Live Review: Sohn, Guerre - Oxford Art Factory

On a chilly June night there isn't much you want to do but huddle inside and keep warm. Guerre, aka Sydney's Lavurn Lee, is your man. It was just him and his desk of sounds and samples but he warmed up the whole Oxford Art Factory.

This is a guy who steps away and dances to his own music, at times like a man possessed, that music ranging from ghostly, demonic growls to spaced-out R&B groove a la Cannibal. It's hard not to join in and dance the chill away.

You get the vibe that winter is Sohn's favourite season. Born Christopher Taylor in the UK, more recently rooted in the burgeoning electro scene in Vienna, he envelops himself in a black hood (for the die-hard fans, he owns “about 65”) looking like some kind of dark lord. His beats are fittingly brittle and icy, and right from the opener, Ransom Notes, the crowd was seemingly under a spell, which could be to do with a very pure and plaintive voice that asks you to be a part of his pain.

Sohn was here with two band members to tour Tremors, a haunting debut that has quietly gained a great deal of popularity over the last couple of months. On the gently rollicking title track he sang bitterly, “If you're thinking of letting me go, then it's time that you do,” alluding to the residue of past sins as “vibrations of tremors that shook long ago”.

While a few tracks are peppered with melodromatic, overdriven synths, his strength is in subtlety. Bloodflows started minimal and swelled gorgeously into a shivery, tinkling beat with the honeyed, harmonised vocals almost hypnotic.

You got the sense he wears the costume because without it, he'd be a sunny guy at odds with his material. Maybe we'd all be happier if we let out our darkest emotions in music. “This is my ecstatic face,” he beamed between songs, at which point a kid down the front row shouted, “Nice hood!”

“Thank you,” Sohn responded politely, “It's very hot” – to which came the universal chorus: “TAKE IT OFF!” He quieted everyone down by saying jovially, “Oh no, then you'd see all the scars.”

With that he launched into Artifice, an anthem for insecurity with a glitchy beat, delivering high emotion and energy in equal parts to a packed room. Lights followed with the instruction “It's time to dance,” before the mood changed again. Tempest, the album's opening track, was rendered an exquisite, stripped-back solo with the whole room transfixed by Sohn's ruminations in a smooth tenor: “Oh Lord, you did me harm… I got lost along the way.”

Rounding out the set with the wistful march of Lessons and the chilling, rattling beat of The Wheel, it could be a stretch to say Sohn's reinvented it – but a little bit Active Child, a little bit Massive Attack, a little bit high emotion radio, he's got it down to a fine art.