. I can see how this would play well at the Atlantis - he could be pretty club friendly, but would deserve a much larger audience than a Wednesday night drink special can draw. The Atlantis could easily host hundreds of patrons, and it would be interesting to see hundreds of people react to Huxtable's performance.

Unfortunately Huxtable was born with but two hands, so he came up short a hand on a number of instances when he needed to trigger a loop or hold a note. When he didn't have enough hands, a foot, a knee, or anything else filled in fine. Any port in a storm I suppose. I was originally going to say "one or more feet" initially, but then suddenly there WAS more than one foot in play. Both feet, both hands, and even a handstand on the keyboard that didn't look like it could support his weight, slight as he might be.

The man would appear to be taking queues from The Who or Iggy and The Stooges with regard to his stage show. Wait until he's a million dollar act with a truck load of synths that could be destroyed in a punk style orgy of destruction. He's not afraid of throwing himself ass first at the keyboard, with no apparent concern that the keyboard stack might come tumbling down or otherwise collapse; an excellent sign in a showman.

Elsewhere

By Richard Murray
Photos : LBM website
Published : July 28, 2004.