When I saw In Gowan Ring two years ago in my hometown Gent there were approximately 10 persons around and seeing that the gentle man asks for the use of a van during his European tour makes it all clear that changes are small that he will storm the charts once.
There's no need for that and I'm sure that B'eirth would be the last man around to want it either.
B'eirth is the creator of what was once a weird cross between neofolk and psychedelic hippyfolk. He used to create his own instruments and In Gowan Ring was once like an open air museum from weird instruments.
But the times they are a-changing said the godfather of the hippies once and with In Gowan Ring it's not different, not that it is a bad turn anyway...
Yesterday some students from the academy of Ghent decided to invite both Lisa O Piu and In Gowan Ring while they were doing a mini-tour through Europe.
Due to some bad promotion (or is the In Gowan Ring-curse?) 40 people or less showed up and once again it seemed like pearls for swines.
The concert was divided in 3 parts.
The first part was In Gowan Ring who got joined by the whole bunch of Lisa O Piu.
No unusual instruments just a guitar that bizarrely enough looked like an avocado while the Lisa-gang were joined with classic instruments like a violin, African percussion or a clarinet.
Despite the fact that this little set was quite beautiful, you felt that In Gowan Ring was more going into the direction from Donovan or Fairport Convention.
The second act was something very strange : Hans Oiseau.
Hans is a artperformer from Gent who uses his guitar in a rather strange way. He creates weird industrial sounds by touching the guitarsnares with a ventilator, an alarmclock (I swear I wasn't drunk), an electric toothbrush and if my eyes served me well (I wear glasses!) even a discman.
The result was quite innovating and the guitar-noise wasn't that far away from Lee Ranaldo's solowork or even the short industrial intermezzo's on Kraftwerk's "Autobahn"-album.
It was a strange decision to put Hans between two neo-hippyacts but at the end of the performance you had the feeling that you watched something breathtaking.
To finish the evening we got the psychedelic folk from Lisa O Piu.
They come from Sweden and already toured with members from acid folkmasters Comus but this time they were joined by B'eirth from In Gowan Ring.
Another 40 minutes followed and I don't know if the term ethereal folk already exists but if it doesn't then it's invented now.
Wonderful female vocals were lead by a Michael Cashmore-guitar and so it happened that references like Sol Invictus or Current 93 were floating in the head.
Those students made a very great evening (just make some more flyers next time!) and at the end we even had a chat with the very gentle B'eirth. (Yes, Wim Morc, I mentioned you).
No comments:
Post a Comment