Suoni Review - Tren Brothers, Mary Margaret O’Hara, and Bernier-Trottier

Tren Brothers, Mary Margaret O’Hara and Bernier/Trottier at Sala Rossa for the Suoni Per Il Popolo festival, Thursday, June 19th.

Bernier/Trottier started the night with an atmospheric mixture of acoustic guitar and laptop. “Welcome to this summer evening”, it said. The laptopist shifted brushes along a snare drum, sampling these textures on top of field recordings of wind and birds. With the duo’s electroacoustic sensibilities, bird chirps were turned into electronic beeps and moving air became white noise. It was a pleasant, gentle way to begin.

I left for some air and came back in the middle of Mary Margaret O’Hara’s set with Aidan Closs. Spar and Automatic is a cabaret-ready duo of piano- and guitar-playing Closs with vocally erratic O’Hara. From the stillness of Bernier/Trottier, I had stepped into a looser, warmer space of playful dualling. O’Hara performs spoken word without the words. She scats with the intonation of an emphatic r+b vocalist who has suddenly lost her ability to form phrases and must make it through the act before we notice. Scuttling around the stage, she forcefully mocks singers who belt their meanings out by obscuring her own words and jumping from sound to sound like a hyperactive hummingbird. I couldn’t make out any of her between-song comments for their speediness and similarity to her sung tones.

Tren Brothers played last, with Mick Turner on electric guitar and Jim White on drums. Turner sometimes used a bow to form long dissonant groans, other times he would pick up a melodica to add scratchy, high chords to the layers of loops. Jim White sat seemingly on top of his kit, lunging to bang out the shifting then falling beats. Turner and White’s music was slow and built force and thickness as it spread out across the room. Once thinned and messy, the melody would restart.

There was a video projected on the screen behind them of Turner’s paintings interspersed with driving footage. The paintings were of curved, colourful creatures and a girl with red nipples who reappeared in different outdoor settings. Each image had several variations that were played back to back to create a morphing effect. The filmed sections were of long nature shots taken out a car window, juxtaposing the speeding horizontal movement of vehicles with the steady, elongated timing of waves, rain, road edges, and fluorescent tunnels. The end of the video corresponded with the end of their set. The last few seconds had the words, “available tonight at the merch table” and a slideshow of Turner’s art postcards and the Tren Brothers’ CDs.