The latest instalment in the Sound Lab series of experimental music concerts went back in time, to an age before digital keyboard technology, but still had the merit of music being created largely in the moment.
Time was when the synthesisers involved would have looked familiar to many a gig-goer and although the sounds they offer may not have been heard widely since their proliferation on popular albums like Steve Miller's Fly Like An Eagle and the 1970s canon of bands like Camel as well as more cerebral works, Jim McKenna used them – distorted birdsong, wah-wahed harpsichord et al – in a way that was more man than machine.
McKenna, who now runs a business restoring and servicing vintage Moogs and Korgs, has a songwriter's sensitivity as well as a liking for sonic whooshes and washes. Even when, as he promised, things got stranger in the second half, there were almost pop-like chord patterns among what he enjoyed referring to as "the dark side of the Moog".
The extended piece that occupied the first half had a wealth of ideas and colour and portrayed both grandeur and subtle changes of mood, although it did become bogged down for rather too long in a ping-ponging Moog bass line that was redolent of a bygone age and lost its good old days charm fairly quickly. For the dark side, McKenna doused all lights and worked, kneeling at the keys by the light of a pair of boffin-like specs, on three more succinct pieces that were by turns ruminative, creepily urgent and rondo-like; contrasting but united by a feeling of personal communication.
HHH
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