Review: BUDD, Jan 2024 Cactus Room, Melbourne

 

I am a long suffering BUDD fanatic. Long suffering because, being from Sydney, they stopped touring here in the late 90s, maybe due to the demise of the scene they belonged to. I had looked on with great envy at the shows announced in Brisbane and Melbourne on and off over the last few decades, thinking “they’ll visit here next time…”. 


When I heard about their latest show in the Cactus Room in Thornbury in Jan 2024 I decided enough was enough. Flights got booked and soon enough I was on the train out to the venue, happy to pass Northcote station on the way and see some young folks sparking up in a park where I alighted.


I arrived in time to see the most excellent Smoke Witch play some very catchy and groovy tunes. A highlight was one of the band member’s teenage sons joining them for a song or two. Very heartening to see the next generation in development. 


BUDD then start setting up and I was very happy to be seeing them play for the first time in 30 odd years. When the University of Queensland awards its first Honorary Doctorates in Noise, there will be no more worthy number recipients than Jeremy and his fellow BUDD co-conspirators. The first chapter of Jeremy’s thesis is written in the Byzantine connections within his 6 x 2 foot pedal board, a portable museum of 60s snd 70s analog relics that deliver the finest fuzz and modulated sounds ever to leave an often thrashed, never beaten quad box. 


Noise creation is mostly art but perhaps has elements of science. Discoveries can be made through combinations of different pedals, especially when there are about 20 of them at your toe-tips. Experiments can be conducted, hypotheses confirmed. And thanks to that process the mostly 50-something veterans in the crowd tonight are in for a treat. 


Pivot from Prana is the first track, and decades of repressed head banging begins to be unleashed. I will require weeks of physio appointments for the ensuing neck strain, and I will hasten the onset of CTE, but the riffs have taken control. In contrast to the mad science of Jez, Kez the bassist has only one big muff pedal, but this “less is more” approach delivers the necessary tectonic activity. Cris does an excellent job providing the foundations for our journey. Huge, huge, huge sound, with groove in hoof and proper snobs behind the fog field. 


As if at the dashboard of a retro sci-fi spaceship, Jeremy expertly depresses pedals and releases switches in a precise order with the trusty soles of his converse, sometimes two feet at time, taking the audience into the outer reaches of the fuzzverse. From exploding phase nebulae, through quiet but impatiently clean jazzmaster strumming, and back to the low-Hz rumblings of planetary formation. BUDD’s equipment will hopefully make its way one day into one of our great museums, so that future students of noise may study its mysterious workings.


Egg, Petrol, 351, Yeti, a new one (Banger?), Fogman, Jawa, Handle it. Faarkk what a feast it is! And all in the intimacy of a 6 x 6 m room with sick acid lamp lighting as close to the action as we like. Long suffering no more! 


The Nazzarene


Photo caption: Now THAT is a pedal board. 

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