Paolo Angeli's Sponde di Passione live at Moers Festival 2010

(beautiful photos here and here)

Paolo Angeli's project Sponde di Passione was mostly serving folk-based drone structures and adding a lot of visual food. There were black-and-white photos projected onto a big screen behind the musicians, photos of Good Friday ceremonies in (southern?) Italy. And there was a trapeze artist which for the first time made correct use of the Moers Festival circus tent by offering acrobatics. The little program booklet announced that the acrobat and the musicians were meant to influence each other, and the musicians on stage where really watching what she was doing high up there under the tent's roof. Yet I couldn't really figure out any mutual influence between them. (Which doesn't mean that there was none, I just didn't perceive it.) Short before the concert, while watching the preparations for the multimedia performance, I chatted a bit with a stranger and we remembered the 2001 or 2002 concert of the Shibusa Shirazu Orchestra with their many dancers and the giant dragon floating over the audience's heads. (We had a little controversy - while he found everything of that gig "spectacular" and great, I admitted that the show was, but that the music was a bit too much based on repetitive riffs.) So, we were asking ourselves, can we expect a show like that? Well, after the concert had started, this guy left after a while. I later met him again and he told me he couldn't stand these Christian photos. I replied that I didn't have any specific reactions to these photos: "I grew up in a protestant household, so these catholic processions are just strange to me, not touching me in any way, neither negative nor positive."

Takumi Fukushima's singing was maybe a bit harmless but nice. I knew some of her singing from Rale. The best moment though was when she left the tracks of harmlessness and suddenly burst into singing traditional japanese drama, alternating between female and pretended male voice. That might well have been the best moment of the whole concert, which was a little bit boring on the whole, because there was too few instrumental development. After I had seen the high number of sounds that Angeli could get out of his instrument in the duet with Jon Rose, the performance here on the main stage was a bit one-dimensional (or maybe it was the sound mix that was not detailed enough?). Drone music doesn't work so well if it is folk-based. (Lutz Eitel calls it "orotund sonorities" and up to now I've been too lazy to check the dictionary what "orotund" means.)

Paolo Angeli's MySpace site and the one for the Angeli and Fukushima duet.

As already mentioned in the morning session review, Takumi exchanged some smile with my wife as well. That certainly earns her a big bonus point.