Many Voices

Just got back from a Skaters-related gig with P.A.R.A. at the CCA.

The first band - who I don't know the name of! - started off well, mixing pre-programmed beats on a small machine at their feet with distorted, screaching-in-a-thunderstorm guitars. When I see experimental, improvised music like this I always need to be able to detect a rudder to the chaos, either a principle, a style, a beat. It can be anything really, but something to anchor the improvisation. Just like in free jazz, when musicians improvise around a theme. By juxtaposing programmed beats and un-programmed guitars, this balance was achieved. But the beats soon drifted out into nothingness, leaving the guitars horribly exposed...

Second was Skaters member Spencer Clark, playing under the name Monopoly Child Star Searchers, although the music he played was more akin to his Vodka Soap identity. Definitely my favourite, he started off with a slightly-askew synth beat that slowly evolved as extra parts were added, creating an off-kilter-yet-metronomic beat that underwrote the whole set.

Ten minutes in, a Casio-keyboard came blurting in, and at first I thought the two jarred, so wholly separate did they sound. (Ben said he thought he had the backing beats on a CD player that he was playing too, and that this Casio sound was a different CD track starting). But slowly, surely, they managed to acclimatise to each other, creating an amazing cross-over of the beat - conjuring images of long Trans-Siberian train journeys, crisp sunsets across fields, the plodding motion of a train, on-and-on-and-on - with the Casio as a sort of distance relative of devotional music from Buddhist retreats or the tribal rituals from Africa that Sublime Frequencies puts out. Similar in parts to Lucky Dragons, it was lulling, lullaby-ing, like rain, almost, or the hailstones on my window that woke me up twice the other night.

He jams differently at each gig so videos will never tell the whole story. The one on the Skaters myspace space (at Leeds) is good as it's a whole set, the one at O'Grady's in Toronto is good too. Here's a vid of a similar jam to last night:



P.A.R.A (which stands for Pre Atlantean Ritual Artifacts) was next up. She took to the stage wearing a long white silk gown, white and cream drapes and a white curly wig. Her table was covered in fur skins and trinkets. At the front of the table was a large helmet that looked like a Star Wars Stormtrooper had discovered paganism. Scattered around the table were metal bowls and dishes, which were amplified up and connected to her laptop (also covered in fur). As she started singing operatic notes into the two microphones next to her, she lit an incense stick and smoke began wafting up. The voices were mangled now, twisted out of shape in a sampler/computer, doubling them up, adding shuddering base notes to her voice to make them sound like voices from beyond the grave:





James Ferraro, the other member of Skaters, finished the night off well, playing almost a logical progression of Spencer Clark's set. Starting from where his bandmate finished, he ramped up ritual drums and added layers and layers of contrasting beats and voices calling across oceans. In putting my fingers in my ears to counteract the white noise parts, I separated myself off from the room, and I think I even began to doze, with the music as a soundtrack to my half-waking-half-sleeping state. It was a nice way to end the night.

This is very much like it: