Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

It most certainly is an art form, it is abundantly creative and dealt with in a manner befitting the electronic world but it always seems to be one that plays more into the hands of the dance floor, the club scene that that where live music is the King. To stand on a stage and take a laptop computer and remix songs which have touched the heart of the listener and give them something of a mashed up hybrid, a sense of the unenlightened and devoid of the song’s enormous power.

For The Bass Reflex, the studious and intense look upon the faces as they fiddle with gadgets and buttons that are unseen to the naked eye is admirable, the duo certainly know how to capture a mood and the gathering of dancers at the front of the stage was perhaps a indication of how the beat can infect a soul and cause a good time no matter what.

That is the point of the exercise, to have fun and to have fun in art form is to be applauded, the only problem lays in how the songs are then taken out of context. Admittedly listening to The Bass Reflex is not as terrible as winding the clock back a couple of decades and finding yourself listening to Jive Bunny as the songs became secondary to the talent that was taking great tunes and leaving them robbed, scared and alone on the pavement, too frightened to put their heads above the music parapet for what seemed an eternity. It could certainly be a generational belief but when it comes to playing music from a different time, to muck about with for example the beauty of The Beatles track Come Together or Nirvana’s Come As You Are seemed to leave many on the fringes of the night feeling cold and aloof from it all.

The point of music though, like language, is that it must be fluid, to perform the song in exactly the same way every time is perhaps a silly way to preserve the dignity, times change, fashion flounders and ripples, unfolding, swells and punctures, if people are having a good time then it must be so, it does seem harsh though to mess with classics that speak volumes about the state of the world today in more that can be offered by the toggle of a switch or a press of a repeated button.

The Bass Reflex offered art that is for sure, whether it was music or the ethos of such left many in the background undecided.

Ian D. Hall