The Marble Factory, 3rd of November 2022
A soggy Thursday night at Marble Factory watching a German techno brass marching band; not your normal night out.
For those that do not know, Meute are a 11-piece techno marching band hailing from Hamburg that cover well-known techno works such as Mark Knight’s “The Man with the Red Face”, Dennis Ferrer’s “Hey Hey” which features vocals from Meute’s Adrian Hanack, Disclosure’s “You and Me”, and my favourite that I discovered them through, a cover of Fatima Yamaha’s underground smash hit “Araya”.
In total, the instruments covered by the members include tenor sax, concert flute, baritone sax, bass sax, trumpet, trombone, sousaphone, marimba, snare drum and hi-hat, cymbal, bass drum, shaker and vocals. It goes without saying, this is an extremely talented bunch of musicians. It was great to see that the crowd was a mixture of young and older; apparently every age can enjoy the staggering sound of a techno marching band.
What you probably wouldn’t expect from a marching band is their unbelievable ability to get a crowd jumping up and down for two hours straight. The combination of already loved classic techno songs matched with the pure talent and power of the brass band is unbeatable. I got talking to a girl who was at the event to see if they would be any good to sign to Boomtown Festival. Fair to say they will definitely be playing there next year off the back off that performance.
The band originally found fame in early 2016 after covering “Rej” by Berlin DJ’s Âme, hitting 400,000 plays in just a week. Meute then managed over 150 concerts in the first two years of their creation, and this level of experience clearly showed on this most recent tour as the level of crowd involvement was ridiculous for a supposedly “classic sounding” marching band that have played in classical settings such as The Hamburg State Opera and Vienna Concert House.
I had seen videos of the band walking through the crowd blasting out their tunes, and was not disappointed as they belted tracks from about a metre away from the front of the crowd at points throughout the show. Overall, I could not recommend catching them on tour or at a festival any more highly; they blew everyone away on Thursday night.
The Travelling Terrier (Finn Hardie)
