EIF music reviews: Up Late With Kathryn Joseph | Vołosi | Up Late with Alabaster DePlume

The Hub

We were all up late, Kathryn Joseph was on stage, facing off with her favourite sparring partner Lomond Campbell, and there were beanbags - the EIF cannot get any more informal. So informal that when Joseph apologised to one side of the auditorium for having to gaze at her rear end for the duration two fans crossed the stage to sit on the other side of the room.

This is the leavening pantomime of a Joseph show because, while she is wickedly funny when she talks, she sings with a witchy whisper, quavering gravity and soaring anguish over plangent electric piano chords and Campbell’s doomy synths about twisted desire, hellacious abuse and maybe even, debatably, about f***ing dead animals.

And it seems she wanted it darker, saying “welcome to my most paranoid show ever” as she asked for the stage lights to be lowered in her most undiva-ish way.

Much of the set was drawn from her most recent album WE WERE MADE PREY. Nothing shouty here though. Her voice quivering, her purpose steely, Joseph offered gothic torch songs for a gothic hall.

Under Campbell’s spell, she has also emerged as an unlikely dancing queen, aspiring to rattle the beanbags with the throbbing electro grooves of What Is Keeping You Alive.

Fiona Shepherd

Vołosi ★★★★

The Hub

A cultural hit squad from Poland’s Beskidy Mountains, the five members of the supercharged string quintet Vołosi walked on, did the business (and how!), took a smiling bow and walked off, not a word spoken.

What did speak volumes, however, was the unfettered dynamism of their performance. Although steeped in tradition and frequently playing with gypsyish flamboyance, their technique was clearly classically informed but could also muster the attack of a rock band.

Tunes (we were, of course, given no titles) might start off with sprightly pizzicato before taking on the keen heft of twin violins and viola, calling and responding to each other or shrilling together over a hypnotic pulse from cello and double bass; or they might deliver a csárdás-like set with dramatically switching tempi, sudden stops and manic fiddle breakouts.

Occasionally they might slow down, gliding, perhaps, over stately descending bass into the kind of serene melody you could imagine as a TV drama theme. Then they’d be off again, players facing up to each other so closely you’d fear for an eye amid these whizzing bows, and emitting the occasional yell – venting the pent, as Samuel Beckett might have put it.

Jim Gilchrist

Up Late with Alabaster DePlume ★★★

The Hub

“With a name like yours, you might be any shape,” as Humpty Dumpty tells Alice. In fact Angus Fairbairn, aka Alabaster DePlume, maverick saxophonist, singer and activist, cut a lean, quaintly robed figure as he took the stage, draping a couple of Palestinian keffiyeh scarves over the mic stand – of which more later.

Accompanied by bass guitarist Rozi Plain, vocalist Ruth Goller and drummer Seb Rochford, he delivered a stream of his eccentrically rambling, cheerfully sweary imprecations of love for us all, before blowing his tenor sax over stealthy bass and drums to launch into Thank You My Pain.

There’s something almost spectral about DePlume’s distinctively quavering saxophone vibrato, while his singing is more of an incantatory chant.

After further declarations of love, there was more tremulous sax over tolling drums, DePlume, at one point, musing, “I don’t know what becomes of these f****ng songs.”

A rousing sax melody over a steady drum beat built up into powerful squalling, Goller’s vocals banshee-like, before subsiding into plaintiveness for DePlume to declaim Broken in a near monotone.

Then politics came to the fore as he declared, “Some of my friends are facing annihilation,” and raised the controversial topic of the Festival’s major sponsorship by financiers Baillie Gifford, currently being called upon to divest from links with Israel.

“This company that invests in Israel also invests in this festival – and thus funds me,” he added drily.

He then launched into a quavering sax lament, threaded with market sounds recorded in Ramallah, before picking up a guitar to sing his sardonic carol Gifts of Olives: “Bethlehem behold: the star will shine / On the genocide in Palestine.”

They were joined by a sitar player in a final improvisation, sax floating languidly over sitar twang to a more equable close.

Jim Gilchrist

Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here.