Elfin Saddle (Picastro / Khôra)
The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge). Saturday, March 5, 2011.
On a cold and rather snowy night, I headed out after the symphony to catch the late show in the Tranzac's front room. If I wasn't going to go home and pull on my jammies, the snug Southern Cross wasn't a bad second option. And weather notwithstanding, this drew a pretty good crowd, that would, at its peak, include a fair number of people stuck standing at the back.
The show was opened with the solo work of Matthew Ramolo, who records as Khôra, easing unannounced into his set. Soon, the crowd was shushing the talkers as Ramolo created quietly-still washes of e-bow, taking about four minutes to build up in volume before he started to add a second layer on top. Meanwhile, this time out, Ramolo was accompanied by visual projections crafted by associate Joe Dodaro — at first orange, smushy fire-like images spilling over an the edges of a blanket affixed to the room's west wall.
By the time the soundscape had transformed into blurby analog synth blobs, the images changed to blurry letters on a page. At first I wasn't sure how Ramolo was staying roughly in sync with a screen he wasn't looking at, but it is worth remembering that he's playing compositions, after all, not just random noodling.
And then, as the music changed again, the visuals moved back to blurry colours for about a dozen minutes. The set to this point had transformed from one piece to another with constant segues, but there was finally a cold stop before the next piece, with gentle guitar picking with less ambient wash backing it up. Toward the end of that, the screen gave out, and the projections were being cast onto the curtains — and through the window, now beaming into the Annex night.
The last piece was something I recognized from when I saw him before, building to a swirling skirl with ebow and a screwdriver used as a slide — and the projections ended as he was on the comedown. Strong stuff, and still entrancing on seeing him for a second time.
Listen to an excerpt from this set here.
That was followed by a too-rare chance to catch longstanding locals Picastro, whose music is rather beautiful, in the way that watching a slow-motion video of a car crash is beautiful. The songs are anchored by the voice and guitar of Liz Hysen1, who started things off with the lovely languidness of "Split Head". The song's hook is a nimble little slide move that always gets caught in my head, set against the gentle atonality of Nick Storring's cello line. That was followed with "Neva", also from '09's Become Secret, the band's most-recent full-length.
After that came a series of the as-yet-unreleased songs that the band have been playing live for a little while, all of which fit well with the older material. The band's malleable lineup — Hysen is the sole constant member — has held steady for a while now, and both Storring and drummer Brandon Valdivia bring along the skills they employ as members of the city's improvised-music community in animating the off-kilter songs.
Which isn't to say, by any means, that this is all "uneasy listening". "Car Sleep" (from 2007's Whore Luck) shows off the fact that Hysen could create something like popsongs if she wanted to turn her mind to it. But there's a lot of rewards for getting pulled into the band's deeper explorations — like here, as the set closed with "The Stiff", where Valdivia turned from his drumkit to the piano to add some chord clusters, piling another disquieting layer onto the song.2
Listen to a track from this set here.
With the snowy weather outside and the late start (about quarter to one), the crowd thinned out a bit as Elfin Saddle got set up. I didn't know anything about the Montréal combo, save for the fact that they're on Constellation Records, but they proved to be a good match for Picastro, with a droning, slightly atonal approach to songwriting.
Initially a duo of Emi Honda and Jordan McKenzie, who also collaborate as visual artists, here they were joined throughout by Nathan Gage on double bass. At the outset, Honda sang, backed by her own accordion and McKenzie on drums. After a couple songs, she would take over the kit (which was customized to look like a percussive hookah, or perhaps something a marching band in a Dr. Seuss book would employ) and McKenzie would pick up his guitar.
Each had their own style of slightly off-kilter vocals, Honda a sing-songy breeze and McKenzie a sort of decentred olde folk approach — I could imagine breaking into a warbling version of "Jerusalem", like Nick Drake on 'shrooms. The band is certainly situated in their own soundworld (or, perhaps, their own Wurld, as their collaborative audio-visual release is called) and the unearthly quality of the worlds/wurlds they create definitely carries over to their music. They showed a definite talent for arrangements, with songs effortlessly seguing from one to the next, and there were some flourishes that I liked, such as the tinkling music box and double-bowed cymbals, but overall it didn't strongly engage me and as the hour grew late the lure of catching the subway home was enough for me to cut out as they headed toward the last part of their set.
Listen to a track from this set here.
1 Hysen will also usually play violin as well in concert, but it wasn't brought out this time 'round.
2 The band has an online presence as low-key as its music, still mostly relying on myspace, but according to the grapevine, Picastro will be giving a local launch to Fool, Redeemer (their "semi-collaborative" split album with Nadja) at January's edition of the "Feast in the East" Concert Series, January 7, 2012.
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