By Tom Eckert
On a pleasant hills summer evening you are treated to a venue that wouldn’t be out of place in a Brooklyn basement. All dark hangings, blue and red light and a smoke machine it is minimalist and intimate, never being more than three metres from the back of the stage.
You can’t help but sit in awe of Page’s rig of microphones, keyboards and an effects peddle with more capacity than the NASA space program.
The man himself is unassuming. Tall, a bit goofy but with a sombre edge under there somewhere. More importantly however, he is incredible quick witted and probably one of the most ingeniously creative musical individuals around.
If you are not familiar with Page’s shows, he is a virtuoso of loop peddle performance. Idiosyncratically he will often sample random elements of the environment or himself to create sounds that he will then often build an entirely improvised piece out of.
This is no mean feat with potentially unknown or awkward keys (“it’s somewhere between G and G#”) and subject to individuals (often poor) sense of rhythm. Despite this, Page never drops a single beat and works with blistering speed over his sampling tools building these songs from scratch often with a great deal of stylistic inventiveness and no small dose of wit.
By his own admission, he has decided to utilise the sampling of the audience in order to challenge himself as he finds his traditional multi-instrumental looping set too “easy.” In view of this, I would encourage him to take on the real challenge and to abandon all contrivances in in sampling. None of “make this sound” or “sing at this pitch.” Instead he should aspire to create soundscapes out of purely improvised samples from an audience, leaving it only up to their interpretation. There I think he will find his holy grail of musical challenge.
A phenomenal performer and a phenomenal mind. We are lucky to have him.
Kryztoff Rating: 5K
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