Sharing the night with the performance of a certain alumni of Baywatch, art rock troupe Kayo Dot make it to Berlin for a night of contemplative noise that is (probably almost) completely devoid of talking cars and square jawed hero-protagonist types striding down the beach, chest hair blazing, yet again rescuing Pamela Anderson from a giant octopus. If you’re looking for that, this is not the night for you.
Kayo Dot are all about compositions and have, perhaps admirably, put genre labels and target audiences in the back seat. Holistically the sound tries its best to defy description, alternately swirling, pounding and washing through jazz, post-rock and minimalism and if you’ll allow us to be so krass as quote the band themselves “…create a completely unique, complex, heartbreaking, and meticulously composed genreless sound all their own”. Kayo Dot are a six piece band of true multi-instrumentalists, all of them working to make each song itself the performer, rather than any one individual in the band.
Supporting on the European tour and on the night are Tartar Lamb 2 and Jeremiah Cymerman.
Tartar Lamb 2 is the off-shoot project from Kayo Dot featuring Toby Diver & Mia Matsumiya performing epic violin and guitar pieces.
Multi-instrumentalist, composer, conductor and knob-twiddler, Jeremiah Cymerman comes firmly from the ‘Downtown New York’ school of avant-garde music and is best known for his excursions into left-field clarinet jazz, and has claimed a bunch of fans from his making the clarinet almost a new instrument through digital processing and experimentation.
And all of it completely uninterrupted by random gangs of drug couriering thugs on jet-skis kidnapping hapless beach goers, later demanding ransom but instead meeting tough justice from beach patrol. Probably almost.
