The festival kicks off at the city’s favourite triad: Casa del Popolo, La Sala Rossa and Sotterenea in a first night full of magic being brewed from both sides of St. Laurent’s street. At Casa, the night is blended with improvisation, indie-folk, R&B and experimental music.
Alex “Bad Baby” Lukashevsky welcomes us into the night just in the right mood with his jovial spirit, playfully enchanting, taking us through a thread of stories and inventiveness. Defying structure, and predictability, Lukashevsky’s performance is abundant and generous, raw to a very precise expression of one’s own musicking – “(…) music is dreaming…” he sings, and the audience agrees.
Liam Cole brings the indie-folk and the warmth of friendship to the stage, performing his latest “Warm Soup At The Big Rain”, released in March this year. Accompanied by Michael Duguay, co-founder of WTETN, with a grounding presence at the piano; Andrew MacKelvie, WTETN’s second half, pulling us to the skies through his soprano saxophone; Liam Fenton’s soothing guitars and Jason Mercer tasty bass lines, the ecstatic drumming sets the motion and takes us to this place deep inside the earth – full of colour, taste and birds, where Liam’s voice lives.
In a more experimental tone, the duo Naomi McCarroll-Butler, who performed alongside Sam Shalabi in his septet on the 14th June on Suoni’s official overture, and Jason Doell take us close to the transcendental with long sustained string notes in homemade instruments, saxophone’s delirium, noise’s elasticity, and some signal processing in between – each one in their work-soundstation, the dialogue is profound and meaningful, hypnotising at times. Perhaps an adapted live version of their latest tape release “FOUR FORMER MYRRH FORMERS FORMED HER HORN FOR MURMURS”, definitely a luminous addition to our tape collection, the improvised journey takes us somewhere special.
The night is already well warm and Quinton Barnes gets it hot and hotter, closing this first day with Suoni in sensuality and grace, sonic and soul liberation. With a full band on stage, magic is real and so is “Black Noise”, the freshly released album gifted to us in a cosmic performance by Quinton Barnes and the Black Noise Ensemble on this thursday night – in a multiplicity of instruments, practices and styles, from electronic to free jazz, to improvisation and r&b, the synchronicity and same-frequency language of Barne’s group is evident. Something seriously beautiful emanates from this connectedness. Chameleonic, fervent, Prince-esque eloquence, we get the feeling of a legend, a myth, right there with us in the same plane.
