Well what a night that was! The first performance of our ‘Cityscapes’ format blending songs with instrumentals and recorded sounds from the local area. We spent a couple of months liaising with Bricks (the organisation that oversee St Anne’s House in Bristol) in preparation, at the same time as collecting sounds around St Anne’s and planning how to present everything.
The venue
The staff at St Anne’s House were brilliant from day one. Great communication, support and genuine interest in what we had planned. And on the night they had everything covered for us, they cleared the room for us, dealt with tickets, ran a bar and constantly checked in with us to see if we needed anything. St Anne’s House is going from strength to strength these days, they have an Italian cafe, a gym, a sauna and a pottery workshop amongst other reasons for going there, if you’re in Bristol it’s well worth checking out.
The set-up
Branches and twigs foraged from the local area were lit with our film lights to display shadows on the white wall behind us. Lamps and slowly flashing coloured lights positioned at the front of the stage lit us and our collection of musical gear comprising loop pedals, laptop, two guitars, keyboard and microphones. The rest of the long room was dark and the audience was seated.
The show
We opened with doors recorded in St Anne’s House which we turned into a looping groove underpinning sounds from the local Co-op and musical snippets from songs of ours providing further atmospheric layers. The door groove was then developed with live looping of additional percussion and morphed into a brand new song. This set the scene. As the evening developed we played a recording of us walking through the streets of St Anne’s at the same speed as the kick drum of the following song. We altered sounds from the local GP practice which were then blended into a song about mental health. Later on, city sounds, traffic and voices, accompanied the song City Slumber from our first album, rearranged for this context.
We played songs from each of our three releases ‘Painting with an open heart’ (City Slumber), ‘Horizons’ (Horizons, Evening Heat) and ‘Rewire’ (Softest of Silks, When You, Hold My Hand) and as yet unrealised material (Snow, Second Hand War).
The reaction
From pretty much a full house we had a very attentive audience throughout. We said beforehand that it would be an uninterrupted performance so everyone politely refrained from clapping between songs (we didn’t really leave any gaps for that anyway) but stored it up and gave us an almighty response at the end. We then had lots of interest, questions and compliments before closing time. Here are a few of the comments:
“The show was like a serialised novel”
“Thank you for the super performance”
“You took us on a journey, took us out of ourselves for the full hour”
“It felt like an exhibition in an art space”
“What a seamless performance, you two are such professionals”
“It was a fantastic show”
“We were both blown away by Victoria’s voice and, well, everything really”
Photograph by Tracy Heather Johnson
What’s next
Cityscapes 2! We shall be performing in the same format at the fabulous Cafe Kino in Bristol on the evening of Saturday May 24th. It will involve similar songs, one or two changes perhaps, plus new recordings from that area of Bristol.
We really like the show, it affords us plenty of opportunities for improvisation in between structured material. And we really enjoy just sitting in atmospheres and allowing everyone to breathe. We can’t wait to capture new sounds in the new area and see what we can make of them. Join us in May if you can to hear the result!