- Sub Club is an irregular home for techno. Its weekly Subculture night, run by longstanding residents Harri and Domenic, plays plenty of it—as do other nights on the club's roster—but the artists it invites tend to mix techno with more forgiving bursts of house and disco, which has been the dominant sound in the city for some time. Animal Farm is one of Glasgow's most established techno parties, and one of the few outlets Sub Club has for a sound whose old haunts (The Soundhaus, The Arches) no longer exist.
For all that, Sub Club is a great club to see a techno DJ in. Its red lights and low ceilings make for a cloistered atmosphere, as if you're dancing in an air raid shelter, except that people tend to take refuge outside in the smoking area when things get too heavy. When I arrived last Friday around midnight, I wondered if a few people hadn't already evacuated the place for a cigarette and a breather—playing to around 200 people, about half the club's capacity, the residents were in no mood to rein it in. Nonetheless, the majority of the crowd managed to keep up with Animal Farm's brisk start.
The battered plexiglass around the booth was getting another rhythmic bashing as Vril took to the booth at around 12:30 AM. His music has a raw, elemental power, and with that came the sort of immediacy that Glasgow crowds lap up. Vril's drums were huge and destructive, and his chords heaved against them like tectonic plates. At one point, amid loops of white noise and thunderous kicks, a volley of hi-hats began hissing like snakes in a pit. During a beatless passage, he triggered a Reese bassline that rushed in like water from a collapsing dam.
However intense Vril's live set became, it was always easy to dance to. He handled his huge sounds with a conductor's elegance, and at the end of his set the crowd seemed energised by its balletic force. Oscar Mulero's music is made of stern stuff, too, but its physique is trimmer and more sinewy—more like a sprinter than a heavyweight boxer. I heard the first bleeps of the night on Mulero's opening track, a moment that transported the music far above Vril's shattered landscapes and into an outer space that the Spaniard's techno often occupies.
For the first 30 minutes or so, Mulero's music had the same sense of urgency and aggression of his Giegling counterpart, but after a while it started to lose my interest. His set just about matched Vril's for energy and power, but it was a little short of variety—I found more of that in Vril's bank of controllers than I did in Mulero's record bag. Where Mulero, like many of his peers, looked to the sky for inspiration, Vril mined the earth instead, churning it into shards as he tore up the Jamaica Street basement.