Fuck Buttons at Adelaide Hall

It’s midnight, and everyone’s phones just started to show the date as June 20th. It was a blisteringly hot day for the majority of us at Adelaide Hall, as we were most likely at NXNE’s Yonge Dundas Square show with the sun blaring at us. We can see the duo known as Fuck Buttons setting up their gear as we patiently wait. They leave after soundcheck and we wait a little bit more. Suddenly, a projector turned on as Fuck Buttons walked back into the middle of the room, approached their equipment and prepared to perform. Through a set up kinect, both members were being projected onto the screen as silhouettes full of acid induced eye patterns. These projections worked in time with every song they played either stylistically or through familiarity (they showed the women from the music video for The Red Wing during that song). Everything else was almost pitch black with just enough light for the duo to see what they were doing; Let’s not forget about the occasional strobe light that caught us off guard and royally disoriented us (in a good sense, of course). Their set was a photographer’s nightmare, but a fan’s dream come true.

Accompanying us with this hallucinogenic trip was Fuck Buttons’ towering music. We got a majority of tracks from their 2013 album Slow Focus (which made my list of top albums of 2013) with a little bit of a change up in each song. It isn’t uncommon for electronic musicians to experiment with their songs live, but for songs like Hidden XS and Brain Freeze that grow layer by layer, it was as if we fell in love for the first time with these songs a second time. Every song led into the next with a seamless transition, where the only splits in between each song was thunderous applause from the fans knowing what was ahead of them. With Andrew Hung occasionally screaming into a microphone and sending his voice into oblivion, and Benjamin Power (also known as Blanck Mass) pounding on a single drum to start a song off, the sound got quite loud at some points. Fans with fingers in their ears proceeded to dance spastically, however, as they still loved the music itself. Surprisingly with the highs being static-like (as they are on album as well), the bass wasn’t distorted, so the rhythm was always present for new listeners to find the groove of each track.

The set ended with Power saying “Thank you. We’re Fuck Buttons”, and that was recorded and sent into a looping frenzy as the duo left the stage. This final farewell, an indication of how the simplest samples can be turned into something admirable, was both an introduction to the curious and affirmation for the already passionate. They were Fuck Buttons, indeed: The very same Fuck Buttons that played one of the best sets of NXNE effortlessly as they welcomed everyone into their nightclub from hell with the utmost sincerity.