The sound emanating from their guitar was a mix of a harpy screeching through a waterlogged gramophone and a simultaneously soggy and splintered old player piano whose mallets bore all the colors of oxidation from barnacle-teal to little-mermaid-red from playing on rusted piano wire for a century. What was happening to bring out the surreal sound of circus organ and sea-faring siren alternately ebbing and flowing between audience ears was something closer to an illusionist’ rather than a musician’s trick; a right hand plucking the strings of a seven-string guitar above the faux-ivory nut or end-piece of the guitar neck separating it from the head and tuning pegs of the instrument, and a left hand playing chords like a piano player, arpeggiating and hammering-on, a technique where the fingers are used like mallets, playing individual chord notes one finger at a time, while routing the electric signal of the guitar through a speaker that rotated in its sloppily nailed together cabinet. All this to make a wavy dreamy and simultaneously harsh but smoothed together sound over which the non-binary but for most purposes, male performer told a story.
The story mirrored the endless Nordic dusk that onlookers witnessed his testimony in. The story started and ended with them stating that his birth name was one that most strangers and friends would never know, and his name to friends and audience members was never known or spoken by his birth family.
Alex Ash Creative 