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home » festivals » The Warehouse Project » The Warehouse Project 2010
Caribou provide a lift to an otherwise inadequate Warehouse ProjectThe Warehouse Project 2010 reviewTuesday 23rd November 2010 The Warehouse Project is a strange place. Literally underground, it is an industrial uterus that for eight hours a night incubates nearly two thousand dancing embryos before spitting them out into the icy streets of Central Manchester. To some it has a chic to it that few other clubs can hope to attain, yet to my mind the perceived coolness of the WHP is an illusion that fades on closer inspection. Yes it has a grimy veneer of underground exclusivity, but this image is cultivated by the clicking, whirring cogs of the marketing machine: its coolness is no longer organic; it is cool because we are told it is cool. However this issue is academic: on nights which are as profligately expensive as the WHP (£1.50 delivery charge on an email, anyone?), what really matters is the standard of entertainment on offer. Regrettably on Saturday at the event curated by Kieran Hebden this standard was, on average, low.
I feel I shouldn't continue without mentioning the awful sound quality in the back room: sure, nobody is expecting a brickwork batcave to have brilliant acoustics, but the muddiness of the bass and general poor definition of the music was an insult to both the audience and the artists performing. Enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a bad spelling and cheap mask Zomby succeeded Mount Kimbie and the beginning of his set was marked by an influx of cool kids with accessory headphones and ill-fitting trousers, which while not a problem in itself did necessitate the crowd having to pack themselves up even more tightly to the grubby walls which were by that time secreting a sweet cocktail of condensed sweat and groundwater. Zomby performs anonymously in a mask which is presumably for either of or a combination of two reasons: A) that he’s acutely, bumhole-achingly fugly, or B) because he’s bald and the use of ostentatious headgear is the only possible way to disguise his naked Cro-Magnon of a skull whilst also in a Lady-Gaga’s-cameltoe-esque way, distract from the tepid mediocrity of his music. Obviously it is hard to confirm or deny either of these because the man really is SUCH an enigma. Whilst he played a varied set, I'm afraid I just don't get his rave-inspired retrostep which for me falls on the wrong side of cloyingly nostalgic rather than a cutting edge update of early 90s sounds. In the main room headliner Four Tet played to a huge proportion of the sold out crowd causing the front three areas of the labyrinthine venue to become innavigable for the duration of his performance, although the banality of the performance itself proved to the rear five hundred people in the crowd why it wasn't worth pressing through the crush to get to the front anyway. And crush is the right word: when the WHP is sold out, there are so many bottlenecks in the seething mass of human beings it can feel quite unpleasant. I must admit before I saw him I was not greatly familiar with his work, but for an artist with a reputation like Four Tet's I had high hopes. However he disappointed me greatly: Three Tet at best.
So, yes, Caribou were great. However even with their LCD screen shooting out bright rays of primary-coloured happiness, they were not able to offset the balance of the evening, which over the preceding few hours had tipped firmly in the favour of inadequate. The Warehouse Project 2010 is turning out to be a real let-down. review by Ali Magness photos by Bryn Russell 
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