Last Saturday i found myself in the salubrious confines of Just Dropped In, a small record shop in central Coventry, for a live performance by US experimental duo LEYA, comprising harpist Marilu Donovan and violin-vocalist Adam Markiewicz. In hindsight, being something of a shrine to all that’s vintage – with vinyl editions of the theoretically great and the good from previous decades lining the walls – it was a somewhat incongruous place to enter the futuristic, fantastical soundworld that is uniquely LEYA’s – although, sitting on a plush pink sofa in front of the stage, i could hardly have been more comfortable.
The gig opened with support act Vanessa Bedoret, whose work i hadn’t previously heard, so i spent time with her debut album Eyes, released last year, the day before the concert. She seemed an excellent match; the way she blends violin and vocals isn’t too far removed from LEYA’s aesthetic, though her use of gritty electronic beats definitely is, but made for a nice sympathetic contrast in this live context.
Though Eyes comprises seven distinct tracks, Bedoret took a broader approach, treating the majority of her hour-long set as a single, albeit episodic, performance. To an extent, that slightly had the effect of lessening the music’s impact, as notions of tension and release became complicated, and there were certainly times when it all seemed structurally arbitrary. But this is only a minor observation, Bedoret was a compelling stage presence, establishing in the opening track (the only one to stand alone) her particular, highly effective juxtaposition of drawn-out, more ambient elements with increasingly intense beat and pulse patterns. That being said, while her vocals generally had the softness of gossamer, her treatment of the violin at times bordered on ferocious, making for a powerful counterpoint of ideas.
At her best (heard, for example, in the final two tracks of Eyes), Bedoret’s music touches on some of the sublime qualities of Fovea Hex, and similar sequences emerged in her live set, filling the space with a lyrical outpouring over rumble and drift – the bass speaking with a beauty i can only describe as strange – before appeared to sing an ethereal melody directly into her violin. Whereupon soft quasi-choral voices appeared, touched by occasional glitches twitching out of the speakers, which gradually accumulated into a torrent, overwhelming everything. Pretty powerful stuff, and a musical voice i’ll be listening out for more in the future.
Longer-term readers of 5:4 will know of my passion for LEYA’s music – releasing one 5-star release after another – so it might seem odd when i confess i was convinced i wouldn’t be able to identify many specific songs during their set. The reason for this is that i’ve come to regard their output as akin to variations on a theme; songs that manage to remain almost entirely elusive while sounding passionately emotional and personal, generally articulated according to three distinct strata: rapid harp figurations, slow violin suspensions and Markiewicz’s vocals occupying a middle ground of light, ephemeral movement. So their music is wonderfully paradoxical, always familiar, yet always unique.
And so it was in their one-hour set, which unlike Bedoret did take the expected form of distinct (though somewhat abstract) songs. The duo’s demeanour, particularly at the start, was striking: Donovan solemnly intoning on the harp, as if laying the groundwork for her uniquely off-kilter harmonic mode, while Markiewicz literally prowled beside the stage, driven by restless energy which was briefly, and disarmingly, focused on the loud opening of a can of beer. From this peculiar, pregnant introduction, we tumbled into LEYA’s parallel world, bathing in ethereality, plunging into full force textural swells that switched in a moment to intricate filigree.
Some of the most mesmerising passages involved Donovan’s manipulation of tempo, rendering it by turns elastic and a moot point, matched by Markiewicz’s poetic obfuscation of words, emerging from his mouth as some combination of breath, whisper or fragment, occasionally projected enough to resolve into something momentarily tangible. It was especially interesting seeing how Markiewicz achieved this, his microphone clearly overflowing with lashings of potential reverb, but never putting his mouth closer than about two metres away from it. The resulting glimpses of feather-like sound walked a liminal line between actual vocals and a kind of Glenn Gould-like semi-involuntary vocalisation. His physical gestures were similarly ambiguous, sometimes like nervous tics, sometimes like an integral, even essential visual reinforcement of the song’s message. When Donovan switched – as she often did – to a regular, metric pulse, she became an anchor for Markiewicz, keeping the music grounded, yet allowing him complete freedom to fly.
