Active Child, Caitlin Park,Oliver Tank @ OAF, Sydney(29/01/12)

Wed 1st Feb, 2012 in Gig Reviews

Sleepy ambient producer Oliver Tank presented a rich set of atmospheric work, and despite his less than dynamic stage presence his music was engaging in a trying-to-remember-a-vivid-dream kind of way. It was a simple DIY set-up: slow, pulsing trip-hop bass loops supporting sparse electronic doodling, accompanied by guitar licks perilously close to being tacky Miami Vice “incidental score” refugees. The playful self-indulgence was balanced by Oliver’s goofy/charming devotion to whomever it was he was singing about.

Overall he only manipulated a small number of elements, with whole songs consisted of single repeated lines about dreaming and longing, and the pace was so slow it gave him plenty of space to work with. The elegant solution was to fill it with reverb, and plenty of it. Soft textures were the key, and so something that might’ve initially seemed quite modest on paper ended up ballooning into impressive cushy walls of noise easily controlled by a single musician.

Caitlin Park on the other hand aimed for subtly and overshot the mark, becoming murky and largely incomprehensible. Their drone-folk compositions were definitely sweet, but the vocals drowned in the background noise and unfortunately the background noise was fairly flat. Their recorded work is fantastic and I urge you to check it out, but something was lost in translation and the energy dipped noticeably. Not even a nifty sadcore rendition of the Prince of Bel Air was enough to regain momentum.

It’s no secret Pat Grossi has an amazing voice, but the Art Factory show was so good it made me feel that up to that point I’d been listening to Active Child with my hands over my ears. The sound desk found the perfect platform for his voice, and it rang loud and true across the room. I suspect even without a mike setup his trademark falsetto would’ve carried anyway – its quality has an unnatural way of piercing through other noise like a knife through thin cotton. You Are All I See blossomed like a sonic fire cracker in slow motion, and the amplified harp was breathtaking. The sombre ambient chords underpinning the song give it a bottomless sensation which Grossi fully exploited, filling it with cascading scales and patterns layered over each other beautifully.

What followed was an austere, impossibly graceful and dramatic set with a strong, idiosyncratic palette of incredible formality that reveals the deeply ingrained discipline he absorbed as a youngster in the Philadelphia Boys’ Choir. If he had decided to focus his creative output entirely based on the synthesiser (which he played for roughly half the set) then he would perhaps sound rigid and frosty, but the haunting combination of his voice and the harp is both innovative and truly memorable. Overindulgence of anything too rich is always risky, so by neatly breaking up the set into harp/synth/harp he avoided the possibility of saccharine overload.

The sublime techno-choral refrains of Hanging On and Church At Night deftly bookended the moody bump and grind lamentations of Playing House and Way Too Fast, and never has heartbreak sounded so much like something to aspire to. He has an enormous amount of built-in musical appeal (it’s natural to be drawn to beautiful things), and given the emotional amplification a live performance can lend virtually any act, this one was a doozy. The experience was nothing short of magnificent – an incredibly moving set from a unique talent.