Rival Consoles at Gorilla
Johnny James, Managing EditorBook now
Rival Consoles
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Rival Consoles brings his new audio-visual show to Gorilla, centred around his ninth studio album Landscape from Memory.
London-based producer Ryan Lee West – better known as Rival Consoles – has spent the best part of two decades making synthesisers sound human. After building a reputation for thoughtful, wide-ranging electronica across releases like Odyssey, Sonne and Howl, he caught his big break with 2018’s Persona, which pitted analogue synths against warped acoustic instruments to create some of the most emotionally evocative electronic music this side of Jon Hopkins.
Things got more conceptual with Articulation and Overflow, before 2022’s Now Is found brighter, more euphoric forms while continuing West’s long-running streak of expressing various aspects of human experience through machines.
His new record, Landscape from Memory, marks another shift. After a frustrating fallow period away from the production desk, West returned to music by digging through discarded audio fragments – half-ideas, melodic kernels and pieces that had not yet found their shape. What emerged was a reconstruction: a record that holds past, present and future in the same space.
That process suits an artist whose work has always been caught between machine logic and human feeling. West often begins pieces on guitar or piano, building electronic music from the foundations of more traditional songwriting. On Landscape from Memory, that instinct feels newly exposed. Lead single ‘Catherine’, dedicated to his partner, is wide open, vulnerable and affecting, while the follow-up ‘Coda’ is heavier and moodier, yet still brimming with human emotion.
The live show at Gorilla expands that idea into a long-form audio-visual narrative, with material drawn from across the last 15 years of Rival Consoles’ career. Expect deep ambient works, his own strange version of techno and the wide, restless territory in between, with visuals co-created and performed live by Sky Ainsbury.
