About the CAMUSI and Gentle Ohm’s Improvisation Concert

On Wednesday the 11th of December 2013 at ATK, the free-improvisation group CAMUSI (Italia) with experimental electronic artist Josh Kopececk (England) performed a very interesting show.

The Italian duo CAMUSI TOTALLY burnt the house down at their concert on Monday as part of the Hanoi New Music Festival 2013.

Camusi consists of only Stefano Giust playing jazz-drums combined with selected objects and vocalist Patrizia Oliva singing through a vocal processor called Voice Live Touch, contact microphone, mixer and Boss delay pedal

“The live show is brilliant: the fragmented rhythms of Giust, change with the naturalness of a beating wings, it’s free jazz, it’s radical improv, it’s even trip-hop, each piece bears his indelible imprint. No less important is the Madame par excellence, her voice exudes passion and vehemence at every step, it’s a scratch, a caress, a slap and a scream at the same time. All these drag the sound of Camusi into the abyss of the soul, and then up to the sky”. At ATK, Camusi played free improvisation, contemporary music, avant-garde jazz, electroacoustic, trip-hop, noise, psychedelia, ethnic, no wave, street noise recorded directly from Hanoi and Vietnamese folk music.”

“Patrizia Oliva’s research is aimed on a redefinition of contemporary singer that often includes gesture. Her exploration on electronics includes noise, field recordings and voice loops. Stefano Giust’s drumming focuses on rhythmic pulse and its destruction, along with embracing powerful rough angularity, asymmetrical rhythms, noise, silence, timbric intensity and extended techniques. He avoids most clichés, nevertheless manages to transmit a pulsation that doesn’t derive from a single beat, but by assembling several rhythmic such as “micro events”.”

Josh Kopecek opening the show and jam with Camusi at the end of the show. The performance that Josh played was called GENTLE OHM, “taking its name after a unit of electrical resistance which took its name after the German physicist Georg Simon Ohm.”

“GENTLE OHM could easily be amongst the British composer’s (who, in the past, has been writing contemporary classical suites, playing Brazilian music with his band Xeomistas, or bending homemade circuit boards) most electronic, adventurous and elaborate offerings to date. An ominously cavernous blanket of noise, interwoven with hauntological samples from bygone eras of traditional Vietnamese music, dipped in modern industrial colors, then manically live-processed in between dub-like beats into elaborate streams of consciousness. The resulting maelstrom is a canopy of dappled light over and through the sound with which he works.”

Josh played passionately and so well, especially at his opening solo performance, as usual, he plays short pieces and restraint, probably waiting for the next explosion of the duo Camusi and the improvised jam session at the end, resulting in blocks of sounds, diversity, complexity, multi-dimensional colors

A fantastic side-event of Hanoi New Music Festival organized The Onion Cellar, DomDom and CAMA ATK. A very interesting sound-evening.

English translation and photos by The Onion Cellar