Music / Review
Review: Simple Things Opening 2019, Bristol IMAX
The support for the Simple Things Opening had just begun when I took my seat, the enormous screen dashing through a knitted nightmare woods accompanied by a stream of agonised and distorted tones. Deej Dhariwal rang out with electronics, voice and guitar, with Sarah James projecting her live visuals. Soon, she sent an underwater flying ink monster to diffuse into life before it morphed into tides of coral clouds.
If you enjoy the utterly refreshing detail of tiny things, then microscopes and live inky visuals like this are musts. It’s a phenomenon how it can provoke the mind’s eye, tricking it to see fleeting faces, creatures and demons in the illuminated colours.
Sometimes it was a batch of noise both visual and audio and I wonder if more range in the sound intensity and texture would’ve suited the curling richness of the liquid visuals and their unpredictable movements. As much as I encourage drones, melodic looping and distortion, wielded expertly in the case of Dheej’s set up, some sonic surprises are always rewarding.
is needed now More than ever
After the interval, the lights went down again. We’d already seen Basinski, Domnitch and Gelfand come in, remove gloves, and shortly after leave again, presumably realising that standing down at the front with the lights on wasn’t the right signal.
They moved into the corridor and the lights went down. The audience hushed and waited in the darkness, a giggling round of popping noises to accompany the on screen bubbles made its way around the room before the main act’s re-entry.
Basinski’s introduction was brief but with personality. Dramatic dark hair, clothes and glasses, he casually advised us to relax and prepare to fall into the astral field.With that, signature lo-fi sonics emerged from the dust, a washed-out orchestral swell that never moves on, like a sleepy memory that’s hard to place.
Pops, powerful underwater tones and static filled the space with restraint. The whole show was like a glimpse into a long, slow disintegration. After a few moments, from the centre of the giant dark screen, a small purple beam began to emerge.
Slowly it turned and grew, its dazzling nature unfolded like life forms germinating out from hidden lenses.
Imagine a laser rainbow depicting the limbs and motion of a psychedelic martial artist, surrounded by spectral creatures. For a long time I was totally tuned in to these behaviour being self generated, so animal in gesture and so human in expression. At one point I spotted the projectionist which snapped me back to the logic of it, a beam of light and the silhouette of a hand.
Soon, the martial arts display tricked my eye once again: fast and striking, gentle and fluid, with it’s own quiet sound character added to the mix. With a clear head, I was aware that I was voluntarily hallucinating, so subtly detailed were the actions of light in liquid that it took no effort to conjure up the equilibrium and graceful power of something like martial arts.
The overall impression was one of vast scale, tiny people in a big screen room, few sounds that unfolded in immeasurable time, and being totally convinced of vivd images that were not there, by a single light and some bubbles.
Main photo from the William Basinski Facebook page
Read more: Review: Simple Things, 2019
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