Ivan Smagghe and JG Wilkes in Glasgow

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  • Depending on the outcome of Scotland's independence referendum, which had taken place one day earlier, I'd expected this Sub Club Rinse FM takeover to be either the happiest night in the venue's history or a queasy hellscape of anguished self-annihilation. In reality, despite an overnight result that would have been a boot in the stomach to the vast majority of those in the Jamaica Street basement, all of the unpleasantness in the city that night was to be found outside the Sub's four walls. Inside, a good-natured mood prevailed, and seemed to come less from fuck-it-all escapism than a deep satisfaction at all the positive things that had happened in the preceding weeks and months, plus an already-dawning realisation that the result could end up being just a comma rather than a full-stop. As a duo, Optimo have been vocal supporters of independence, and if this night had involved the more outwardly political JD Twitch as well as JG Wilkes, it's likely that there would have been a few explicit musical references to what had just taken place. Wilkes and Smagghe sidestepped anything like that, opting instead to deliver a relentlessly high-quality four hours of music that started (for me) with the shuddering bass and menacingly blank vocal ("I'm about to vandalise you all") of Roman Flügel's remix of C.A.R.'s "Idle Eyes." This sort of techno and electro—dark but deeply infectious stuff that sounds, in one friend's memorable assessment, "like someone's chucked a rattlesnake into a speaker"—dominated the bulk of the evening. Relatively linear, propulsive iterations of that broad form, among them Bok Bok and Tom Trago's febrile "Need This" and the Matt Karmil remix of Talaboman's "Sideral," warmed the crowd into a palpable, against-the-odds party mood. The distorted, crunching likes of "So We Went Electric" by Powell, meanwhile, made for sharpening little digressions without ever disrupting what had become an intoxicatingly strong groove. A few choice rave era selections meshed well with these recent cuts—Confidential's 1990 classic "Psychopath" was a particularly stirring highlight—before the pair moved toward vocal tracks late in the set. A closing one-two of Sylvester's "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" and The Vaselines' "You Think You're A Man" finished what could easily have been a night to forget with a beaming, celebratory strut.
RA