BLIND DIGITAL CITIZEN BAND REVIEW 2011
While I was standing half drunk at a crap magazine launch. I saw the setup of what was going to be the performance of Blind Digital Citizen. Seeing these guys looking more like sound engineers than pop stars, I became intrigued. Meanwhile, a sound was being produced. A better way to explain it would be as if you had an amplifier connected to your microwave, and that you were watching David Lynch filming the last moments of the earth, while the members of Bauhaus slowly fall off the edge of the world.
Blind Digital Citizen is a 5-piece band with one of the members who is a Visual Dj. Within their world, they create a cocktail of Krautrock sound scapes with unmistakable spiritual sound clips that resonate the likes of CAN. You can hear this in their song ‘Tropicalism’. So what makes them so different? Or maybe more to the point what makes them so NOW? It could be because they smash you into the 21st century, by pinging you back and once you’re at the breaking point, they let you go flying along side their drumbeats which make you stamp your feet that beat the street.
At this point you don’t feel like you’re watching a band doing the Blue Peter ‘here’s what I made earlier’. You feel like you are watching some guys making something, experimenting; like Faust have done in their days and like The Horrors are doing now with shifts from genre to genre, testing and mixing not only their music but also how they play music, by changing between them their instruments. They’re maybe ambient or electronically enhanced in some parts but their lead vocalist will put you in your place. He is like a preacher from the underworld, shouting or speaking to the masses, with his burning eyes, steaming with passion. Meanwhile the VJ is producing the flickering images of societies creations and mistakes in the background. These guys maybe not be for everyone, they’re more for people that miss parts of the past and that are looking for new sounds, not the new hits.