Following a cooling down period after a really nice, long Sunday afternoon Kuma's blow-out, Isidro and I made it down to Mortville to see some friends play last night. Having been listening to the recent Coppertone CD EP quite a bit lately, I wanted to see/hear what Miss Sasha W. was going to do live. And aside from overpowering the circuit in the room that she was performing in and needing a re-start, what she did for her second ever solo show (!) was wow the audience with some lovely and melancholy minimal synth material. I appreciated that her voice was more echo-y and less vocoder-y than on the first CD that I have. That really helped set a particularly somber mood. I left with a new disc that features the plucked-string loop-driven last song that she played/sang, and I am looking forward to hearing the studio version, as it was my favorite piece in her set. Both Alex and Jeremy from Oakeater played cinematic solo synth sets last night, but the styles verged into very different territories. Alex's set was definitely like the soundtrack to a 1980s Italian horror film. The multiple pieces that he played combined a mixture of Tangerine Dream and Goblin styles, making for a progressive synth feel. It was nice to watch him actually "play" too. Jeremy processed his modular set-up to create more of a long-form soundscape that certainly nodded to 1970s and 1980s synth music, but it had a less identifiable feel to it, not being as easy to tie to, say, Giallo films, etc. Good stuff, all around.
