Live Review | The Null Club @ Rough Trade, Bristol

George Ward

Freelance journalist and online editor for CLUNK. Can be found out and about in Bristol, finding cheap records or having a pint on King Street.

Gilla Band guitarist Alan Duggan Borges brings new project The Null Club to Bristol’s Rough Trade for an intense blend of noise and electronics

Last month, Alan Duggan Borges, the guitarist for Dublin noise rock band Gilla Band, dropped the debut EP for his new project The Null Club. Featuring three completely unique vocalists, the EP saw appearances from Valentine Caulfield (Mandy, Indiana), ELUCID and Faris Badwan (The Horrors).

But when Duggan Borges walks onto the dark stage of Rough Trade, Bristol, he’s the only figure on stage, surrounded on all sides by amps, drum machines, synths and, by my count, 19 guitar pedals on his board.

With only three tracks released, we chatted outside the venue about just how The Null Club would fill his set, either with unreleased material, extended versions or a more improvised electronic set. As it turns out, it was all of these things combined into an insanely noisy beast of a performance.

If you weren’t to know whose voices featured on the EP, I’m not convinced you would have any idea after seeing The Null Club live. Instead of simply recreating the tracks on stage, Duggan Borges instead brought out heavily mutated, stretched and warped versions, luring us in with familiar beats, before building layers and layers of noise, filling the room with a wonderfully sinister atmosphere.

The other voices do appear, but not in their original form. Small snippets of lines are chopped up, repeated over and over rhythmically or morphed beyond recognition. Soon, it’s easy to forget who even said the line originally, with human voices becoming just another instrument for the noise.

Though Duggan Borges spent much of the set twiddling knobs of synths, programming complex beats into drum machines or using fascinating combinations of pedals to create noises I’ve never heard, his guitar never left his side, slung nonchalantly over his shoulder, dangling behind him. Often at the climax of these noisy jams, he would play the guitar, thrashing it more like a percussion instrument than a string one.

At this level of noise, it is hard to tell exactly what instrument is making what sound, but, with Duggan Borges pressed against an amp, disturbingly ripping at his guitar, his perfomance was just as fascinating to watch as any Gilla Band gig. In fact, hearing a full solo set shows you just how much his input as guitarist and producer is to the band’s sound, especially their more electronic moments of experimentation.

Despite its harshness, The Null Club’s set isn’t inaccessible, with pulsing techno beats driving throughout, holding everything together as the chaos crashes all around. It’s the kind of set that should be experienced at the 2am after-party of a festival. If Duggan Borges continues to experiment this excitingly, The Null Club has the potential to be one of the most impressive new acts of the year.

Read our interview with The Null Club here.

Listen to ‘The Null Club’ here: