No festival could be more appropriate for the North American debut of French guitarist Julien Desprez, here with his trio Abacaxi. Desprez plays guitar and pedals with the unimaginable precision of a robot from the future, hand jumping from headstock to bridge, picking strings and punching the body and fingerboard, all of it in lock-time with a literal dance on a pedal board that not only mutates and distinguishes every nanosecond of sound but controls a light show from black-out to incendiary flare, all of this resulting in a music that simultaneously invokes Hendrix, Webern, and video games. He’s the most dramatic figure to emerge in improvised music in decades.
French guitarist Julien Desprez's technique might require the coining of a new musical field — pedal dancer — a field wherein he immediately would ascend to the championship. His trio is filled out by only slightly less pedal-enhanced bassist Jean-Francoiçois Riffaud, and German drummer, with the heaviest bass drum foot in the festival, Max Andrzejewski.
With a pedal array stretched across half the stage, and requiring two discrete quarter-inch inputs for his guitar, Desprez is unlike many tech-addicted musicians who collect pedals like vintage Star Wars figures; he is unafraid to play them all, with tap dancing delight.
He and Riffaud swapped and sorted noises and brief noisy riffs with the energy and precision of speed-addled Amazon employees, while Andrzejewski hammered out the packaging with death metal heaviness applied to jazz-influenced techniques.
The non-musical element came in the form of pedal- and sound-triggered stage lights that, at times, further enhanced the epileptic dangers of the performance. The slight limitations in the presentation came from how the applied technology was used for a "trick" dominated approach, with moments starting to repeat themselves before long into the show.
But for sheer intensity and will to rock cybernetically, not to mention pedal dancing prowess, Desprez and company are a tough team to beat.
poetry, by way of galen e hershey, grandfather of catherine hershey who sings, with instrumental and voice accompaniment by gilles poizat, voicing and finding harmony, embracingly elegant and perfectly tuned. the almost unfinished, but completely unbusy, found-photographic nature of the ballading fragments helps the creators-total find the meaningful in the words and to dress them in particularly honest and paired skill.
celtic-like whisper beautiful singing, in rounded and shaped folk tradition, melodically in a rich as-a-life-working/lived, sometimes emptying in a cappella solo freeze, and sometimes in droning and mysterious older times of perception, a remembering of other works and belief, calling out to the fields and the day's labour, and calling out to the clouds and the sky and what may sit behind and on top.
strongest memories of family and the words written in poetic descriptatory fate, in lullaby-simplification, yet filled with ode'ing winks and the yellowing of sun-hit outdoor vibrant footage uncovered in the attics and suitcases of our wiser histories. writings of specific times and feelings transposed/translated to warmth-as-a-reminder lamp-folk, lighted by ancestry and carried by the family tree.
lyric-songs, poetic in aged language, instruments turning to olden tones prettily adding together in harmonic match, trumpet lonely but in confidence quietly mirrors the quieter voice sculpting the two into a singular climbing breath fogging the windows and wiping clean the last notes on turning wheels and the last reverberated echo drops off into the other rooms holding the melodies tight. they'll be sung again.
