The concert on the other hand was very urban and technology-based. The kind of concert where performers seem very comfortable absorbed in their equipment and the audience seems satisfied to stand and listen austerely, perhaps with the occasional head bopping. Tristan Perich gave us a world that can only be created with electricity and gadgets. Sitting in the middle of the room with the audience gathered round, he played a noise set that was rhythmically simple, but with a variety of textures. These densities thinned and thickened as the sound became its own physical presence in the room. You could feel the sound around you; this I liked about it. You could not ignore this added presence as it joined you and those around you in one moment, not through lyrics or catchy rhythms but through its physicality.
To compliment these harsh sounds, Iktus followed Perich’s noise set with a percussion and electronic piece. This was played on stage, which was lit by hundreds of small multi-colored decorations on the back wall.
With the rainbow lit in these circular decorations, there could be no better back drop for this dreamy, melodic electronic piece with catchy rhythmic grooves played by the percussion quartet. The ear catching moment in all this, as you may have guessed, was the elephant claw! If the percussionist could somehow turn and play one of the lit, circular decorations behind him on the wall, this is what it would sound like, as if one color pulsed among this polka dot rainbow or one color radiated just a little bit brighter than the others for just a short while. It was ear catching and wonderful.
-Sally, Spring 2014
