A tiny “yay!” split the sacred silence prior to performance, and audience and musicians alike broke into laughter. Sonic Bothy shortly commenced their noisemaking, but the smiles never left their faces. With a staggering array of tools at their disposal, the six artists that comprise Sonic Bothy’s performing ensemble moved as one through forty minutes of wildly inventive, intense, and playful improvisation. An introductory free piece flitted from one movement to the next, never letting anything grow stale. A gust of folk violin from Evie Waddell blew away scratches and squeaks, and Nichola Scrutton’s pulsing suspended chords seemed to promise a thumping trad session. But ten seconds later they had moved on.
While a technician looked at Waddell’s instrument, she switched to body percussion and loosed a range of pops and claps into her microphone. Everything was mutable, and nothing sacred. At least until the second improvisation, which arose glacially from percussionist Adam Green’s cavernous floor tom riff. Captioner Karen enhanced the mood with arresting descriptions: taps on wooden boards were “Like a gate knocking in the wind.” Scrutton and Ali Robertson added elements from their play tables, which were so closely mic’d as to render each minute shift audible throughout the hall, and bowed metallophones, glass flutes, whistles, and reverberating ohs coalesced into a cascade of suspense — the exact space of discomfort in which the two mad geniuses thrive.
A final piece, composed by EWI player Sonia Allori and entitled ‘Public Inconvenience’, set statistics and testimonials about the decline of public toilet availability in the UK to a thematically shifting soundscape. The performers toyed with slang terminology — Robertson reveled in rolling his R’s in “crrrrrrapper”, and a lone “john” morphed into an enquiring chorus — and rolled coins across their instruments to remind the audience of the cost of needing to go. There was a tap dance sequence, a change collection from the front row, a rising tide of anxious noise, and a section in which all six players carefully rotated water bottles to recreate the sound of plumbing. A round of medieval chanting, echoed as if being performed from a vast sewer, at last settled into a final flush and a sigh of relief.
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The brass players of Maher Shalal Hash Baz tooted away quietly while Counterflows organiser Alasdair Campbell attempted to introduce the group. Campbell eventually caved to their insistence and departed the stage, at which point the full ensemble joined in repetitions of the klezmer-esque riff. Over top, drummer and co-leader Reiko Kudo recited words of domesticity, disrupted and recovered in the span of a few bars. Such was the early pattern: the band played a small phrase and Reiko spoke over top, returning frequently to words, motifs, even whole poems about daffodils and curry. The music would abruptly stop, leaving the audience unsure whether to clap. Before wits could be gathered, mastermind Tori Kudo would count into a new tune, beginning the whole thing anew.
Musicians practiced between tunes and glanced around during halting entrances. Tori hammered rhythms with his hands and feet until everyone locked in. The spacious wooden hall and its elevated stage ringed with red curtains contributed to the atmosphere of a school cabaret. In one particularly endearing moment, trumpeter Otani audibly improved at playing a melody on the second and third repeats. Tori cut off each piece with waving hands and an “okay”. It was a ragtag group reading a last minute setlist of songs defined by innocently singable melodies. Yet despite appearances, everything is done with intent. Seasoned professionals Bill Wells and Danielle Price laid down unshakeable basslines on opposite ends of the stage. Reiko flipped timeless snare rolls into pounding kick patterns at a moment’s notice. McLoud Zicmuse added traffic cone, recorder, packing paper, and sneakily lovely falsetto from a back corner. Shiu-Yeung Hui’s spiky violin and Tori’s guitar stabs pointedly finished the foundation, which churned under the three-headed melodic monster of Otani, clarinettist Naomi, and banjoist Arthur Bickers. It all felt crafted; if not for score-perfect replication, then for frictionless distribution of joyous communal messages.
Musically, no idea is too unassuming for Tori to write down. In a memorable performance of ‘practice! performance’, the band alternated chaotic-sounding (yet fully notated) onslaughts with a lone, three note piano riff. It was a study in space, boldly contrasting dynamics and textures and proving the impact that the simplest combinations of notes, properly honoured, can make. At the last minute, Tori decided to close the set with a rousing rendition of ‘Banned Announcements’, from 2004’s Osaka Bridge. The bouncy tune wriggled its way into my head and clearly had a similar effect on the players: at the end, Otani initiated a seemingly spontaneous improvisation on the central motif. The band exploded into raucous revelry as the fragment whipped around the stage, subjected to a furious litany of creativity but retaining its cheery core. Hui raised his instruments — violin in one hand, a pastel yellow melodica in the other — above his head in triumph. When it ended and the nine unceremoniously walked backstage, the Counterflows crowd, which had begun stomping and whooping during the cadenza, fully erupted. Utterly taken by the uniquely bizarre wonder of it all, we cheered and cheered for an encore that never came.
