Dean Roberts, Daniel Varricchio/Kynan Lawlor
De la Catessen/Exeter Dining Room
Mon 10 & Tue 11 July

The tiny De la Catessen, tucked away on Anster St. City is a rare jewel in the rain-soaked Adelaide streets. New Zealander Dean Roberts began the night by screening Studies For Existence Redux. The grainy phantom-grey images and Roberts' accompanying soundtrack ripped holes in the atmosphere in which a busy brain could the mind carry. The screen flickered with images and text, some of the words turned inside out, giving air to different meanings. Structurlist in from, the film grew from blank sheets to pixels climbing, cycles returning, the two-part soundtrack sounding like a beehive, a junkyard, and a playground, climaxing via heavy rhythmic pull of gaining drones against the burning white screen.

Daniel Varricchio followed with three linked pieces on three guitars, the first of which echoed the majestic walrus scene in Robert Flaherty's 'Nanook Of The North'. The guitarist recited an aural fable, sonorous and laden with the sweetness that comes when notes bend and fall into each other like hot pungent fruit in a pot. Next a muddy melody of chords peeled open a scorching mash of metallic riffing, the sustain digging its claws deep while the untamed upper-register runs carved the walls in acid ink. His last, shortest and perhaps best piece left softly-trem'd waves of smoky sound to dissipate in the frosty air.

Roberts emerged, the tremble of his limbs moving throughout the body of his guitar. He first played a medley of songs highlighting his distinctive style of play. His hitting, rubbing and strangling of the instrument cajoled and disfigured a series of rich tones, pouncing atop his droning vocal with melancholic wordplay sometimes trickling through the stick-brittle crack of metal on wood. One moment he feathered a divine melody, the next he pulled sharp jabs of rhythm, his voice neither following the dynamics nor leading the way, instead hanging spectral as the din raged and regressed. After a short break Roberts closed with a sublime rendition of Uneasy Flower with harmonics, lapping chords and voice boiling down to lonely lovely stew. As great as Roberts was tonight, the following night he delivered a sweltering set, a whole other echelon of radical song construction. It was the kind of set that you couldn't escape. His jolting guitar, like a thick-throated dog, destroyed space and time; the audience unable to rest for Roberts drew the map as he went along, ending with a bubbling slab of feedback to close a revisited Uneasy Flower. Earlier Kynan Lawlor again showed that he is one of the most versatile and intuitive artists in Adelaide. His laptop slowly dragged high-resolution sounds from speaker to speaker, the slightest change in colour pushing the ears to new frequencies. It was impossible to leave these performances without a thousand thoughts racing in one's head; the music as vortex of possibility and action swirled on and on.

Lenin Simos