Rose Kallal / Colin Potter / The Asterism (live at Café OTO)

London
21 April 2018

A rather windswept Mark Pilkington (head honcho of Strange Attractor and one half of the esoteric surfing Téléplasmiste) is up first, treating us to a rare solo performance under guise of The Asterism. Getting jiggy with the interwebs reveals an asterism to be a pattern of stars or an optical starburst in gemstones, a somewhat apt title for the opalescent parade that follows.

That slow curling drone of an introduction certainly has a staring into the night sky-like quality to it, a broody brew of mapled folds doomically stabbed in electro-magnetics and warping cumulus. Mark’s hands milking a microcosm of possibility as the firmament is quickly invaded by the super-bright glint of ice cream vans from an alternative galaxy. A jangly jape of Pokémon pixels and radiophonic skipping ropes, fun-loving tangents hiccuping, radiating out to be later thrown through some lovely diseased frequencies, shiver-santeed hoops of kiting crystal and buzz-saw drone.

Slipping tendrils of tune and beat come peaking through this odd bossanova-like groove, a distance-shot doorbell from the intergalactic Avon lady disintegrating in semitoned burrs and laser-zapped to buggery. An artificial Avalon pendulum swung into the interior of a table-top speaker to lilt a sweet aorta en route to the inevitable demise.

With hardly any time to catch your breath, a deep droning singularity signals the start of Colin Potter‘s set. Still tampering with his set-up, a few Clangers-like peeks eat into those lush-sounding ringlets as the smeared wax on screen contracts to the peaking sonics. He grabs a neckless guitar, lays a resonating ebow on its strings and sets this swervey viola texture loose — a faint whiff of Japan shamrocking in a slow volta-like grace.

Pensively posed over the equipment, Colin continues to helm the exquisite. Divorced from his Nurse With Wound duties, the sound bends pleasantly, beaks a pert melodious verve. This scar of processed laughter appears from nowhere, is tramlined into a pulsing courier that sets Colin’s body (and mine) bobbing to its buoyant blubber. He slowly dusts in some extra hooks that jellyfish your senses in grooving euphonics. I could be wrong, but I recognise the track jiver from somewhere, but fail to put my finger on it as the ice cream-smeared grins melt on screen, twist in a chantelle of kraut-like manoeuvres. The silhouetted dancer on screen giving me Tales Of The Unexpected shivers as the canvas becomes heavy with mortared magnificence and dew-dropped acidics of a bayoneted baptism that is really hard to let go of.

Stranger still, Rose Kallal‘s brand of restrained minimalism takes the evening’s dancey orientations and turns them on their head. A coptering wah of repeated transits and whispering leylines; rutting tractiles full of (well, to my ears) miraging words. A shuffling illuminatus of slipping literals and re-triggering meanings pinched to a foetal pump and rasping tear.

That unassuming black box of hers full of radium-roasted surprise, hand-rolled into a soupçon of rococo(ed) rot. Tasty modular mauls and oscillating cross-cuts caught in the geometric abstractions on screen. The diodes flashing purple down her waist as she plexi-plies a raspberry ripple to something that sounds like the word “funny” blistering out in ovulating ovals, textures that leave you swaying helplessly along.

A rush of ocular metallics serrating, nibbling at the bowling rotaries to suddenly stipple a jackbooted pulse that storm-troopers over you. Curves agitated by a spray of stray pigeons flapping on through in the round to what sounds like “I’m home… I’m hoooome“. Word illusions plaintively spiralling to a ooohing void that effectively draws the evening’s entertainment to a close.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-