Live Eye
Over The Top Fest @ Various, May 1-4
BY Chris Randle May 05, 2008 12:05
Precious fruit is traditionally nothing but trouble. Yet Silver Apples, a.k.a. Simeon Coxe, is a survivor, and like the protagonist of the trippy Yeats poem that lent his band its name, one can imagine him plucking chords until the spheres themselves fall silent. Being a psychedelia-affiliated musician from way back, he also treated his audience in the Music Gallery’s pews to an oscillator that approached canine frequencies. The decade that bore Silver Apples is notorious for confusing the laughable and the profound, but Coxe was such a visionary that I can excuse ripe '60s lyrical nonsense like “My lady New York City gypsy love”. The pulsing beats and looping keyboard samples coming from his jerry-rigged synthesizer — custom-remade after a near-fatal injury restricted Coxe’s hand movements — were so catchy that it was easy to forget that they anticipated entire genres. His use of theremin-like UFO sounds and improvised radio snippets leaned towards the experimental pole of electronic music, yet one of the new tracks featured Timbaland-worthy percussion. The affable Coxe joked that it was “strange” to be performing his mystic lyrics in a church, and his crooning-as-yelling is unusual for hymns; but the audience members who reverently took photos of his setup afterwards knew they had witnessed a minor miracle.
High Places’ Saturday set was also booked in a place of worship, though they had to make do with the hall used for bingo games rather than the Music Gallery’s glorious acoustics. The duo thus ending up dealing with understandable sound problems — I first thought that Mary Pearson’s vocals were intended to be barely-audible chanting but soon realized sunny melodies were struggling to be heard. I like the dumpster-derived percussion, though: even when Robert Barber failed to lock into a groove while pounding his synthetic drums, a sampled gamelan or shaken gourd was just around the corner.
Ended the weekend with Nadja at Wavelength, whose Over the Top co-presentation became this year’s closing gala by default after Kevin Barnes cancelled. Those locals are also a boy/girl duo, though their sparse and guttural vocals were a sideshow to the central M.O.: punishing their guitars to bring about a soothing kind of doom. There’s louder strains of said metal — this pair balances sheer noise with effects-laden ambient droning. Their second song (they fit in about three) was almost bodily in its chugging, pounding palpitations, like the biorhythms inside a monstrous behemoth. And if it made me feel like a slowly digesting snack, well, at the end of the festival, that’s almost calming.
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1
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