Suzanne Ciani / Rodney (live at Colston Hall)

Bristol
6 October 2018

Great to be back at the Colston Hall again, the stairs and upper foyer looked down on a stage that bustled with analogue and hi-tech loveliness, a crowd were perched against the glass railings in anticipation, a great vantage point for later; but I decided to take in the first half in the lower depths.

After a bit of a fragmented introduction, Rodney (Bristol-based solo artist and engineer) hooked into some smooth, purring perfection. A melodic that Big Jeff (unintentionally) contributed to by hitting his pockets of loose change as he danced along. More swaying hooks were fed in, then terminated by crumbled aluminium, the sound of chattering dialogue cut-up, vowelling the voltage. Flipping in a new tape the mood went Eastern, flowed in odd ellipticals that tilted a relaxed tension of floaty texturals. They spiked rumble fish as a fresh harmony ate in there, got you mindlessly swaying along as its flesh was tainted in an urbanised sliver of passing traffic. Hands coaxed the cortex, curling in the brightness, shape-shifting some lovely spectrals before easing in a whirring exit.

After a quick tidy-up, Suzanne Ciani graced the stage in artexed abstraction, an abrasive zither that quickly jivered into very danceable concoctions as I climbed the stairs to get a better look at what was happening. Took a few snaps as the bubbling surface tension accumulated, was allowed to breathe, then skipped round the quadrophonics. The sound was razor-sharp, detailed, as secondaries rumbled over, acetating abruptly, then ate into the glow. Shapes that anamorphically rhombussed then diced dimensionally in your ear; swept and curled.

Looking from above, her arms were constantly shifting the dynamics, adding and removing the patching, as the internal syllabics sat-nav’ed alternative routes. With a twist here and a switch there, she constrained the topography to reveal hidden depths, conjured a contoured delight. Every now and then she’d hit the iPad and whirling bird sounds were fed into a prism of reverb. A panoramic velcro(ed) to a volcanicity that would explode on over, then locomotive through to be circuit-bent into a rhino’s exhale.

Yeah, lots of complex manoeuvring to be appreciated; one minute the flow was light and airy full of rocketing vapours, the next scooping a deep crevice full of weathered bronchials and windswept dunes. Watching the blinking lights of her Buchla synthesizer, you’d imagine where the sound would go, to be constantly surprised when blazing headlights spanned in from nowhere, swept from the left to right of the foyer in grainy funnels to then dive back into a fresh melodic.

Post-performance she stated “you never really know what you are going to get”, and watching her keep a rein on its randomised possibilities was a pleasure you’d never get the opportunity to sample from recordings alone.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-