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Happening, n. An unconventional dramatic or artistically orchestrated performance, often a series of discontinuous events involving audience participation.
The Triple Rock, with its low stage and semi-circular viewing area, its black walls for thoughtful leaning and unique balance of light and shadow, easily plays host to the above definition. When the crowd is small (as it must be for a true happening), there can come a moment of silent watchfulness toward the noise-wrangling on stage—erratic, discontinuous, maybe, but full of communicable intention—when audience participation is activated via sheer wonder and anticipation.
Gruff Rhys, an unpredictable and deliberate performer since his days with legendary Welsh pop-askew weirdos Super Furry Animals, holds that wonder, missing no opportunity for broadening and brightening the full world of sound from which songs are made. For every sound a place and every sound in its place. Midway through his solo set at the Triple Rock he rattled off some wry musical advice, and while that maxim didn’t gain utterance, his own “confuse your contemporaries” sufficed as an equivalent. Rhys’s wayward approach to performance might confuse if not for its persistence of vision. His masterful entrance—cuing the ambient sounds that begin “Gwn Mi Wn,” stepping sideways to his keyboard, initiating an indecipherable song-length mantra later echoed by his band, jumping center-stage to electronic drumsticks and then guitar—was a long, dilated, breathless moment, with no false step along the pathway of instruments.
The workshop of sounds he brought to the stage included the following: glowing drumsticks that rattle the air (aforementioned); left-handed guitar (he is left-handed, it turns out, but for a brief while it seemed like he might have just flipped over an ordinary guitar, without swapping the strings, in the pursuit of the peculiar sound of a high-note to low-note strum); absurd escalations of key changes in place of melodic development; screamed vocals, when the moment is right; an audiophile’s version of a child’s record player emitting birdsong. The spectrum that includes “instrument” and “toy” at opposite ends and “noisemaker” in the middle dissolves away in his company. Consider him the Welsh Beck. And all of this was employed not for cartoonish whimsy, but in a spirit of great artistic seriousness, whether Rhys was playing methodically mad garage-y rave-ups or songs from the soft, reflective side of his discography, such as new Hotel Shampoo (sample existential title: “In A House With No Mirrors You’ll Never Get Old”). Rhys could hold court with piano balladeers and modest strummers of the human condition, but he doesn’t just write songs, he builds them.
As an instrumental opening act, his backing band Y Niwl played an intoxicating, full-bodied surf rock, very traditional Dick Dale-type stuff rendered new by the forcefulness of the playing. Despite the looseness of its rhythms, I can’t think of a mode of music that demands greater precision in its timing than surf music, and Y Niwl are very together, benefitting most from perfect timing (no messy alignment of note and beat in this liquid arrangement), and also from the cult of audiophilia that Rhys has cultivated through his years in the biz. Or maybe Y Niwl’s own fine array of gear is the reason he recruited them? (Example: guitarist/keyboardist Gruff ab Arwel alternates between a Farfisa Fast Five and a vintage Saturn, which of course only matters if the musician knows what to do with them, as the younger Gruff does.) They’re some kind of wonderband—especially given their top-notch performance following a two-day drive from Seattle and a late arrival at the venue after the scheduled showtime!—and a fine choice to back Rhys. They recall The Disciplines, the group of young Norwegians led by Ken Stringfellow during his time away from The Posies, and while Stringfellow’s day-band, like Rhys’s Super Furry Animals, is a constant source of juvenation (no prefixed renewal required!), it’s no wonder the two men gravitate toward such talent.
Y Niwl returned most strikingly to the native youthful fire of their opening set during Rhys’s set-ending “Skylon!” an epic in the classic story-song sense. It’s the kind of song that would work better in a crowded room, gaining momentum from the energy of so many bodies, but the band worked toward such a convincing rumble by the 15-minute mark (an estimate, but maybe much longer) that any previous lag in energy was justified. Such is the cumulative effect of an air disaster rendered in music.
