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Wysteriax plays solo cello with loops and sampling and effects. She starts out by beating gently on the back of the cello with a soft mallet, then setting it looping to create the rhythm track over which she plays. It's rarely tuneful; mostly she does skittery things up and down the neck, occasionally sampling them and adding them to the loops, but there are hints of warm, buttery bass line thrown in from time to time. She has a squeaky, old-fashioned bird call on a string around her neck, and works it while pressing it against the strings and the body at one point, which adds both visual and auditory interest. And she ends her set by pressing a small music box against the cello body playing "Pop Goes the Weasel." Good, weird stuff.
Bullock/Rawlings/Kerbaj Trio have a whole lot of stuff. Bullock has an upright bass and some kind of electronic box. Rawlings has a cello and a vast array of eviscerated pedals, provisionally wired together. Kerbaj has a trumpet and a whole lot of ancillary objects; he begins by blowing into the trumpet (no embouchure, so it makes just the faintest little wind-sound), then removes the mouthpiece, substituting first a rubber tube, then what appears to be a clarinet mouthpiece on a hose. He puts various things over the bell of the trumpet, or rests them in it, sometimes with other things inside them. Meanwhile, the other two are bowing at any part of their instruments except the actual strings, for the most part. It's all very interesting to watch. However, sonically it is very, very subtle. And there's a fine, fine line between the far end of subtle and the near end of boring. I get kind of bored.
Krap Ghos' are not boring. They are quite possibly the most psychotic musical experience I have ever had. And I mean that in a good way. I don't know and, to some extent, can't imagine where they might go from one moment to the next. Some of it is sort of simple, rhythmic electronica, but then they'll veer off into thrashy guitar torture, strumming hard with gigantic feedback and fast power-drums, then a synth-poppy bass line on the keys, then a brief, lovely guitar arpeggio. It all sounds really good (except when it sounds really bad in a really good way) and it's kind of fun being jerked around like this. This is a side project, and maybe just a one-off, but I hope they'll do this again.
Secret Diary is another of Donna Parker's duo acts, this one with Jessica Rylan. (a.k.a. Can't) Jessica's got a big, homemade-looking box of buttons and knobs and sockets and wires, which she manipulates to produce various crunches and pops over Donna's thrumming and whining. It's a lot more rhythmic than most Donna Parker solo sets that I've seen, but also a good deal more subdued. There's some cool stuff going on, but it never quite seems to bust out and get outrageous, somehow. Maybe I'm spoiled. The section where Jessica screams into a microphone, and the system turns it into pulses of distortion with the rhythms of speech, is pretty intriguing.
