Vocalis

January 25th was a cold, Friday night and London was in the mood for casting out the nightmare of politics and fear, with good live music and beer. A perfect night for the inaugural Vocalis event at Beaconsfield Gallery. The evening was hosted by the singular talent of Michael Curran, who swanned about the packed house and jollied the evening’s programme along wearing a purposefully disfiguring lycra body suit partially disguised by a flowing sequin-cape. Pure shock and wit, Curran’s MC’ing invoked the avant-garde spirit of Hugo Ball and his Cabaret Voltaire and the outrageous precociousness of Cookie Mueller in Female Trouble. Curran kicked off the evening by drawing from a stack of postcards in a sort of musical pop-tarot divination, inviting audience members to draw, write or play with their chosen card – Bay City Rollers, Charlie Parker, Nancy Sinatra, Suede, Motley Crue, Cher, Abba, Whitney Houston, Ariana Grande. Calling out the names of the musicians on the cards as he passed them out, in a sort of rhythmic invocation of pop muses that cast a spell over the audience who were caught somewhere between the ridiculous and the divine, at which point Curran introduced David Crawforth. Playing his own customized synthesizer, Crawforth partially spoke and partially sang in a style akin to reading a laundry list of sorrow. Blended with the longing that is particular to the wave bending effects of a synthesizer Crawforth sounded a sort of Lynchian lament that was perfectly pitched to the dream-state of Vocalis described in their flyer as “informal and open – where food and fluids mix with electrical impulses and vocalised concepts.” The Belgian artist Rufus Michielsen pumped up the volume with his driving, layered synth beats as he prowled and leapt about the space with his electrifying lupine energy, swallowing the microphone like a dawg, crumbling syllables with reverb in a syntax that syncopated with the beats. Dig it. Dug it. Dog. By this time the place was buzzing and packed. Over the din of conversation and laughter the MC beguiled; reading excerpts from books on noise, reciting lyrics over a toy tanoy like a conductor announcing station stops and shining a long flashlight through a large transparency of Cindy Sherman laying prone like a school girl dreaming of a TV romance. More magic followed when the performance artist and writer Hayley Newman took the stage alongside her musical collaborators, Honey Birch and her mother, artist Gina Birch (bass player from the cult, all-female post-punk band, The Raincoats, who were delightfully critiqued by the mother played by Annette Bening in the ultra cool film 20th Century Women, apologies for the long-winded aside, but I had to get that all in, so good are these confluences). Singing delicious a cappella harmonies perfectly pitched to contrast with Newman’s dark and witty lyrics of cannibalism and ghosts, this was song making as charm, a striking balance of darkness and light, pure choral mischief making. The evening finished off with a performance by the art & music duo Trish Lyons and Gordon Dawson, who make up Viralux. Pumped up to 120 bpm, Dawson put synth sounds and beats through assorted pedal effects as Lyons mixed her spoken and sung vocals through a mix of vocal effects producing their signature lush layering of sound, but this time with a dance beat. Starting off wearing a hot pink mariachi sombrero that obscured her head and upper body, halfway through Lyons took off the hat to reveal the strange flesh tone mask of a cat which had been seen dancing around as an avatar in an alien hoodoo landscape in the video that played behind Viralux. A strange mixture of creepy and sexy, part pet, part alien. All pleasure. Viralux new rules, dance like there’s no tomorrow. Four hours of Vocalis and the audience cheered and chanted for more. This is Vocalis at Beaconsfield, a new series of curated art and music. Catch it while you can.