CHICKEN CHILI BASIL (elsenprice.bandcamp.com) 7/10 Energy and excitement can be paradoxical elements in music, in that musicians who play with too much vigour can stop their instruments vibrating and sounding to their full capacity, and excitable performances can result is music that is merely overwrought. Elsen Price understands this, and…
John Shand Posts
CONFLUENCE (Bamboozle Music) 8/10 The first vibraphone notes tinkle like wind chimes in the lightest summer breeze, while a shaker mimics an insect. Soon enough other sounds – breath through a trumpet, swelling cymbals, electronics, a chattering snare – darken the mood. A groove emerges that only amplifies the sense…
What were they thinking? STC’s production of Jonathan Biggins’s Talk, a play partially about truth in the media, arrived just as the Trump regime had opened the sluices on its deluge of lies. Good timing! But the play, about a lunar-right shock-jock (John Waters), felt like an extravagantly extended sketch…