There was a time, not so many hundred years ago, when the very best place to hear the finest music was in a church. Seats, a roof over your head, safety from thieves, rich acoustics and professional musicians … what more could your Enlightenment tune freak ask for?
And so it sometimes still is. A first sight of the rather austere nave and chancel (designed by William Halfpenny in 1721) shook a few bones of ancestral memory. Impressed. If the music could rise to the architecture we were about to have a very good night.
Laurence Pike (Drums), Adrian Klumpes (Piano/Keyboards) and Ben Waples (Double/Electric Bass) met as music students in Sydney and are now on their third album as TRIOSK. Their music is beautifully fresh sounding: minimalist, improvised, and supplemented with electronica and super-alert to the sound of the room.
From the opening bars of the first number, Adrian Klumpes was making the most of the randomly out of tune house piano – short repeated phrases with a couple of fingers and chunky little rhythmic blocks. Sounding very cool. All the while he’s filling out the sound with the main keyboard over in the right hand, and nipping in and out of the computer and a bundle of processors.
Over on the south side, Laurence Pike is as a hyperactive a minimalist drummer as you could ever imagine. His first onslaught is a one hundred miles an hour thrash around the whole kit. But so lightly touched and so delicately done that it’s a shimmer of clicks, taps and tingles that defy acoustic logic. He does mix it up as things proceed. But I really can't remember a drummer I've enjoyed as much as this. Every single shot he plays is audible, and nothing he does on any part of the kit crowds out anything the band are doing. This is classic trio work - listening, listening, listening and never competing.
And while Pike and Klumpes are making the bold moves, Ben Waples holds it all together with flurries of bass, big sheets of bass and growls of subterranean sustain. Delicate, timed to perfection. He swaps between bass guitar and stand up bass, and plays each for their best tricks, translating and connecting his bandmates' with magical artistry.
I don’t know the tracks. Getting some recorded music is a pleasure to anticipate. But I would report to the musically nervous that it never once occurred to me that I was listening to "jazz". This emerged later as I checked the notes. Totally swept up in the expressive, fascinating twists and turns of their masterfully controlled sounds, I would definitely recommend them to anyone with a taste for adventurous post rock or freak folk or acoustic/electronic experiments of all kinds. Them on a bill with FRIDGE and THE DIRTY THREE would make perfect sense.
As it was, we had two support acts with perfectly compatible and nicely complementary aesthetics. COLLEEN was as sublime in person as she has been on record. The strong emphasis on acoustic instruments (notably the gorgeous viola da gamba) makes her much more of a live instrumentalist than her earlier electronic-infused work might suggest. The pattern, playing pieces mainly form the current "Les Onders Silencieuses" album, was to establish loops of sound, then leave them running through the digital delay while adding further ideas on top of the layers as they grew. Classical guitar, clarinet and wind chimes were used. And there was also the treat of a tiny musical box, pressed against the sound board of the guitar and looped out through the guitar mic. Each piece was distinct, coherent and expressive. Expectations raised by the album were comfortably surpassed
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Slight and rather shy, she spoke little, but apologised after one tune for getting lost in the sound of what she was doing and forgetting to do something or other. Given the resonance of the room and the very sympathetic amplification I think the whole audience had joined her on the excursion. So no one noticed. It was simple, beautiful music.
Anticon's BRACKEN, a nom de guerre of HOOD member Chris Adams was the opening act. With his tabletop full of keyboard and ancillary electronics he spoiled us rotten with 30 uninterrupted minutes of a work composed especially for this event. Deferentially, it started and ended with choir-like evocations of sacred music, mixing in imagined bells and organ to frame the wider development of shifting sound that constituted the bulk of the piece. At 30 minutes the main surprise was how short it seemed. My attention was wholly absorbed from beginning to end. The mood of careful listening and taking delight in the pure sounds in a building rich with possibilities was brilliantly established, for the great good of all that followed. It was a very special night
www.triosk.com
www.colleenplays.org
www.myspace.com/brackenmusic
Sad to say, one of those unenlightened thieves seems to have used the cloak of the Church ambience to make off with Adrian Klumes’ Pentax camera – tour photos to date included. If you hear or see anything … do get in touch.
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