Joanna Boool
“Hi am, hi am Joannna Boool, Joanna Boool, I’m going to start right now…” Her voice echoes over a drum track. Soprano tweets like bird chirps, something like a machine gun underwater in the background.
This is the voice of a woman, strong and mellifluous. The whole experience and event has the quality of a voice. Now the sample is a keyboard, sounding like a harpsichord, the very low notes repeated.
She plays in a dingy basement, but the sonorities are grand. You could be at an opera house. Spectral, ghostly, haunting liquid chimes. This feels so good. She embraces you with a soft wall of tubular metal, you are somewhere and nowhere. You just like being here.
The tone changes. Funky metallic beats. Subdued, sinister shouts. The funky beats get spacey with repetition, hovering and circling around your mind. Could be a flying saucer, spinning like a hovercraft above a sea.
Joanna has fractured soul. It blends and splits with the music. The echoes on the computer and of her own voice swirl. They mix with the shuffling beats, and the rhythms carry the voices, which carry the rhythms, which sand down your own spirit till you can only receive, and accept what she has to offer, which is spiritual, raw, and unendingly sweet.
Ian is on bass guitar. He hits hard. The beat is some weird funk, spacey but not out of control. On drums, Nick is playful and rollicking and rolling, bowed like the wood of the hull of a boat. Wes is eking out sharp sparks from his electric guitar. This has a no wave feel, coming out of the same strains where we found GToss, but the rhythms are simpler, and the tunes more melodic.
Wes says Sonic Youth but this is different. More driving. Experimental, yes, but with metal grooves, and dips and dives. Nick’s drumming is very subtle, sometimes hitting very lightly. But it’s cast like wrought iron, and ornate.
Each musician contributes equally, one of the nice things about this band. What bass does works with what guitar does, rounded out and capitulated by the drums.
Wes gets some really cool liquid, elastic twangs by holding the notes way up by the bell. He works with these, and it sounds almost like a synthesizer.
The Channels is a classic band, they have a classic feel, the classic feel of a band always reaching out into the future, into the feel of their youth, so you can imagine groups doing stuff like this way back in the sixties, maybe Red Crayola. This is Red Crayola wrung with early eighties New York, but perfectly molded to the basement they are now playing in, the millennial Make Out Point.
Silk Purse is a NYC band, with members of Sightings. The first thing you notice is the bassist, Richard, who is choogling (if that’s a word), or that’s what it sounds like; repeated patterns of deep dark woody booms.
Mark is singer and guitarist. His short bursts of shouts sound like electric dog barks. On synth and electronics, Justin echoes these effects, and it’s a wall of noise, with classic metal rhythms.
Mark has played with Aaron Dilloway of Wolf Eyes, and you can hear the latter’s vermin-ridden sound in this band, but this is a straight rock band, very noisy, but still with polish and control.
It’s exciting. The rhythms go places. The songs are short, and there’s always a new adventure. Mark has a series of pedals in the floor, and there’s as much action on these as on the strings.
Silk Purse is shatters and fragments, soldered together into stained glass panels from a church of the devil. The queer, squeaky, eerie light shines, and you hover around the infernal lips of the goat-footed beast, but you flutter away back like a butterfly, in the beams piercing the glass, or out the window into the light of the new summer.
originally posted @ theflashboston.com
