Before Your Very Eyes is the song that opens Amok, Atoms for Peace's album from earlier this year, and tonight's long-awaited Atoms full band set as well. Behind the erstwhile Radiohead singer Thom Yorke and the vacationing Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, drummer Joey Waronker (REM, Beck) rattles out its metronomic machine beats while Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco (RHCP, David Byrne, Brian Eno) spins around what looks like a museum of hard-to-pronounce instruments, adding sibilants and plosives. It's a dense groove that continues, frequently varied, but barely interrupted, for nearly two rapt hours, like a particularly uninhibited Radiohead gig relocated to Lagos.
"We're making a workout video," jokes Yorke moistly, hair tied back, jigging about in yoga bottoms and a loose tank top. "Dance, motherfuckers!" He seems thoroughly relaxed and happy at this state of affairs, even on his most intense songs, such as Harrowdown Hill, a song that remembers the suicide of the scientist David Kelly. It's less bitter now; more of a drum workshop.
From moment one, when Yorke kicks off a sinuous African motif on his guitar and Flea starts skanking in a voluminous blue skirt, it's clear that Atoms for Peace are not just some high-end theoretical ensemble who work best on headphones. They rock, too, if rock is the right word for this sweaty, pell-mell interlocking of rhythms and counter-rhythms that owes less to American rhythm'n'blues than its African predecessors. Flea's bass lines are topped off by guitar and Yorke's instantly recognisable vocals, acting as handrails above all the roiling beneath.
This is the first time London has seen all five Atoms in situ. A late-night gig last February found Yorke and erstwhile Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich playing a glorified DJ set of Amok songs, largely digitally. No issue with that: Yorke has been a credible player in the IDM clubhouse for some years now. It's a scene where performers recreate latptop-borne works in front of an audience, which unproblematically constitutes a live act.But recreating Amok with instruments was always going to be a bit like herding millipedes with a colander. Could they fall into step? This experimental album, Yorke's second away from Radiohead, began as a jam of sorts. Art directed by Yorke, Godrich, Waronker, Refosco and Flea met to work out rhythms and melodies in one another's company. They had previously toured Yorke's 2006 solo album, The Eraser, recreating its tricksy laptop manoeuvres with wood and skin and metal strings.
Those demoed grooves and themes were later stitched together on computers by Yorke and Godrich, with some gnarly synthetic threads: literally, Stuck Together Pieces. (Paradoxically, that song feels like one of tonight's most straightforwardly grabbable tracks, foregrounding Flea and a 70s funk bassline.) This Amok world tour – which began with a dress rehearsal in LA last month – transliterates all that digital work back into its instrumental constituent parts, with added gear, live programming, effects pedals and elements of chance. Some of Yorke's fly-swat dancing in the first songs interpolates a lot of pointing – to Flea, then the sky, to the monitors, then the sky – as he tries to calibrate these overlapping elements.
If everything sounds like a remix, that's because it is. Default – song two on both the album and this live set – is introduced by its bass wobble and ticklish beats, not the nagging hook, which barely gets a look-in. The Clock, meanwhile, is one of several songs from The Eraser Atoms play tonight. Buzzing and pulsating, it has turned into a kind of country-and-African fusion, with Refosco playing a stringed percussion instrument that might be a Brazilian berimbau.
Happily, for those flailing for the handrails, the songs are often colour-coded, with zigzagging neon tubes playing off against squares of light. Ingenue, for instance, is coded orange; it's relatively stark, with Yorke at the piano. Yorke may be playing away from the band he has worked with since they were all teenagers, but he has brought with him Radiohead's commitment to bold graphic fluorescence, as well as their commitment to moving things along technically. Having removed Amok and The Eraser from Spotify in a row over the website's paltry royalties to new acts, Atoms are selling video of every song on every tour date via the Soundhalo app, calculating that people would appreciate better footage than just jerky phone video on YouTube.
Would this restless 16-song set have benefited from a little more conventionality? Probably. Atoms for Peace have one mode – on – and one direction – forward. As involving and invigorating as they are, these songs lack the builds and drops of dance music; they are fundamentally rhythmic, clock in at breakneck speed and could use a little phrasing and pacing.
But as a spectacle – Yorke and Flea facing off against each other, each dancing to their own arrhythmia, Refosco playing washboards and something that looks like a Christmas tree of tambourines – they're just exhilarating. The bass is so penetrating that it dislodges confetti from some other, now-forgotten gig.
