Mardi Spaghetti @ Flux Festival, October 7th, 2025 Festival Flux collaborated with Mardi Spaghetti on October 7th for an evening of experimental sounds of international origin.
Eduardo Cossio (Perth) was the first to break the silence, his left hand hovering over a pedal chain while the right set an Ebow on a single string of an auto-harp. A trio of blue eyed Ebows joined for a cluster of tightly wound frequencies. There was something desolate in that metallic drone. Stabs from a reverb laden kalimba bubbled under the highest highs and lowest lows of Cossio’s harmonica. I had visions of an abandoned suspension bridge creaking between overgrown shores.
One of the thick steel cables is unwinding, each tiny strand tightest before the fall. Jen Yakamovich and Roxanne Nesbitt (Vancouver) continued the air of suspense on drums, electric bass and two trees of semi-cylindrical bells. Long tones encircled the stage at Casa del Popolo. Jen rolled around the drums with every sort of mallet, brush stick and back again.
Roxanne wielded a wooden bow of ancient styling against the detuned strings of an electric bass propped on the left shoulder. Dense stuttering from the bass rose with flourishes of a riveted cymbal and fell into sparse ambiances centred on bell tones. A slow pulse, our first clear unobscured tempo of the evening, arrived just in time for the bow.
The trio of Pablo Jimenez (Bogota/Montréal), Camila Nebbia (Buenos Aires/Berlin), and Antoine Létourneau-Berger (Rimouski), brought time and tonality back into the abstract with a series of intensely committed improvisations that explored the extremes of their respective instruments. Antoine sat behind a the keys of an Ondes Martenot routed to pickups placed on the various quasi-membranes of a trap set – the skin of snare drum, a gong. Subtle whispering tones often inspired his bandmates to a new level of understatement and fragility.
Camila Nebbia could follow him there, sometimes with the help of a tin can in the bell of her saxophone, now apparently singing from the other room. She’d pull the can out to reveal a cascade of untethered melodies full of rhythmic substance and surprise. Pablo let those rich tones through, bowing his acoustic bass into the texture of a section of violins on a rewinding tape machine. Recalibrate your ears and expectations for music some Tuesday soon.
