Kenny Hanlon takes us through the recent UR and Interstellar Fugitives Closing party at DEAF 2007 in Ri-Ra...

Any direct link that Detroit’s Underground Resistance collective has with Asia is tangible at best. Yet this didn’t seem to make a difference to the organisers at this years Asian themed Dublin Electronic Arts Festival who, at practically the last minute, announced them – performing under their Interstellar Fugitives guise - as the headliners of the closing party of the annual festival. This years DEAF Festival, as noted, was Asian themed focusing nearly exclusively on artists from the east. The main problem this threw up for the punter was the question of who to check out, as most people had heard of few or none of the artists featured, and as such left them a bit perplexed as to who to seek out. Maybe with this in mind, the festival organisers decided on getting in UR, or maybe it was just simply the fact that UR were touring the UK at the moment, and its not often they come around so, hey, why not get them over anyways? UR’s legendary status in dance music and their fiery and original brand of techno and electro was sure to pull in a substantial crowd.

The party took over both Ri-Ra and the Globe, so before the arrival of UR head honcho “Mad” Mike Banks and his gang there was time to check out Japan’s Sketchpad performing live in the Globe. Their brand of stripped down techno was not particularly innovative but it still did what was asked of it, and the warm bass-heavy soundsystem got a few people shuffling ‘round at the front.

UR were to perform a little earlier than expected – 1am - so by the time I made it downstairs to Ri-Ra they had already taken stage while the sound engineer milled around looking for a radio mic that had been stolen by a caring punter. A request for its return proved fruitless but never the less, as their MC Cornelius Harris stated, it was gonna take more than that to stop UR.

Flanked on either side by Banks, Dj Skurge, MIA and Frankie Fultz – doing his best Professor Griff impersonation by just standing there, not really doing anything – and decked out in balaclavas and other more fetching face apparels, this was obviously going to be a very different UR to the one that performed 2 years ago as Galaxy 2 Galaxy. Gone was the high tech funk and jazz of that group, to be replaced by the harder edged electro and techno of Interstellar Fugitives.

This also meant more preaching and less partying, as Harris from the get go delivered, nae shouted, musings on the themes of chaos and order, or more precisely the destruction of chaos. Or was it the destruction of order? Or the construction of chaos? Hard to tell at times, as a fair few tongue twisters came out in fairly quick succession while the group thundered into some cuts from the latest IF album. The slightly over-crowded dancefloor at first went with it, though the stop/start nature of the performance obviously wasn’t to the liking of some, and it eased off a bit after the first few songs.

Maybe some were expecting the likes of High Tech Jazz and Knights of the Jaguar , but bar the string heavy housier “Moonrays”, the grittier sounds of “Moor Horsemen” and “Kill your Radio Station” took precedence. The only nod to the more well known UR came in the form of a flat sounding “Final Frontier” which lost its impact due to that classic acid line being all but inaudible. But then they went and saved it by leading into Kraftwerks “Numbers” through to Adonis’ “No Way Back”. Proof too that UR aren’t adverse to a bit of old fashioned call n response antics, Harris lead the crowd into a chant of “Eine zwei drei vier” with the mic then being passed around the crowd for “No Way Back” before the haunting synths of “Final Frontier” eventually crept back in. Who said UR was all about po-faced posturing?

It’s fair to say that they don’t hold the presence they once had on record but there is still no one quite like them in the world of techno. In a live arena populated by blokes staring into laptop screens tweeking a midi controller, it was refreshing to see samples and loops being kept to the minimum, with beats getting bashed out furiously by MIA on the ol MPC pad (who’s ever seen a drum solo on one of them before?!) with Banks holding up the rear on the keys. And as for the oft-scoffed at militant-esque stance and bravado of their appearance, you’re never gonna walk into a room where Interstellar Fugitives are playing and confuse them with anyone else.

At that, the masks did eventually come off with a version of “Crackzilla” that practically leveled the whole room, let alone the dancefloor, before Mad Mike, blatantly loving every second of it – yes that’s right kids, he smiles! – delivered the age-old classic stabs of “Sonic Destroyer”. They suggest at the end that there will be more, and just as Banks started up the opening of “Amazon” it all of a sudden came to a halt for reasons not made clear. It was a slightly muted conclusion to the performance, but going on the rapturous response from the crowd, UR had more than delivered.

In a time of ketamine-induced stupors on dancefloors and Dj sets containing more ping-pong sound effects than the whole Chinese Olympics table-tennis team could muster up in a 14hr training session, techno needs more acts like UR. Not afraid to stand out from the crowd, and not afraid to take risks – some of which don’t always come off – UR continue to mine their own path in the dance music arena, one that last Sundays crowd seemed perfectly happy to go along with.