Stevie Chick 

Planningtorock – review

For her Meltdown performance, Janine Rostron cloaks her charm in menace and mystery, writes Stevie Chick
  
  

Planningtorock performs at Antony's Meltdown
Planningtorock performs at Antony's Meltdown on 1 August Photograph: Burak Cingi/Redferns via Getty Images Photograph: Burak Cingi/Redferns via Getty Images

Berlin-based electronic composer/performer Janine Rostron – AKA Planningtorock – opens her Meltdown performance with Purcell's baroque fragment Music for a While, which promises that music "shall all your cares beguile". It's no throwaway gesture. Both meanings of that last word, "beguile", describe her art: charming, for sure, but also deceptive, cloaked in trickery.

Tonight, Rostron eschews the effects that transform her vocals into a gender-neutral croon on record, but her performance still plays pointed games. Her clothing – black, baggy, shapeless – renders her body androgynous, amorphic; her eerie facial prosthesis, which leaves her resembling a disfigured Klingon, is further alienating. The lighting never rivals that of a 15-watt bulb, so that, even from five rows away, she's lost in the murk – an exercise in misdirection, meaning our eyes are drawn instead to the videos that play behind Rostron, which seem to mime along to her live vocals.

The darkness from which she performs serves as a confessional, a shield behind which she can tap into the menace and mystery within her songs, anonymous and safe. Manifesto, with its lyrical mantra celebrating "secular love", introduces a note of the erotic that's only amplified by the playful confusion of The Breaks, a haunting synth-pop glide where Rostron teases "Don't be seduced/ Until you know my truths", even as her performance seeks to keep all her "truths" obscured.

A new song, Patriarchy Over & Out, boasts a fiery message and an insurgent two-step throb that unseats the audience to dance in the dark, but the lyric feels a little too on the nose. More seductive are the songs that intrigue like riddles, or other moments, such as on Going Wrong, where she sounds like Tracey Thorn or kd lang, lending desolate torch-song longing to its roiling soundscape, declaring she has "no one to believe in". In these shadows, she conjures strange magic.

 

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