Sebastian Rochford and Pamelia Kurstin + Snorkel

Café Oto, London

30/06/2011

Seb Rochford and Pamelia Kurstin had a tough assignment at the launch of their album, “Ouch Evil Slow Hop”. It was a hot night, the venue was packed with a restless audience, and their record label, Slowfoot, had programmed a loud, electronic post-funk outfit as support. A hard act to follow, you might think, armed with only a drum kit and a theremin.

The support was Rochford and Kurstin’s label mates Snorkel, who break down (on MySpace) the basic ingredients of their sound as “dub, jazz, afro-beat, krautrock and electronica”. They define their sonic territory as somewhere “between the groove and free improvisation”, though in actuality they never venture too far from the former; there can’t be much room for real improvisation in such rhythmically tight and multi-layered music. Still, it’s interesting that they at least cite improvisation as an influence. They are successors of the likewise adventurous Can, This Heat, and perhaps synth pop pioneers OMD. Led by drummer Frank Byng, Snorkel’s insistent rhythms are a defining characteristic. Ben Cowen’s synth lines seem simple at first, but their sheer insistence snags just as they begin to overlap and create complex patterns. Ralph Cumbers, mostly crouched behind a low stool on which sit what I assume were a rhythm box and a sampler, adds further, more random layers of complexity. He also adds a very occasional bass line, and just once he picks up a trombone to double main trombonist Tom Marriott, who often treats his instrument to sound processing and favours brief, tonal interjections over extended soloing. Standing stage left, rhythm guitarist Roberto Sassi adds tonal variation, throwing groovy 70’s cop show licks into what is an already heavy brew. Snorkel is just terrific live. They aren’t bad on CD either (their recent ?Stop Machine’ album is well worth checking out), but the relative looseness of the performance situation lets the music flex and expand with added vitality. Snorkel go over well, while the audience, all (unusually in this venue) attempting to yell over/across each other, make almost as much noise as they do. Things don’t bode well for the subtler headline act.

Rather than come out fighting, Seb Rochford and Pamelia Kurstin got their set under way slowly, and took a long time to pull it together. Kurstin began playing her theremin like a horizontal bass, literally plucking nicely rounded, resonant tones from the air. Rochford varied his accompaniment from subtlety in the first piece to a barrage of stormy turbulence at the start of the second, but the aggression soon subsided. Into the subsequent stillness Kurstin triggered twittering electronic noises, contrasted with clean, high sustained tones. The duo then lapsed disappointingly, into further bass imitation accompanied by lazy brushwork, before Kurstin changed tack and began to pluck dirtier, less rounded sounds and to layer on sustained, high song-like tones. Kurstin spent more time crouched at the base of the upright theremin, where she had two effects units and a mixing control, than she did standing to play its pitch and volume antennas. These she used to control, distort and distend what I took to be triggered samples, though I didn’t see a sampler among the duo’s kit. Rochford, in an attempt to join up some sonic dots, responded with staccato, broken rhythms, but the music refused to gel until too late, just before the piece ended, he latched onto a slight funkiness in a particularly squelchy theremin sequence.

Kurstin began the third tune surprisingly, with some classic/clichéd spooky sci-fi sonics, pinching out acute sounds with the fingers of her left hand while levelling them out with her right. Rochford played along with a hushed tambourine-like patter, and his accompaniment remained spartan as Kurstin produced sounds reminiscent of Herbie Hancock’s electronics at the start of “Rain Dance”.

Forty minutes into the set now, it took Kurstin and Rochford some time to decide to continue, although some in the audience were giving more encouragement than I could at that point. Kurstin eventually launched the fourth piece with a solo that subtly blended sustained low tones with an even lower, sub bass rumble. An added, ethereal electronic siren song came as a lovely contrast. Rochford deployed mallets on cymbals, and an audience member just behind me added a less welcome effect by persistently rustling a plastic bag. More happily, Rochford and Kurstin were now playing more joined-up music. When Kurstin reprised her bass shtick Rochford offset this pulse with a gentle percussive swing enlivened by rim snaps, and Kurstin came back at him with a fluttering, squelchy melody. The volume levels rose as that melody disintegrated into distorted splats of sound that Rochford bashed against, martially but slightly unhinged, before breaking into an up-tempo, unanchored tumble that became a fading cyclical pattern toward the set’s gradual halt.

The last piece having been such a marked improvement on what had followed I considered leaving before the encore. Now one hour into their set, Rochford and Kurstin also seemed ready to call it a night, but the MC decided they would play on if the crowd called for more, and the crowd duly obliged. With Rochford on brushes, Kurstin began another walking bass line, and then produced a new sound, which was at first flutelike, then morphed into a ghostly whistle, always underpinned by that bass effect. Rochford kept his accompaniment to a minimal shuffle. The piece played out in weird sound, with eerie shuffling or creaking effects from the theremin and a reprise of the supernaturally high, whistling melody which eventually spun and twittered out into silence.

For me, this last, excellent piece and the one previous capped what had previously been a merely interesting performance. Rochford seemed wryly happy, and Kurstin seemed positively made up, bouncing away from the performance area with impish delight. Perhaps she was just relieved: before the set started her theremin was refusing to produce any sound, until mysteriously coming back to life of its own accord. Theremin buffs might be interested to know that this was a Moog Etherwave Pro. The curious will find an interesting 2002 TED conference video, in which Kurstin performs on an earlier model (the Ethervox MIDI), accompanied by a pianist, which performance she intersperses with a talk on her art (http://www.theremin.info/-/viewpub/tid/16/pid/5). A review of Seb Rochford and Pamelia Kurstin’s album, “Ouch Evil Slow Hop”, will be posted on this site in the near future.

Tim’s Star Ratings;

Snorkel-3.5 Stars

Rochford/Kurstin- 3 Stars

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