Live Review: Deradoorian, Benjamin Witt, Alyx Dennison

As the beginnings of an audience began to trickle in, local singer-songwriter Alyx Dennison took the stage, and began weaving a deceptively simple soundscape, which combined a diverse range of sampled drums, live percussion, and deep, dense keyboard bass. On an early song, Dennison's clipping, gainy samples and affected, looping vocals created an eerie and unique blur between organic and mechanical sound. Another highlight was her stripped-back closer, which peeled away all the instrumentation save for an unrelenting one-bar floor tom pattern that became almost hypnotic over the course of the song's five-minute runtime, all the while drawing focus toward Dennison's gorgeous voice.

Benjamin Witt (ex-guitarist of The Chemist) followed, with looping songs and sound collages assembled from playing an electric guitar in just about every way one could imagine. Witt created a lot of interesting rhythm, but his set felt bound in its scope. Songs built on a loop like these only ever have a couple of chords, and by their nature, it's hard for them to be developed much further than that, beyond just fluctuating in texture. Witt demonstrated his undeniable proficiency on his instrument, with several really handy bits of playing, but the songcraft itself wasn't there to back it up. Witt didn't benefit from the still small crowd (who gave him little energy to bounce off) or from his proximity to Dennison, whose set was full of songs that made use of a lot of repetition.

Deradoorian's stage layout had the New York duo (comprised of sisters Angel and Arlene Deradoorian) facing one another, which, combined with the crowd's comfortable spread across the floor, created an extremely intimate performance space. Suddenly it didn't matter that there wasn't the usual jumping Newtown Social Club crowd, and the calm in the room focused attention solely towards the incredible musicians on stage, who built up their extraordinary psychedelic folk from scratch. Some songs began on Arlene's side of the stage, such as A Beautiful Woman, which played with complex rhythm as a looping hip hop beat played off staccato backing vocals and smooth bass guitar. Some began with a harmonic base from Angel's side, like Violet Minded, with its warped Randy Newman-like synth sound creating a simple but extremely effective groove. What bound the set together was the sisters' incredible voices, and particularly Angel's stunning, versatile lead vocal, which pirouetted atop the duo's experimental pop with remarkable and moving clarity.