Ghosts and Leviathans Presents is a monthly electronic music night at Love Shack, Bethnal Green, a bar with the best kept secret venue in East London. Issa Odyssea and Emily Jade recently joined Ghosts and Leviathans at Love Shack for an extravagant celebration of electronic music.
The venue is cosy, with timber fittings, antique telephones and winding corridors where a candlestick holds the key to another world. Pull it, and find behind the bookcase, a hidden venue. Built under three rail arches, this venue boasts a massive secret dance floor just off Hackney Road. The zany venue has a retro DJ booth and adorns its wall with angel wings and other oddities. Against those walls, mismatched couches form a wide U-shape around a giant dancefloor and the room is in the shadow of its own dark blue lights.
The indie night supported by Loudr, the music review app, with Irish hyperpop artist, Ghosts and Leviathans is a monthly night of electronic music. The energy is high; from liquid EDM, to pop performances with full scale theatricals, big bouncing curls and bright-teal thigh high boots. On a night like this, you’ll likely hear dance bangers infused with lyrics as Gaeilge. The host, singer-songwriter and producer Matthew Deane from rural Ireland, knows just how hard it is to break your teeth on the indie scene. Introducing the first act, Issa Odyssea, he urges us all to remember the importance of showing up as a crowd. “Sing along, clap, dance. It can be so intimidating playing to a crowd. Let’s have a f*cking party.”
The light shifts and the room is bathed in a fluorescent blue. A red rug sits atop the space with a stool. From it, Issa Odyssea plays an ethereal, shimmering electric guitar line. Smooth, simple chords in a jazz style, with crisp moody vocals. Her sound transitions; uplifting harmonies, intimate lyrics. Vocal balled Love letters to the sky is mixed with nostalgic samples of children in conversation, laughing and speaking. The disco balls spins, sequins of light spinning the room, crossing her face. The lights fades; the room in total silence, swaying eyes closed.
Ghosts and Leviathans amps up the bass a little. Walking on to a moody bilingual banger; the show stars with “Is mise Ghosts and Levithans, and I’ll be your guide for this experience. Participation is encouraged. – see how loud you can scream. Go on, go on, g-g-g-g-“. From this moment on, the vocoder is locked and loaded. Crossing back and forth across the dance floor, mic wire wrapped around his hand, he sings directly to the crowd: Where is my artists life? A dance track about the fading optimism of youth in the search for artistic purpose and meaning. His set is layered thick with references to the Northern Line, the business district and the bog. Introducing an upcoming release Bog Dreams, he says:
“I really miss the countryside. We have this thing called the bog. It’s this mud that we turn into fuel. It’s what Irish people do be doing. It’s barren, it’s loads of flowers, loads of mud.”
Tracks are introduced with full brat-era Charli vocal FX, screams and all. The smoke machine blasts us in the audience one more time; and the bass lifts the floor. He ends the set with a heart-thudding, goosebumps all-over-dance track. It starts quick and it speeds up instantly, and then again at what feels like every 15 seconds. The lyrics to Waltzing Matilda seem like a strange movie and the entire room is in the air dancing to it. The sort of beat that races so fast, genre doesn’t get to really stake a claim. There is a sort of breathless grinning from the audience as an ecstatic Ghosts and Leviathans leaves the stage.
Liquid D&B artist, Emily Jade sent the beat racing again. Singing a mix of previous releases, music from her upcoming EP Liquid Love and a banging cover of RAYE’s Escapism. What we heard: A wide range in vocals with Emily mixing melodic vocals over crazy BPM’s. There’s a sentimental feeling to the style. The jazzy, soulful vocals accompany a flowing bass line toward the end of Run, before tapering into chant for full club track impact. Dressed in bright blue thigh-high boots and a baggy t-shirt with her own name emblazoned on the back, Emily put on a killer show, with impressive and lustrous choreography accompanying new tracks from her upcoming EP Liquid Love. There was a real sense in the air that this girl is about to do something massive.
Ghosts and Leviathans Presents is a host to club kids who need a little lyricism. There are really broad parameters on what falls into the category of electronic (hyperpop, EDM, hip-hop, trance, techno, the list goes on) which means they house a lot of different styles emerging on the scene. It’s a cool litmus for what’s happening across London in the independent music space. The acts that played all shared a real grit, and a grá for the music. What’s great about Independent music nights like Ghosts and Leviathans Presents is the community at these sort of events. You get to rock out to someone’s song and then talk about it with them afterwards. Issa, Emily and Matthew were all hugging it out after the event and talking about the indie space, where it’s headed and what the other cool venues to play are.
