Index of Shows | Homepage | Upcoming Shows | Write to me
Tonight has been billed as an evening of mostly mellow, ambient music at ZuZu! I'm kind of exhausted, so I'm happy to chill out and let this stuff wash over me. First up is Gavin McCarthy, who plays a drum kit. Not so mellow and ambient, really. He has some prerecorded music that he triggers from a laptop, and then he drums over it. It's good drumming, sort of rolling and rich with lots of fills, and the inversion of the more typical playing-melody-over-canned-drums is interesting.
Forbes Graham blows a trumpet. He doesn't really play the trumpet much; he's mostly blowing through it, so the sound is whispery, desert wind type sounds. I find this interesting at first, but it's pretty static, and I quickly get bored with it. The occasional interruption for what, to my ears, read as pointless noodly jazz runs without tune or tonality does little to capture my interest.
Insect Factory is one man with guitar and pedals. Now THIS is ambient! Carefully modulated feedback and e-bowed strings slowly build and fade, swells of note arriving and overlapping like very gentle waves. Watery metaphors are inescapable, because it all has a very floaty, oceanic sort of feel to it. It's very soothing and sort of timeless, so I really have no idea how long he's played when it gently dwindles to nothing.
Earthen Sea is also one man with guitar and pedals, but it's a more dynamic experience. He makes heavy use of loops, and actually picks at the strings sometimes, so there's some attack to what he's doing. He also builds slowly up and then almost as slowly back down, but the components that he builds with are individually livelier.
