Music / music
Review: Three Cane Whale, St George’s
You can always depend on friends to bring out the best in you. While Bristol’s quirkiest musical sons Three Cane Whale are splendidly gifted tunesmiths in their own right, it took a little help from an offbeat crew of filmmaker pals to coax out their true magic.
Performing at their home from home, St George’s, as part of the 2017 Filmic Festival, the chamber minimalists lifted the curtain on a set of brief celluloid encounters that accompanied their hypnotic live performance.
In all, 13 shorts were premiered, each one a tripped-out music video matching the band’s gorgeous, rambling soundscapes.
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The coterie of directors backing this cinematic mashup are some of the industry’s most striking practitioners: Emma Lazenby is a BAFTA-winning animator; John Minton was once Portishead’s visual architect; Brett Harvey is an award-winning feature-film director.
Like the double-bill screenings of old, this presentation was split into two transmissions: a novelty warm-up of unpolished new tracks and established re-runs followed by the spellbinding main-attraction of music-to-film adaptations. As it turned out, the main-feature alone more than justified the ticket price.
The West Country trio, who employed a treasure-trove of stringed curios as well as the more traditional piano, trumpet and guitar, opened with golden-oldie Sluice, itself a mini-movie for the mind, recollecting the fantastical filmic strains of Yann Tiersen. Tightly interlacing mandolin, zither and guitar, the band conjured a climbing rose garden of a tune that could well have been an outtake from the Amelie soundtrack.
Soon after, they premiered four new numbers, with mixed results. A frisson of nerves was evident onstage, resulting in a few scuffed notes and miscues.
But in fairness, it’s hard to mask mistakes when you’re handling such delicate instruments as the baby harp and bowed psaltery in such an intimate space, where every blemish is blown up immensely.
The band brushed off off their flaws with a dose of good humour, though, with jovial guitarist Paul Bradley pulling befuddled faces like a folksy Stan Laurel.
After the interval, backed by visuals, the band were in their element. The blend of the trio’s entrancing bucolia with dreamlike montages of mountains, murmurations and ancient forests was suggestive of the pages of a National Geographic magazine coming to life.
It was not all nature porn though. Some clips veered into more experimental territory – one superimposed Mark Rothko-like blocks of faded colour over what looks like a long-lost Super 8 home movie. All together, it’s as if David Attenborough studied at some obscure European film school and this was his final film reel.
Optical illusions abounded amid the music’s intricate tracery. In John Minton’s short featuring water shaken by stereo speakers, orange jets of aqua become diving sparks of lava. Elsewhere, swarms of midges metamorphose into dancing fairies.
Hopefully a sequel to this performance is in the offing.
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