Svarte Greiner (The Sight Below / Wyrd Visions vs. Nif-D / Gardenia and Nick Storring)
Teranga. Sunday, May 16, 2010.
Of course the hockey game is on. This might be a night of out-there noise/drone at an African bar, but you still gotta have the hockey game on. It's the first game of the Eastern semifinals, and vast swathes of Toronto are engaged in an uncharacteristic flirtation with les Habs — one of those liaisons that, come fall, pretty much everyone will deny as they reconcile themselves to another season of grim, masochistic backing of the local side.
The stage area is gear-laden, but not with the tools of rock'n'roll. Looks like it should be an inneresting night — hopefully worth making the trip out on a Sunday. I'd been hopeful that the early doors time might mean that things'd get going sooner rather than later, but that doesn't really come to pass, with the headliner doing some soundchecking well past the time I was hoping things would have gotten going.
Killing time, I survey the crowd. I get the impression that everyone else here knows each other. I look around, wondering if I should drag a chair over to the area in front of the stage — surely this isn't going to be a standing sort of gig? Meanwhile, the mood is being set by DJ Craig Dunsmuir, playing something that sounds like Terry Riley, followed by something that sounds like pitched-down dance music.
Eventually, things got going as Gardenia and Nick Storring started their set — Gardenia (a.k.a Bryan Walker) on guitars and effects while Storring plays cello and manipulates things via laptop. With some vwip noises as Storring started a slow sequence of notes on the cello, Walker's guitar provided the background atmospherics. The sound got heavier with a slower, lower cello loop underlying Storring's live playing, while a steady, train-like chuffing rhythm — not quite a beat — emerged. Slowly, Storring's percussive bow taps transformed into a slowly-unfolding backbeat, riding the groove for three or four minutes, before collapsing into guitar haze. A series of treated rumbles ease down to become the bed for a mournful cello passage, setting up a very subtle touch of a vocal track, pitched almost the same as the cello it accompanies — before it falls in on itself and winds down, the whole thing lasting about fifteen minutes.
Without pause, the pair started again on a second piece. A humming loop from Storring — using a harmonica as the clay to sculpt his noise from — is accompanied by minimal shimmering guitar. Again, the piece builds up in volume and rhythmic complexity, easing for a bit in the middle into something like a beat-box Maggot Brain with Walker's guitar now less restrained. And then it all imploded into itself, receding into the distance as Storring played a low, grunting cello part that got looped below a higher, more fluid one, riding that out for the last few minutes.
My assumption is that this was pure improvisation, and not the musicians working out a pre-planned composition. It certainly had me thinking back to another occasion that I had seen Storring in this same venue, in a duo version (with Colin Fisher) of I Have Eaten the City. It's interesting to reflect on the division of labour here, as what Storring's doing is flashier and easier to follow, so it's less clear to the casual observer how Walker is impacting the process. But an absorbing set, even if I tend to like the ambient beginning and crunchy endings more than the middle parts.
Listen to an excerpt from this set here.
Starting 'round eleven, next up was a unique collaborative set billed as Wyrd Visions vs. Nif-D. Colin Bergh (usually seen playing slow-simmering folk with his double-necked guitar) and Matt Smith (with his laptop and yellow plastic case full of electronics) normally have fairly different aesthetics, and on this meeting, the common ground was more towards the latter's looptronica.1 Bergh appeared to be playing a krar, and started with a repeating little four-note plucked figure. Nif-D began layering his voice over top, and soon that was weaving in and out of slightly-out-of-phase doppelgängers of the krar line — building up into a cloud of pinging vocals, some glitchy noises and echoing drum. An interesting first phase, and perhaps the coolest part of the collaboration, as some of the subsequent ideas (such as a high-pitched looping noise) weren't as pleasant to listen to.
As that collapsed into a haze of Smith's distorted vocals, Bergh (now sitting on the floor) seemed like less of a driving factor in the second half of the set, adding wordless vocalisations under the cloud of Smith's own vox, which grew in number as the loops built up and took over like a sort of doowop zombie army. Drum loops slowly took over from the vocals, until only they remained, and Smith slowly tampered with them, pulling them out of sync to create an effect not unlike a crowd of bored junior high kids bouncing basketballs off a garage door — until it then resolved itself back into a kind of order and faded away.
Going just over twenty minutes, there were a couple bumpy patches here, but also some interesting ideas. Again, there was a chance to muse on the push-and-pull of a collaboration like this — it felt more like Nif-D was engineering the process, with Bergh serving as one more input for him to manipulate. But being less deterministic than a standard "instrument" obviously meant that what Bergh did created choices and decisions which affected how things proceeded. It's fair to day that I've never seen Nif-D playing the same thing twice. He has more of a method than a genre, and having something different like this to plug into it — especially the krar at the outset, but Bergh's presence generally — gave it a unique twist.
Listen to an excerpt from this set here.
Even though there was a fairly quick turnover for Svarte Greiner2, the room was less crowded than for the previous set. That could have been a case of some folks just wanting to check out what the local guys were up to (there were some other musicians in the crowd who seemed to drop by mainly for the Nif-D/Wyrd Visions set) or a case of gotta-get-to-bed on a Sunday night (the set started about twenty-five to twelve).
Erik Skodvin, hailing from Norway, took the stage without chatter or even saying who he was — not being sure in which order the last two acts were going to play, I wasn't even sure who he was at first. In fact, as I sat down on the floor, I couldn't even see who was playing — as he finished preparing to play, the room was plunged into almost total darkness, hardly dispelled by a few candles placed on the stage. The darkness went well with the music's dreamspace-like qualities, though — this was more suited to lean back with eyes closed and feel.
Sometimes when people refer to "drone" in more pop-structured music, it's not really all that droney. But this: more so, and very suitable for creating a woozy, floating sort of state. By this point of a Sunday night I'd usually be asleep — and this wasn't unlike that. Whether that sounds like a selling point or not to you would probably indicate your response to this set.
The music started slow, Skodvin playing with overtones as he slowly bowed the guitar for an unrushed nine minutes before he started to explore a new idea, plucking out slow series of notes that repeated with the subtle intervention of his laptop.3 After a few quieter minutes, the sound began to build up into a loud wall — loud, but not "noisy", as the real skill here was in the sense of the spontaneous composition in the whole thing, with the various elements woven into something that was decidedly more than just a pile of cacophonies. Existing its own little hermetic bubble, this was beautiful stuff.
At the very end, the music did get discordantly noisy, as if that bubble had popped, and we were being plunged back into the chaos of the world. Playing for just under twenty-five minutes, this was pretty amazing, and could have gone on for longer.4
Listen to an excerpt from this set here.
After that, an even thinner crowd for The Sight Below — it was, indeed, getting pretty late. A solo vehicle for Seattle's Rafael Anton Irisarri which, despite using basically the same ingredients as the previous set (guitar, laptop), the results were rather different. The set started off strongly, using loops of bowed guitars, and there was a nice ambient sense to it.
I was thoroughly enjoying things for about the first ten minutes, but when the beats came in, it was less inneresting — and that was the bulk of the set. Perhaps just the rhythm's deterministic regularity felt at odds with everything else, leaving an unresolved tension where this was neither effective as sit-down-bliss-out or get-up-and-dance music. There were also some subtle pre-recorded vocal loops, and that also made the set feel less "live"/fully-created-in-front-of-our eyes than the night's other music.
Well executed, but not really my thing. It went on a bit, lasting thirty-five minutes — and this time it felt longer than necessary. But I must not have been in the majority opinion, as Irisarri was called back for an encore, playing a dreamy ambient piece, which was a nice note to end the night on.
There were perhaps some technical problems behind the scenes — besides the late start, I understand that The Sight Below usually incorporates a live visual element into his act, but that wasn't running for this show. But, that notwithstanding, a rewarding night on the whole, with a good showing from the local undercard and Svarte Greiner definitely impressing.
1 Although, that being said, it's worth noting that Bergh's sound in Wyrd Visions is also partially derived from his use of a loop pedal, so he's obviously no stranger to the technological possibilities in play here.
2 Ex post facto edit: Well after the fact, I have realized that "Svarte Greiner" is a bandonym and not a personal name, so I have tweaked the text here where necessary.
3 Actually, in retrospect, this was a good chance for a staid rockist such as myself to think on the role of the laptop as a useful tool. Most of the time, seeing a computer on stage is a generic sort of turn-off for me, especially when it's used like a complicated tape deck where someone can just "press play" and sing along. But with the sort of music being created on this night, the laptop isn't an ersatz sort of replacement for something on stage as much as a tool for manipulating the sound in a way that would not otherwise be possible. And although there's still a decided lack of rock'n'roll flair in watching someone leaning in and peering into a screen, that arguably matters a lot less when it comes to "head" music like this, where the reward is in the immersive experience more than spontaneous visual excitement.
4 If any of that sounds inneresting to you, you can grab a freebie MP3 of a 45-minute Svarte Greiner live set in Moscow here.
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