Thursday 3rd March 2011 saw Edinburgh’s mighty FOUND trio push their music to the next level when they launched third album factorycraft to no shortage of critical acclaim and a capacity crowd at The Voodoo Rooms. Having been operating on the fringes of the live music scenes in Edinburgh and Aberdeen (where the trio met at Art College) for much of the last decade, this moment has been a long time coming but well deserved, as the band proved that they are much more than a kooky crew with an interesting side-line in experimental curios (actually, it’s just one curio: a female robot called Cybraphon, who responds to opinions expressed about her online by creating music in a corresponding mood, but that’s another tale). No, FOUND are in fact a kooky crew with a now steadily growing catalogue of high grade pop music, the style of which can be located in any number of different genres, labelled folk, rock, electro or just plain alternative.
Tonight’s performance is basically a run-through of the new album and front-man Ziggy Campbell explains this to the audience, characteristically with more than a hint of whimsy, in the simplest possible terms (and his thick Borders brogue), as follows: ‘We’re going to spend the next hour playing all the songs from our new album, then we’re going to leave the stage, pretending that we’ve finished, then you’re all going to shout and scream until we come back on, then we’re going to come back on and do one last song.’ The tone is pitched perfectly in keeping with the general sense of well-being and self-confidence than the band have been exhibiting since their new album first started raising eyebrows far and wide and gets a few laughs as well as a bit of a cheer from the home-town audience. But it’s also a very accurate description of what follows and the excited, assiduously attentive crowd assembled at Limbo tonight suggests, almost a decade after these three musicians first got together, factorycraft is just the beginning for FOUND.
The rest of the night features stirring DJ sets by FOUND pals Radio Magnetic Sound System, S-Type and OnTheFly and it’s another one of those nights where the music and the dancing doesn’t stop until the lights come up after 1am. FOUND follows this date with a full UK tour supporting new Chemikal Underground label-mates The Phantom Band: onwards and upwards….
