True to Manchester’s musical heritage and ever-forward underground sound, last Friday Soup Kitchen played host to Soulection member and affiliate Mr. Carmack for his debut appearance in the city. Unable to stay away, we at The Noise Gate went down to the ruckus.
Straight from the get-go, the vibe in Soup Kitchen was a good one. Hit and Run and Levelz braniac Rich Reason got the packed crowd all toasty, so by the time Mr. Carmack was up for his set the basement was pretty heated.
Opening with a melee of heavy beats, Carmack was literally smashing the doors in within seconds; the place erupted in retaliation to the cuts he dropped, his mixing was focused around high bursts of energy between his own edits and tracks from the likes of our artist of 2014 Sango.
Meanwhile the emphatic crowd were kept in constant motion and sways, largely due to the small timeframe between cuts, all the while Carmack managed the drops with a self-assured manner, sometimes letting out a detailed grin when he sent everyone nuts. There was a lot of raw energy for sure.
The liveliness didn’t let up either, from his own versions of Jay-Z and Drake, to belters like ‘Stroke It Baby’ and The Cool Kids’ ‘I Rock (I’m Mikey)’; all of them came rumbling out of Soup Kitchen’s system, which handled everything with a sweet clarity.
Now there is one thing to be said, there is a partial amount of Carmack’s music, that can’t be done justice through laptop speakers, or for that matter even a good pair of headphones – as cliché as it sounds, you need to witness and hear the movement first hand… live.
We have to give an honourable mention to the people too, something that I haven’t seen in a while from a flurry of events I’ve been to across the country. The crowd was excellent, insane perhaps, but a decent lot.
The Soup Kitchen – recently named by XXXY as one of his top 10 UK clubs in this Guardian piece – was not short of people afraid to where something a little different, to dance uninhibitedly and more importantly to have a good fucking time. The whole thing was an upper.
Of course when Carmack finished up with ‘Fluxed out’, the whole place cheered to no end, a fitting end to a really good gig. Fittingly, it seems only right to end this review in the same way.
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