THE SKATERS

The stage is dim; you can only see two figures hunched over equipment spread out on the floor. No performance, no seducing of the audience. The clattering of hand drums punctuate human voices melting into one another, and the latter in their turn are electronically transferred into imposing drone fields. The Skaters’ performances are said to come very near the ritual basis of art – instead of creating new musical structures, the band aims at giving birth to new forms of experience. The term “noise” implies meditation here, not frustration or aggression. Therefore the group’s music could be called psychedelic noise, the intertwining of the external and the internal.

The Skaters is James Ferraro and Spencer Clarke from San Francisco. As a child Ferraro spent a lot of time by himself, since his father worked for the army and the family moved frequently to new cities. He thus created a rich imaginative world from which he use as a source of inspiration once he started making music as an adult. As with the asceticism of mystics, the music of Ferraro and Clarke transforms the scantiness of cultural and material means into a richness of experience. This transformation is also manifest on their recordings, which make unforced use of the sound characteristics of the audio cassette – the hiss of magnetic tape and the tendency to dissolve distinct boundaries between sounds.

Avanto Club in Gloria on Saturday, 18 November, 9 pm to 3 am