Off Minor

Mopomoso » Henry Kaiser (guitar), Steve Beresford (electronics), Lol Coxhill (saxophone), Satoko Fukuda (violin), John Russell (guitar), Roger Turner (percussion), Hannah Marshall (cello) «

A specially assembled Mopomoso, at the Red Rose, this weekend (extra to the usual third Sunday of the month) in order to feature the visiting US guitarist Henry Kaiser… I also went along to see Sakoto Fukuda, again; I’ve only seen her once before, but she’s apparently this blog’s second most-popular referring google search term (thanks, Sakoto Fukuda!).

The evening opened with a John Russell + Henry Kaiser acoustic duet; twin plucking, scrabbling Bailey-esque lines that was pretty marvellous; but too short! Play longer!

Steve Beresford had a cool duet with Roger Turner; Beresford with electronics and toy stuff, Roger Turner on inventive percussion… After seeing them both in succession at Boat-Ting once before (and not having seen Turner too much, at all), I had previously compared his playing to that of Steve Noble; he’s not so much playing a drum kit, but sort of pouring a box of metal spare parts out all over it, and then seeing what sort of noises he can create with the mess… Turner’s fantastic, although tonight my Noble comparison diverged; Turner played with a lot more space, whereas, whenever I’ve seen Noble, he’s seemed more forcefully full-on… Beresford’s electronic toy stuff is cool… At first a seemingly incongruous collection of noise making machines that all somehow come together… For the Turner duet, although there was no obvious dialogue taking place, everything still fit together perfectly, each sound (effect) colliding perfectly with the others…

Elsewhere, there were a lot of strings attending: two guitars (John Russell sticking to acoustic throughout, Henry Kaiser moving to electric for everything except his duet); Hannah Marshall, cello, and Fukuda’s violin… so, as the small groups were divied up, it was all a little bit of a variation on a theme… But I felt like I wasn’t paying enough attention, and all the complex string textures all sort of blended the one into the other… For example, Russell (photo, above) played really nice movements, but I found it hard to pick up on all the detail he was obviously contributing; it looked like something where there’d be an improvement in having it on record, so that it’d be easier to dive in close to his delicate lines…