The Electrozone will be doing online musical events every Friday and Saturday night until lockdown ends. These reviews are about the program titled MUSIC/FUN (https://www.facebook.com/events/606473500216982/), which went live on Friday, April 24th, 2020.
Here are my capsule reviews of what went on. I strongly recommend that you check out the shows video archives. Links below.
Deep Creature (twitch.tv/deepcreaturemusic)
Deep Creature is the solo project of New Jersey keyboard player Sam Gutman. This guy has a sound that reminds me of Roger Powell (circa Cosmic Furnace) with a little bit of George Duke and mid-70s Herbie Hancock tossed in for good measure. A very vintage, analogue sound. Three keyboards and a roomful of other electronic goodies. One piece features the voice of the late Carl Sagan, describing our planet in loving detail, another the sampled calls of songbirds.
Samuel Aronoff (http://www.samuelaronoff.bandcamp.com)
Much more minimalist setup than the previous act, only two keyboards and a sequencer. But the sound is no less fat, or vintage. And it's no less engaging. Samuel does a lot with his minimal setup. If you weren't watching, you might think he was playing a room's worth of analogue synths. Faint echoes of Kraftwerk, circa Autobahn.
Grant Bouvier (http://www.grantbouvier.com)
Sounds a bit like we may have another Kitaro here! His instrumental stylings owe more than a little to Asian musical styles, at least until he gets into full-on analogue-flavored noise-music mode before returning to more mellow but no less interesting electronic sound. Rather than show images of himself at the controls, his highly-psychedelicized videos accompanying the music are of trains, urban scenes and machinery. The sampled vocals are equally spacey.
Viola Yip (http://violayip.com/)
I last saw Viola Yip perform at the Greyhaven Motel in Ithaca a few years ago. Her music was unconventional to say the least. It involved electric buzzers which injected buzzing tomes into the mix, and controlled a bank of different-colored light bulbs. This time, she is playing a specially-modified PVC pipe which is rigged as an amplified one-stringed instrument. It produces some dreamy, droney and sometimes mildly disturbing sounds. She plays it by hand, or with a bow, a stick, and/or a motorized wire brush (shades of Remko Scha!).
To see future and past ElectroZone online performances, follow the links below:
Live link: https://www.twitch.tv/the_electrozone
Archive: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyCbFTaMYPshyMQLaQS4s7Q
Donations of US$10.00 can (and should) be made at
venmo @electrozone.
Or via PayPal - ithacaelectrozone@gmail.com
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