Let’s Prego: AngelicA Secondi

By Andrew Choate

This is the second part of a three-part review of the full 35th edition of the AngelicA festival in Bologna. The first part can be read here ; the third part will arrive after the festival ends May 31, 2025

Unless indicated otherwise, photos are by author

May 12, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

Iancu Dumitrescu & Hyperion International Ensemble

Iancu Dumitrescu - conducting

Tim Hodgkinson - bass clarinet

Dyslex - electronics

Dan Antoniu - acoustic guitar, vocals, electronics

Octav Avramescu - piano, prepared piano

Andrei Kivu - cello, flute, trumpet

Ciprian Ghiță - double bass

Simone Beneventi - percussion

Chris Cutler - percussion,

Supradynamic Music

Axis Mundi

Cycloides

Spectogramme

Stellar Points

During this ensemble’s more than two-hour performance, the audience divided into two camps: those who would have stayed for twice as long, and those who felt it should have ended much, much earlier. I’m firmly in the former group. A devoted listener to Iancu Dumitrescu ’s music for decades, I’ve traveled to Bucharest to see him conduct the Outernational Ensemble, and I’ve read Cosmic Orgasm: The Music of Iancu Dumitrescu (edited by Andy Wilson). Allow me a brief anecdote, which may symbolize a certain relationship to this music. In the 1990s, while living in Chicago, the apartment I shared was broken into. During an ultimately unsuccessful search for anything valuable, the burglar opened a drawer of my CDs and grabbed a substantial handful from my collection of Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram releases on Edition Modern. When I returned, I called local record stores to see if any had recently received a large batch of such specific recordings. One had. And because a photocopy of an ID was required to sell used CDs at the time, the thief was identified—his attempt to offload Dumitrescu’s music, with nary a care for the energy contained therein, led to his arrest.

No crimes were committed—nor solved—by the music in Bologna, but its earth-shattering force did seem to augur something momentous. When I arrived, about fifteen minutes before the show, I heard sporadic percussive crashes from the hall. Knowing how extensively this performance was rehearsed, I assumed Dumitrescu was still coaxing something particular out of the ensemble. I entered and sat down. The room was relatively quiet until he raised his arms and summoned another blast, this time with the addition of scrawling strings. The audience murmured; he shouted, “Silence please!” More scattered sounds from the stage, more low talking from the audience. Then a definitive “SILENCIO” rang from his lips. Shortly thereafter, without any formal announcement, the house lights dimmed, the stage lit up, and the music continued – unchanged, unaffected. It would not stop for the next two hours.

Dumitrescu. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

Many members of this iteration of the Hyperion International Ensemble—Dumitrescu’s umbrella term for the rotating cast of international performers under his direction—were new to me. Two in particular deserve special mention. The electronics of Dyslex (Gheorghe Iosif) were a gritty fit in the ensemble’s fundamental maelstrom. Whether channeling fuzzed-out theremin distortion or squirty analog-synth bleeps, his timbral contributions deepened the music’s texture exponentially. So deftly employed, his sounds didn’t just layer onto the music; they seemed to emerge from within it, amplifying its evocative unease. Just as notable was the acoustic guitar and voice of Dan Antoniu. His guttural growls—reaching the gravelliest vocal registers—added depth to an already dark palette. And his bowing of the acoustic guitar, positioned upright on a table (take that, Keith Rowe!), summoned dazzling, high-end squeals at key moments. Dumitrescu, of course, controlled all these dynamics; his conducting movements not overly elaborate, but clearly effective due to rigorous rehearsal. Each performer responded with a rich variety of attacks, textures and energies, shaped under his unmistakable direction.

Maybe you’ve never heard Dumitrescu’s music before. If so, let me say: the title of Andy Wilson’s book Cosmic Orgasm is perfect. Like the poetry of Will Alexander, this music is nearly impossible to describe without using the word cosmic. Reinforcing this association is the fact that most of the releases on his and Avram’s (rest in pulsars) Edition Modern label feature graphics of nebulae, galactic formations, lava flows and constellations.

What struck me first on those early recordings was the extreme use of strings: huge groups of players bowing the outermost edges of their instruments in unison, creating the kind of caterwaul that seems like the most intense kind of scream – the one on the inside. Percussion detonations pound and scatter across the sonic field. And then: eerie quiet, a single string vibrating, tension so heightened it’s almost molecular. One could listen and hear darkness, villainy or a sinister undercurrent – there is something truly abrading here. But there’s also pleasure to be had in confronting the reality this music poses: it feels like the real, actual situation of life. It’s violent, and it’s beautiful—and not always separately. Luigi Russolo would have loved it.

This particular night gave us cavernous winds and a shocking mid-register bass clarinet blast from Tim Hodgkinson. A lightning ball of discreet eruptions shot diagonally through the ensemble, following Dumitrescu’s lines drawn in the air. More vocals surfaced than I’ve ever heard in his work, thickening the atmosphere with raw nerves in action. I’ve already noted Antoniu’s role, but Chris Cutler, Simone Beneventi and Andrei Kivu added vocalizations too.

Tiny, rippling objects buried between string clusters were framed by massive, dramatic poundings and scrapings. It felt like falling and dissolving – not shooting stars, but staggered, cascading descents. This music is the flipside of the same existential elegance revealed in the austerity of Walter Marchetti’s Per la sete dell’orecchio, where large stones are dropped at irregular intervals down a deep well. Dumitrescu, however, pursues more sumptuous cataclysms sprawling within the abyssal grandeur. Tonight that grandeur stirred to life in the quiet, creeping ripples from the bass-clarinet and flute pads as they forebode an inevitable barrage. The woman next to me jumped when the percussion strike landed.

Every performer in this band is miraculous. I had never heard a piano sound like a three-second waterfall – and I’m counting the Fluxus bucket brigade. I especially admired the choice to have two percussionists with almost identical setups mirrored on each side of the stage. The uniqueness of their responses to Dumitrescu’s cues revealed just how personal this music is to perform. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, even if it often feels like entropy is one gong away.

Chris Cutler. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

~ Sidenote on Chris Cutler. Beyond his books championing boundary-pushers in music, beyond his longstanding stewardship of the superb and crucial RēR Megacorp label and beyond his own outstanding and legendary career as a performer, I have to highlight Probes , his podcast produced for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA). It is, without a doubt, the most insightful and ear-opening introduction to the history of music ever created – thirty-seven episodes and counting.

The entire Radio Web MACBA project deserves recognition. Instead of the perfunctory sound art installations that elite institutions like MoMA, Tate Modern and their ilk trot out every so often—always featuring the same names, the same experts with the same pedigrees moving in the same circles— RWM presents a plethora of micro- and macro-scholarship that acknowledges the reality and diversity of centuries of artistic investigations into sound beyond the narrow confines of urban-superstar cultural hegemonies from the expected capitals.

May 13, 2025

Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi – Bologna

Charlemagne Palestine

Schlingen Blängen OrgAngelicA

This concert took place in a new venue, the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi. Posters advertising concerts featuring works by Haydn, Schumann, Mozart and Mendelssohn adorned the outside. Upon entering, the space opened up unexpectedly, its vast interior and seemingly endless arched colonnades defied the modest façade. When I commented on this disconnect to the woman showing me to my seat, she said that many of the churches in Bologna are like this – meant to suprise and awe you once inside. I settled in and noticed a thin organ chord already humming through the space. The instrument, suffused in red light, already felt active within the ritual.

Palestine began by moving from the organ at the side of the church to the center aisle, where he stood swaying in silence before launching into chanted vocals rich in overtones, with a hint of the naturally angelic. Without a microphone, his voice leapt with playful precision, hopping like a rabbit through a field: purposeful, unpredictable, chipper. The overtones were mesmerizing in their complexity without feeling formal or cerebral. After about eight minutes of singing, it felt as though the air itself still trembled where his breath had been, as if his sound had warped the space, which was now shimmering with the kind of distortion you see when heat bends space. (I swear – all I had was an amaro before the show.)

Onto the organ. Few experimentalists besides Jean-Luc Guionnet and Bengt Hambræus have made pipe organs so integral to their musical practice and vision as Palestine, attentive as they all are (or were, in Hambræus’s case) to each instrument’s singularity. Their approaches embrace the volatility and mass inherent in each organ, treating them not as vessels of order but as living, resonant forces to unleash unstable physicalities.

Bear with me for a critical digression: I don’t include artists like Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro and Sarah Davachi in this lineage. Their work, while acoustically refined, leans toward harmonic tidiness. It functions more like exercises in sound design than explorations of the organ’s alchemically corporeal charge. Meticulously tepid, their relationship to the instrument feels purely procedural, as if each organ’s astounding physical presence were incidental rather than indispensable to their aesthetic. They represent a large swathe of the contemporary brand successfully marketed as “post-minimalist” organ, which has ossified into ideologies of tuning and generic pleas to “reveal listening as an active process of creative participation.” This is where elegant arrangements, introspective stasis, conceptual overdetermination and sonic lifelessness come together. I wish I weren’t contrasting the work of older men with that of younger women – perhaps the latter’s is, in part, a reaction against their predecessors. My critique is specifically about how the organ is treated: as a profound material force, or a polished backdrop for meditative kitsch. That choice determines the aesthetic and affective weight of the music, to my ears. I’d be less harsh if I could find a single, scant syllable from my professional peers that acknowledged the difference between these two strategies. Maybe the popularity of the consort I’m criticizing lies in how fluently their music mirrors a listening culture conditioned by seamlessness: they make work calibrated not for experience or confrontation, but tailored for passive coexistence with a life of scrolling by. Satisfying for audiences in need of reprieves and time-outs, not reckonings and transformations. (For what it’s worth, I was born halfway between Davachi and Guionnet, if demographic framing is your default habitat.)

Fret not, salvation is nigh! Not all recent pipe organ music by young women adheres to this decorous restraint. The pioneering and egregiously underrecognized Austrian pianist Ingrid Schmoliner has begun incorporating organ into her already esteemable keyboard practice. Though she has released only one album featuring the instrument, she’s been performing on it at festivals across Austria for the last several years, reshaping how the organ can function as both a kinetic reservoir and sensitive vessel for intimate expression. The title of her work says it all: I Am Animal . Amen.

This was the second time I’d heard Palestine perform on the organ live; the first time was in 2009, on one of the largest pipe organs in the world, at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. I remember him maximizing the volume until you could feel the bass rumble through your pew. The set was a long, raw whirl through the full range of the entire instrument. This bout, playing a version of the same piece, felt much more condensed and synthesizer-y: tones layered on tones creating an electrically vibrating mass of sound. Palestine confirmed my experience in a brief message to the audience after his performance, proclaiming the instrument “the greatest synthesizer that exists,” extolling what it is capable of in stretched, reverberant architecture like this. It’s possible that this show was less performance than invocation: the organ summoned itself, and Palestine rode the waves.

Charlemagne Palestine. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

The overall effect was like a perfect broth – clear and concentrated, yet built from an abundance of ingredients and flavors coming together. Huge bellows gave way to slanted blue simplicities, like the wind nudging a column of haze awry. At times the horns seemed to double themselves, sounding impossibly more horn-like than actual brass; don’t think, feel. There’s a kind of gentle ferocity to racecars circling a track––relentless within bounds—and Palestine’s quivering pulsations summoned something similar. Then suddenly it was as if a chasm had cracked open in the Dolomites and a wild bloom of squeals and howls burst forth. I sensed the nearby flower petals palpitating, still trembling post bee-plop.

May 18, 2025

Secret Location – Bologna

Essaira

Paola Paganotto - vocals, multiple voices

Angelo Gelo Cassarubia - guitar and noises

Nico Pasquini - guitar and electronics

Secret Show

Though not an official part of AngelicA’s proceedings, I was invited by the festival bartender to attend a “secret show”featuring her band on one of the off-nights. It’s not like I was desperate for music during the week without concerts, but I should admit that a few days before, in my avidity for listening, I followed what I thought was an intriguingly unusual sound emanating from the open windows of the Chiesa Santuario Santa Maria della Pioggia just after 9pm. I knocked on the door to find out. Alas, this was not a concert; they were just cleaning the floors with an exceptionally high-pitched propeller vacuum, scouring some oddly arhythmic residue. I want this tool.

Based on the space for the Essaira show––an informal collective of small stations where artists are building instruments, screenprinting and designing/refurbishing gear––I felt at home. Downstairs, Essaira launched into one of those surprisingly invigorating live sets that grab you by the heart-hairs. Post-punk WTF in extremis: industrial rhythms and textures spun with psychedelic slashes . Momentums established and deliberately sabotaged. You’d start to dance, then be forced to halt and relish the stasis…until grooved immediately back into distorted submission: but boss, I already clocked in! Momentum derailed in a rewarding, tension-building way.

Cassarubia’s wild, processed guitar strums reminded me of Martin Siewert at his most flourishing: acid for cats. Paganotto—dancing, chanting, audience-penetrating—delivered lyrics that were political, confrontational, lyrical and physical. And by the latter I also mean danceable. Some lyrics were in English, but the meaning transcended language: when she sang the word fashion—dripping with disdain and bounced-back brutality—you knew she was referencing fascism. I know she wasn’t repeating the name Frances-Marie Uitti but I leaned into the mishearing, delighted by the fantasy of a future where that exquisite virtuoso’s name would be regaled and chanted like an icon we should all be devoted to. (Well dang, of course there's a coincidence: I just did a little research and discovered that Uitti actually premiered one of Scelsi’s last-discovered cello works at the AngelicA festival in 2006. I guess everything makes sense if you hallucinate attentively enough.)

I’ve listed their official instrumentation above, but Pasquini also adds drum programming to his guitaring activities – contributing heavily to the band’s updated industrial framework. I loved his sensibility: dark, savage and frisky. He concentrates on the low-end frequencies (I actually thought he was playing electric bass, but I didn’t look that closely, jamming as I was). The band wouldn’t work without the interplay of Cassarubia and Pasquini’s electric strings: Pasquini’s rhythmic boisterousness grounds the punk and Cassarubia’s effects set free the abstractions that make the sound so full. Paganotto live-mixes what everyone contributes while slipping between multiple vocal identities. One loop featured a chant of “DADA REM, DADA REM, DADA REM” repeated to infinity, which I interperted as a hymn to the best kind of sleep you can get: aggressive, artistic and vividly immersive. A slow cascade of guitar noises unfolded over an ominous beat, and she sang in earnest over the now-dense but still discernible layers. The dada realm turned out to be the waking one, where we make responsible choices informed by dreams. I probably projected a lot onto what I comprehended of her lyrics, but the repetition of what I heard as “you’ve been chaste” made me realize: chaste is a homonym of chased , and I wasn’t running. I was elated: Essaira combined zones I thought had either been abandoned, codified into irrelevance or gone extinct. But volatility is alive again, and the edge of noise-punk activism on the dancefloor is a centerfold I slaver for.

May 21, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

b-l duo

Bertram Wee & Lynette Yeo - keyboards, electronics, objects

my body, broken for your amusement [vessel II] (2022, Bertram Wee)

Scapes (2023, Chua Zi Tao)

NUN IV (2021, Sarah Nemtsov )

Dance Fantasia: Chromatic Eccentric Weaves (2025, Hoh Chung Shih)

Cam11us (2025, Christoven Tan)

b-l duo. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

This ambitious evening of four works by contemporary Singaporean composers—and one German woman—performed by two Singaporean musicians was framed before it began by the presence of a large metal sheet in the middle of the stage: bent, folded and twisted. Though never struck, it served as a projection surface, cycling from dazzling (green and pink together, yum) to obscure (was that a body?) to obtrusive (a retina-searing white that made it physically painful to look at the stage). But as the title of the first piece—my body, broken for your amusement [vessel II]—made clear, these performances were not about comfort and cookies.

That opening work by Wee, for keyboard and talkbox—he was also one of the evening’s two performers—began with the talkbox mic half-submerged into Lynette Yeo’s mouth. Subtle bubbling sounds—like the last desperate sucks slurped from a straw at the bottom of a drink—transformed into growls over Wee’s loom of slowly shifting electronics. Two layers defined. Abrupt stop. Defined Pause. Begin again. Now a little denser, more growl than bubble. Flutter-tongued breath mirrored by fluttered electronics: a wheel spun, wobbling. Abrupt stop. Noise blast and screaming. Lightning flashes. Pig squeal* vocals. Keyboard armageddon and grunts galore. Stop. Silence. Return to initial haze, now recontextualized. Flipsides established. Back to the blasts. Louder, longer, more metallic, shrill and dark – a deathcore-style barrage. What’s not to love in such exquisitely executed entrenchment?

*Listen to episode 10 of Cutler’s Probes for a deep dive into vocal experimentation, including an especially deep look into the special category of pig squeals.

The other pieces in the program didn’t quite reach the same intensity for me. Chua Zi Tao’s Scapes (for keyboards) suffered from a foundation of thin digital timbres—thankfully not as dire as the nadir of brittle digitalia, George E. Lewis’ Voyager—plus plinky piano that never gained momentum. Its gestures and vocabulary felt stranded in a proto-INA GRM wasteland, a hangover from the early days of electro-acoustic composition. NUN IV (for keyboard, electronics, video) by Sarah Mentsov felt like a sci-fi soundtrack, full of sweeping gestures that suggested artificial drama rather than musical tension. The blindingly bright white light projected onto the metal sheet during this piece rendered the stage literally unwatchable. I have no idea what the intended effect of this video by Rosa Wernecke and Heinrich Horwitz was. Sonically, the piece came off like an encyclopedia entry on how to generate whirled sounds via electronics – though none approached the acoustic apex into this space reached by Whirled Music by Max Eastley, Steve Beresford, Paul Burwell and David Toop .

Hoh Chung Shih’s Dance Fantasia: Chromatic Eccentric Weaves(for keyboard and melodica) focussed on the interplay between the sonorities of harpsichord (keyboarded by Yeo) and melodica (played by Wee.) Just when a kind of vampiric antagonism developed—each instrument consuming the timbre of the other—the piece ended. I was left hoping that Shih expands from what he attained here. The program closed with Christoven Tan’s Cam11us (for keyboards, objects,electronics, video), a complicated conglomeration of object-based sound. I say “object-based” because most of the sounds remained tethered to the objects that produced them, in a netherworld between sound and music. Wee crunched on something crispy, Yeo activated wind-up toys; train-track warning klangs fired, bursts of radio static erupted. Samples of cartoons at the wrong speed clashed with heavy-metal rumbles. Paradoxically, the accretion and layering of all these distinct non-musical sources created a form of coherence, something incongruously and unexpectedly musical.

The uncategorizable is standard fare at AngelicA – this piece and the night’s program epitomized that ethos. Why is such eclecticism actually so rare at other festivals, when every self-proclaimed music lover swears by their own “eclectic” tastes? Even if I didn’t fall in love with every piece on this night, I appreciated many things: exposure to new performers and composers from a generally under-represented region in the contemporary music world, the embrace of sonic (and visual) extremeties and, most of all, the context itself. This concert was bookended by a seminal, soul-bending organ performance a few days before and incandescent multi-generational improvised music the next night – if good fences make good neighbors, good juxtapositions make better listening.

May 22, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

Ava Mendoza/ Hamid Drake/ William Parker

Circular Pyramid

There’s only one word for Hamid Drake’s playing tonight: voracious. No matter how many times I’ve seen him over the past 30+ years, the profound funk of his polyrhythmic attack is startling. (Though attack sounds harsh – he doesn’t assault so much as unfurl and envelop: it’s a gift.) He and William Parker, longtime collaborators, are practically interwoven: their interplay is more like shared breath than dialogue. Ava Mendoza brought a wistful, yearning lyricism to the dense exchanges, her guitar sound laced with just enough distortion in the first half of the set to bend the trio’s groove into something edgy and restless. The real magic here was the chemistry: everyone elevating each other, no one playing the star so everyone could shine.

Mendoza, Parker, Drake. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

The rhythms were breathtaking and invigorating, accelerations intricately interlaced with decelerations until another explosion, polyrhythms spread like butter through the folds of perception. Downbeats felt like discoveries, not anchors, plucked from the æther for maximum noggin wallop and limb shake. Imagine a staircase, with nice and even steps. Then it bifurcates. And the steps become teasingly skewed, but in a way your body somehow recognizes. Then the bifurcations are squared. Hello syncopated imbalance ,my old friend. Now each jut and strut spirals out in an exponential array, a firework display of Escher-like illusion and impossible geometry. Except the rhythms are real. And you’re not stepping – you’re floating.

Mendoza channeled shades of Steve Vai’s otherworldly harmonic sophistication, crafting runs so plaintive and full of soul that even their inevitable disintegration felt fulfilling. The highlight for many in the audience—there were hoots, there were hollers—was a supernatural funk vamp anchored by Parker’s repetition of a simple, hypnotic yowl of a phrase on the shukahachi. Mendoza locked into a taut, understated rhythm-guitar stride and Drake plotted out an impeccable groove, fully accented and embellished down to the last fractal of funk. The high wail of that double-reeded shakuhachi pinpointed the sweet spot between the ancient and the ecstatic, the blessed and the coiled. A serenade to neigh by.

Photo by Massimo Golfieri

May 24, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

Erik Drescher

Against Nature (2020, Peter Ablinger)

My introduction to Peter Ablinger’s music came through Weiss/Weisslich 22 (1986, 1996), in which layers of 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century symphonies are condensed into 40-second bursts. It was the early 2000s, and I was in grad school at CalArts—in the writing program, not the music school—taking a class with James Tenney. After I turned in a tape piece of my own, Tenney invited me to his office to play me the Ablinger recording. The stunning shifts in color between the dense blocks of noise—each drawn from a different musical century—were a revelation, even for someone accustomed to sonic revelations. I’ve relished every opportunity to hear Ablinger’s work since then. Now, following his untimely death last month, each encounter feels all the more poignant, a feeling tonight’s performance deepened.

Ablinger and flutist Erik Drescher collaborated on this nearly hour-long piece—for glissando flute, voice, ultrasonic flute, bottles, bird whistles and ribbon—for six weeks during the Corona lockdown. Multitracked tape supplemented additional flute and voice recordings with birds, toads, telephone rings, alarm clocks, honking horns and other field-recorded assortments. The piece is built from 59 miniature sections, though the formal logic behind the sequence was difficult to perceive in performance. I found myself simply absorbing the interplay of slurred glissandi, multitracked samples, booming jug blows and uncanny organ pipes pushed into the ultrasonic range. At one point, a digital–acoustic clash at those extreme frequencies produced that airplane-taking-off rumble that seems to materialize from nothing and then consume everything. It reminded me of Tenney’s For Ann (rising), where the illusion of perpetually ascending pitch never resolves. A high-pitched ricochet followed, dropping me back into the room.

Erik Drescher. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

It wasn’t always a comfortable place to be. At times, shrill whistles had me plugging my ears. But there were moments of pleasure too, like raindroppy pad-taps on the glissando flute. In retrospect, I realize they referenced the toads that inspired the piece’s creation, though in the moment it felt somewhat disconnected even if sensually satisfying. Speaking of mmmhhmmm, I’ve always loved bottle music—from John White’s “Drinking and Hooting Machine” to Percy Mayfield’s “My Jug and I”—so I was especially drawn to the appurtenances of volcanism I perceived in how the bottles were played: it’s all about the pressure, baby. Field recordings of honking traffic were cleverly intertwined with Drescher’s flute playing the role of police and ambulance sirens in full Doppler swirl. The whole thing unfolded as an algorithmic labyrinth of the expanded flute spectrum: we’re all minotaurs now.

May 24, 2025

Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna

Rafael Toral

Spectral Evolution

I arrived at this second set of the evening more familiar with the electronic side of Rafael Toral’s work, having seen him in MIMEO a few times and listened to recordings more aligned with that side of his practice. Tonight was primarily a guitar-centered affair: a made-for-performance, expanded version of his latest album, Spectral Evolution . Playing electric guitar alongside pre-recorded material, he sounded like Oren Ambarchi OD’d on chamomile tea and was resuscitated by a faint vape of MDMA. Quite good. Calm lines sprinkled over thick symphonic warbles; giant waves of harmonically throbbing overtones; a fog of hum rippling in all registers, eddying in whirlpools of lapsed finesse traded for the glory of succumbing. Ahh, full succumbation.

Rafael Toral. Photo by Massimo Golfieri

I liked how he physically reacted to his own music – even when not playing, as the pre-recorded bits moved from background to foreground. He danced with his hands and surfed with his shoulders, then dropped back into pizzicato noise twiddles, like squeezing and twisting a sponge soaked with guitar licks that dripped out unpredictably. Toward the end, he laid his guitar across his lap, arms outstretched to either side in a yogi-like pose of perfect stillness. Burpy, warty, squelchy electro-gurgles and Indian chanting mixed with monolithic swells of infinitely sustained guitar chords played back as he remained seated. As the recording faded, he added a few concluding strums. Then he rose for the final coda: a theremin solo stylized like birdsong, arriving just as the projected photograph (by Sylvain Georges) of a bird behind him was extinguished. Reincarnation via medium switch. It was all quite pleasant—and I can see why he’s built a loyal audience for his raptures.

Photo by Massimo Golfieri