Music / Reviews
Review: Jellilalas, El Rincon
At first glance it seemed that El Rincon’s minuscule stage corner had been set up as an early 60s prototype for the Tardis, Vyv Hope-Scott’s electronica assembly being a mass of old-school patch wiring to gladden Dr Moog’s heart. Then, at second glance, you also noticed Tony Orrell’s table of slickly modern musical gizmos neatly connected to the obligatory Macbook.
As people arrived the pair dithered intently with their respective ‘instruments’, releasing random sounding clanks, swoops and tweets. This may have begun as a tech check but over a few minutes the noises began to come together around a gently pushing loop and it became clear that, such as it would be, The Jellilalas’ music had begun.
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That first piece’s smooth evolution recalled Terry Riley’s early keyboard pieces, simply created with a cheap organ and a very long tape loop. The value added by 50 years of technological development, however, was a richer sound palette allowing atmospheric shifts within the structure that brought the tune to its neatly logical conclusion.
By contrast, the next number began with a crisp piano arpeggio that quickly degraded into a battle of jagged sounds intersecting a gentle bass line. It was a combative start but it. too, gradually resolved into reflective ambience and a reconciliatory finale.
And so it went. Later there was an extended dub-style piece (admittedly using that term loosely) that rolled with a classically analogue bass growl, a slippery big-voiced digital mid-range pulse and tinkling high-note birdsong, and another which jarred a discordant piano with insistent techno beats and urgent sonic interjections.
Throughout the music Vyv and Tony remained absorbed in their fiddly electronic work, looking less like musicians than operatives in a surreal power plant designed by Jeunet and Caro. For their part the eaters, drinkers and chatterers rammed into the tiny tapas bar rarely looked in their direction, either.
Intentionally or not it all fitted exactly with Brian Eno’s original definition of ambient music as being ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’. But those who did pay a bit of attention would have revelled in the way The Jellilalas drew on a complete vocabulary of synthetic sound and the conventions of producer-generated dance music to weave such discreetly individual semi-spontaneous pieces. Oh, and those delicious analogue bass lines.
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