East India Youth brings icy electronica to Latitude 2014 woodland

It’s late afternoon in Henham Park and deep in the sun-soaked woodland, a gangly man in a suit is generating an absorbing industrial buzz on the cramped iArena. The tiny tent might be surrounded by luscious woodland but the sound that William Doyle a.k.a East India Youth creates is conspicuously urban.

A startlingly talented bedroom producer, Doyle is a tangle of nervy energy onstage, running between instruments to construct the cascades of emotive electronica that make up his year’s debut solo album ‘Total Strife Forever’. Tall, smartly dressed and swathed in dry ice, Doyle headbangs as he switches between mixing desks, laptop, bass and vocals, playing his synths with the kind of virtuosic intensity you might apply to playing Bach on a harpsichord.

There’s a risk that the mesmeric effect so powerful on ‘TSF’ might lose impact relocated to a lo-fi festival stage and stripped from its usual live backdrop of hallucinatory Escher-style projections. Thankfully these fears prove unfounded. A small crowd stand rapt as Doyle paints startling, Krautrock flecked industrial landscapes that veer from the cacophony of the Autobahn, shrieking shards of broken glass in the underpass, to spectral whispers, a gust blowing through an abandoned building. His instrumentals - the likes of the captivating, doom-strewn ‘Glitter Recession’ - are minimalist slow builders heavily indebted to Philip Glass, Eno and Berlin-era Bowie, easily enough to hypnotise an audience already teetering on the brink of sunstroke.

These tracks are seriously smart, but it’s the vocal lead songs that really stand out, gripping both heads and hearts. ‘Dripping Down’, a gloriously blocky, analogue tinged pop number, gets hands in the air, while ‘Heaven, How Long’ explodes into moments of deafening transcendence. A lingering bittersweet start to Latitude’s first sunny evening.