Clare Hood's vocal work in the edgy I give you back dazzled with its many shades of speech and song. Photo / Supplied
Clare Hood's vocal work in the edgy I give you back dazzled with its many shades of speech and song. Photo / Supplied
Karlheinz Company's annual concert is always a highlight of the year, and tonight's instalment showcased four decades of music that gleefully demolishes any attempt at boundaries or borders.
Eve de Castro-Robinson's Whiplash was a teasing launch pad, choreographing flautists Uwe Grodd and Grace Liu in a mutual stalk-out ritual withsonic implications.
After John Elmsly's Here had violinist Elizabeth Holowell dealing out whimsy with fluttering tremolos and woozy chord slides, John Coulter's eerily effective Mouth Piece beamed down from a TV monitor.
A mouth, in merciless close-up, repeated a phrase that was eventually reduced to wordless pitch patterns; the delicious irony came when, as we were visually drawn into dental claustrophobia, the soundtrack achieved liberation in electro acoustic birdsong.
Kevin Field's People Factory explored post-cool jazz with a Cuban twist, with Roger Manins' roving saxophone dominating the quartet.
Annea Lockwood was saluted twice and her edgy, confrontational song, I give you back, featured the marvellous Clare Hood ruffling psyches in many shades of speech and song.
If Fritz Hauser's Schraffur invited us almost to steal in on eight percussionists and their whispering gongs, then Stephen Montague's Tigida Pipa was the ultimate theatrical finale.
Invoking the worlds of Ligeti and Berio, four vocalists, led by Morag Atchison, had merry fun with a plethora of vocal skullduggeries, set against the shivery dance of wood percussion and taped sound to match.
