“NO WALLS,JUST MUSIC” by Ronan Francis McDonnel

3 CommentsWednesday • June 16, 2010 • by admin

“No Walls, Just Music”

There is a man on stage in a Venom mask. He has spent the past half hour taking turns between playing multiple synthesizers at once, flailing guitar solos and screaming into a microphone. Up until this point, his band’s set at the decade old music festival Creamfields has been full of their electro-thrash sound, straying closer and closer to the realm of punk rock. Now, however, the other two members have left the stage briefly and the man is sitting there, calmly playing classical piano. The audience is struck with awe. He has once again succeeded in taking their expectations towards music, bashing them over the head and leaving them lying limp and bloody in the corner. That mask clad man is Bob Rifo and he is the front man for The Bloody Beetroots.

As a person, Bob Rifo has an intangible quality about him. He is responsible for one of the largest electronic dance music acts of the century, yet next to no-one knows who he is. This anonymity is largely attributed to the image he has created for his band. Rifo’s group wear the masks of the classic Spiderman villain Venom, citing his love of comic books in his youth. These masks have hidden Rifo’s face from almost every single publicity photo for his band. When they are absent, a bandana and a pair of sunglasses are likely taking their place. It’s a strange move in an industry dominated by the concept of instant fame.

“I am interested in the music industry as a channel for getting my work out there. It’s not about instant fame or instant anything.” By removing his own face from the picture, it removes the element of the artist involved with the work, leaving behind only the music itself.

Two stage-hands run towards Rifo, one carrying a guitar, the other a cigarette and lighter. Rifo takes the guitar first, his music coming before his systematic destruction of his lungs. As he starts to play the chords for The Beetroot’s cover of The Toxic Avenger’s Escape, we find out why the masks have been rolled up halfway. The second stagehand puts the cigarette in his mouth and lights it before Rifo takes off towards the audience. His eyes are blanked out by the white horn shapes of the mask and the cigarette wedged between his lips removes any perception we had left of his face. He’s moved to centre stage. Tommy Tea, the only band member with free hands, has stopped riling up the audience and gone back to manipulating the synths. Just like everyone else, he knows the solo is coming. He knows Bob’s got it covered. Rifo unleashes. The rave that existed twenty seconds ago has now becomes a mosh pit. He is on his knees, leaning back and letting his guitar scream out while his pre-occupied mouth and mask-clad face are tilted backwards, his neck providing all the animation his own facial expressions would otherwise. After his face-melting solo ends he moves back towards the synthesizers, passing his guitar off to a stage hand and throwing his half-finished, still lit cigarette onto the stage.

Masks risk cutting off any connection to your audience via facial expressions, meaning you need a new way to connect. Where Daft Punk used a three story tall pyramid light show, Rifo instead went for an immensely powerful raw performance. At the start of the year, Rifo transformed his live show into The Bloody Beetroots: Death Crew 77, citing a “need to evolve and the stimulus of a new challenge” as the reason. It’s important to mention that it is, in fact, a live show post-transformation. There are live instruments now, even a live drummer; something that almost no electronically based music groups have used since the creation of the drum machine. This heavy inclusion of instruments allows Rifo’s band to really perform live, rather than just stand behind the decks like most ordinary DJ’s.

This live performance aspect seamlessly transitions from dance and electro into hardcore punk and back again with breaks in the middle for Rifo to sit down and play piano. It is an eclectic style of performance that gives a window into Rifo’s thought process. “It’s not about planning a set so much as how I perceive the word “music”: as a collection of genres and subgenres that Death Crew 77 express”. Rifo’s Death Crew really does express the full collection. No-one really expects these sound changes in the Death Crew 77 live experience, which is unusual; given that The Bloody Beetroots’ hit album Romborama also had these wide genre swings. For example, track two is Have Mercy On Us, a track with heavy operatic overtones. Two tracks later and the sound is undeniably hip-hop with Awesome, which is in turn followed three tracks later by Second Streets Have No Name, another classically inspired track. By just barely hiding this behind The Bloody Beetroots signature pitch bending synths and grungy electronic sound, Rifo exposes his audience to genres they may never listen to otherwise.

Rifo has moved the concert to the music of his punk rock side project Rifoki. He screams what are presumably words into the microphone. Then the rest of the band kicks in. Rifo mirrors the explosion as his arms fly out from beside his body. He takes this energy and charges to the other side of the stage. The photographer moves out of his way as though Rifo was a rampaging bull. He lets fly another primal torrent of pseudo-words and swearing. The crowd is attempting to scream along with him, but is instead only capable of a retaliatory roar of noise. Rifo then performs the original sin of live performance and points his microphone directly at his fold back speakers. We are met with the familiar, ear-destroying shriek of the feedback. He pulls it away and launches into another guttural scream. He returns to his keyboards as the band begins to move back to the electro. Back out of Arkham Asylum and into the world of the sane. Well, as sane as you can get with the Beetroots.

For a man with such an insane stage presence, there is a surprising eloquence to his words. Every sentence displays a wealth of research and history, which in turn inspires more questions than I have time to ask. “Every release has a reference to some historic or literary or artistic movement… Taking it further, every composition has a series of resonances… I try to create links with the past. It’s an abstruse process that might be appreciated by future generations.” Rifo really instils a deep amount of information into everything he does. A minor scraping of the surface reveals the beginnings of the web. He mentions the Metanarrative, and how Jerry Cornelius novels act as an inspiration for The Bloody Beetroots’ 2009 EP Cornelius. These books in turn lead us back to his mask, by way of Commedia dell’Arte.

“Italian Commedia dell’Arte showed us how masks could define and create parallel identities.” In Commedia, the mask and the character are generally considered inseparable. The mask, more so than the actor’s costume, appearance and even gender, determined who a character was. These characters in turn determine the basic structure of the scene. Commedia is an art form built upon the masks. “For me, dressing up is a postmodern interpretation of the Zanni character”. Zanni is the term in Commedia used as a label for the characters that are servants or other low class members of society. For a character to actually have the name Zanni meant that this character was one of such low status that they did not earn their own name. Occasionally, this single role was split amongst multiple actors at once, each sharing the same name, same personality, same function in the plot and the same mask.

This is how Rifo utilises the mask. He removes focus from himself. He creates this anonymous character with no individual name, identifiable only as one of The Bloody Beetroots. Really, any single member of this audience could be under his mask and if it weren’t for the lucky few in the front rows being able to read the tattoo on Rifo’s chest no-one would ever know. This drops focus from him and his band-mates, directing all of it towards the music. The resulting effect is that the only things truly separating Rifo from the crowd are five metres of space and a waist high metal fence. Neither does anything when it comes to stopping the fans connecting with the unique experience that is the sound of Bob Rifo’s The Bloody Beetroots.

“No walls, just music. We want our public to listen without prejudice and broaden their sound horizons.”

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