SILVERWINGKILLER at The White Hotel

Manchester’s underground music scene is increasingly coming to national attention. As Crack Magazine noted recently, “a disparate group of artists are blurring the lines between bands, DJs and performance art. Bound by a shared ethos and fed up with the predictable, they’re building a DIY communal culture driven by friendship, shared purpose and a desire to upend convention.”

SILVERWINGKILLER are right at the heart of that scene. The duo – Yushang Ni and James Baca – bring the energy of punk together with a Frankenstein’s Monster of electronic styles, blending breakbeats with gabber kicks, acid house 303s with industrial noise. ‘More is more’ seems to be the general sentiment.

Live, it’s exciting. Baca pounds his drums like someone who’s been given one set left to live, while Ni, singing through thickets of distortion in English, Mandarin and Shanghainese, moves around the stage like some kind of poltergeist Björk. They join the likes of Crimewave, Another Country $$$$ and BUFFEE in rejecting both the sheen of static laptop sets and the rigidity of the post punk revival.

Their EP Triad Funded draws on science fiction and ultra-violent Japanese video games. “We want it to feel like the kind of music you would buy from the dark web,” Baca says. “Something surreal, violent, dystopian.” Tick, tick and tick. Each track feels like a maximalist collision of cultures and technologies – world music influences warped through analogue arpeggiators, aggressive basslines, frenetic live breakbeats and lyrics that nod to real-world violence in Ni’s native China.

There’s a new EP on the way this summer, apparently, with the lead single ‘Chang Film’ having just dropped. It’s heavy on the acid, and tempers the duo’s usual assault on the adrenal glands with dreamier, more elusive atmospheres. Perhaps an indicator of what’s to come from SILVERWINGKILLER 2.0.

At The White Hotel, their spiritual home, the duo are joined by boisterous Soweto punks Twenty One Children, who blend U.S. skate punk grit with South African soul. It’s also worth getting down early for Keiran Lea-Jones, the queer DIY electronic artist who performs as Mogan. Hailing from Cornwall but now based in Manchester, they make stark, lo-fi, electro-pop that they describe, somewhat hilariously, as flaccid house – owing to the dark, gothic undercurrent to music otherwise influenced by 90s Euro trance and house. In the words of one fan, they sound like “Nick Cave ejaculating in Berghain”, which feels as good as any line to end on.