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Rating: New, grimy, and alienating sounds... that's what I more or less knew about these guys the moment I decided to organize one of their concerts here at Spartaco, Ravenna, where I occasionally arrange things and various events...
I was in touch with their Italian booker (Luca), who was telling me about the substantial difficulty in placing this kind of concert here with us, a bizarre fact since in America bands like the Skaters, for example, have even opened for Sonic Youth and Wolf Eyes... well, I tell him at least one date I'll get for you here, etc.
From my perspective, I knew I was facing an appealing proposition in its own way, even if ultimately challenging, given the average listening standards of the audience here on the Romagna Riviera, so I also spread the word a bit on some blogs and various music sites...
On Saturday, our guests arrive around 7, making themselves comfortable, some on the phone, some on the Internet, and some even with a bottle of wine. I introduce myself and immediately find them friendly and pleasant. One of them, Jan/Tomutonttu, is Finnish, and I find him calm in his apparent alienation. Skaters and Axolotl alias Karl the most boisterous and chaotic, unbelievable: they start drinking like sponges, and before you know it, I have to go back to the Market to get 2 more bottles of wine because the three I had bought were already drained dry on the kitchen table.
Karl is the only one who smokes weed, so I gladly exchange some weed with his latest 33 RPM work (Chemical Theatre, a great record...).
The last one to appear, after about two hours spent on the phone with her boyfriend, here comes Inca Ore, aka Eva, a very tall and I'd say rather gloomy girl, despite the aura of hippiedom that pervaded her. No sound check, or at least that's what I'm told more than once. The only sources of sound: a bass combo (our grimy one) and a 60 watt Fender amp.
The concert starts around 23:00, a good turnout of people, locals and not, all in good spirits because entry was free! Inca Ore, that is Eva, is really out of her mind: she hooks up to the bass amp and, armed with voice, pedals, and processors, starts dilating bizarre sounds and vocalizations, a sort of whiny child, irritated and frustrated. Also, a bit of a more DIY Bjork, let's say, less melodic, more slurred. She's bewildering, after a while, this girl, but it’s the right dose of madness to start the evening well...
then Karl/Axolotl approaches me and asks if we could roll a joint before his set, as ganja relaxes him in those moments up there when it gets delirious, and so on; I couldn't be happier...later seeing him literally dangle from his grimy violin, while his initial set merges with the increasingly piercing screams of the girl (a bit like THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MUSIC, a bit squinting and bellowing at truly alienating volumes... beautiful...).
The cosmic dilations expand with our friend's pedals, he processes everything, and the sound mixes and blends until it becomes an amorphous and harmonic mass, managed between highs, and especially lows. Few screams this time. Just magmatic chaos, intertwined with symphonic motifs and violin notes. But it doesn't last long. Pity.
Unfortunately, I missed Tomutonttu's set, I'm human too, and social relationships should not be put aside. Anyway, I heard an immense quantity of frequencies buzzing, maybe one of those theremins that Jan had shown me earlier...certainly acidic, the set, pity...When I manage to organize my trips, the Skaters approach the stage. One of them has a rope with bells hanging from his neck, while his partner in crime equips himself with tambourines, marimbas, unidentified things, and the usual immense array of pedals and tape-recorders, microphones, and who knows what else...
The amps start to screech, finally immersed in the void, forget about the skateboards to which their name erroneously alludes, because the frequencies fed into those poor amps’ speakers, I couldn’t even understand what the primary source of such a range of sound content was: much of the work here is also reserved for voices, used as waves and walls of sound, while improbable architectures of psychotic and delirious noise-making are gradually constructed. Another exciting 30 minutes of cerebral degeneration, surprisingly finding the audience attentive and interested, even if visibly disoriented.
Very nice fade-out ending, with the combo emitting a sound more properly from a dilated Sunn guitar, with the cowbells sliding more and more towards a dignified and sober silence. One of my new entries of the moment, along with Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood. Magical.
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