We walk into the Arnolfini, past the scarily helpful staff, and there’s a woman playing cello onstage. She’s plugged into a laptop, which creaks and drones along with her. This is Chipper, and now she’s gently hitting the strings with her bow, technology looping, ageing, mingling sounds. It’s fantastic, hypnotic, like falling into a magic trick, or a slow fever. And then, for the last song, the laptop fails and suddenly it’s just a woman playing cello onstage.
But magic is the theme tonight. All through the evening, an upright piano stands onstage, half its shell missing, its strings plastered and jammed with tape, marbles, rulers, sweet papers, bells and bottle caps. A quiet German chap will sit in front of it twice: once to mesmerise briefly at the beginning of Mapstation‘s sparse, arid and frankly overlong set of pleasant building block beats; the second time to dazzle as Hauschka.
Hard not to go over the top for what is essentially a man with his back to the audience, but come into this twinkly universe, and get trapped like a marble in piano strings. The range of sounds coming from the stage is pretty amazing: close your eyes and you’ll hear benign music boxes, toy carnivals, a stick rattling a bucket of stars. Open your eyes, and the quiet German chap will turn and smile after every song. Magic is correct. Do what you can to fall under soon.
