Thursday, August 25, 2005

XP2

And now for the second part of the experimental-avant-garde show at the Avant-Garde Bar: Fursaxa, Zaimph and Carlos Giffoni.

Tara Burke is Fursaxa, and she makes her music by looping dulcimer, rattle, guitar and her own chanting into an effective tapestry of sound. Definitely my favourite performance of the night; also the longest - everyone else confined themselves to one or two creations (as far as I could tell ...).

A little singing ...



A little guitar playing ...



Add some flute ...



She also had a music box, slide-whistle and some other odds'n'ends.

Zaimph, alias Marcia Bassett, made most of her music with a guitar, using e-bows and laying things across the string while she picked and sawed at it. She also held the microphone in her mouth for some vocals.



Using the e-bows.



Never a mic-stand around when you need one ...



Breathing blue fire!



Finally Carlos Giffoni, from Venezuela via New York. He seems to curate a lot of noise shows there, works with a bunch of avant-garde big wigs and generally gets around. I couldn't get into the sound he was produced, though the technique - moving a cursor around a field on his laptop to manipulate the sound from various noise-emitting doo-dads - was interesting enough.



Laptop action!



In sum, an interesting evening. With six diverse performers working their way around the fringe of what we'd call music there was guaranteed to be a few slack spots, but it was well worth it for the Fursaxa set and a few other highlights in the other artists' brief pieces.

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