For Eyedress – AKA 23-year-old Filipino freakball Idris Vicuña – it’s a night full of wonders. “I can rap, oh shit!” he exclaims, spitting standard hip-hop tropes, expletives and fellatio requests over compulsive beats on Snakes Never Prosper and Manila Ice. “Samples, man!” he gasps as a reggae guitar emanates from his DJ’s laptop, “It’s from the future! We’re basically cheating on stage!”
Leaping into the crowd to dance, if this sticky pub backroom in Dalston seems like a brave new world to Vicuña, it’s because it smells to him less of stale microbrewery lagers and moustache wax, and more of emancipation. Having been held in Manila by red tape while married to a Japanese woman, signed to French and UK labels via Skype and airmailed contracts, and endured a failed teenage move to California – hence his LA slacker banter about how the lack of a moshpit is “weak” and “if someone gave me some weed I’d play for 50 hours” – , his punkish snarls speak of a bitter, caged creative unleashed, and his music batters borders, too. His opening brace of rap tracks merge urgent South Central polemic with misty eastern atmospherics and cavernous soul hooks, and when he moves on to sing about missing his wife on Tokyo Ghost, he becomes a witch-house poltergeist, pining in spectral falsetto over slo-mo J-pop.
Though occasionally verging on the painfully atonal, Eyedress gets increasingly intriguing the more he tries to alienate us. My Hologram’s relentless electro menace could be Terminator driving music, and when he declares “this song sucks” before his most popular tune Nature Trips – a seductive groove that came with a video of murderous housebreakers and a high-crushing chorus of “it’s making me feel so bad”– it’s like being hassled by a snarky bouncer on your way into the club in an ice-hotel basement. He ends by picking up a guitar, claiming, “I can play this thing!” and drenching us in glacial noise, his vocals shattering on contact with a microphone presumably doused in liquid nitrogen. Eyedress, man; it’s from the future.
