Wife at Vacation Vinyl on Friday, July 8, 2011

Wife uses such an impressive number of pedals, that the floor of Vacation Vinyl was covered of them, and I was wondering what kind of distortion there was in store for us. But actually, the sound was more stretched than distorted, the experimental music more melodic than deviated.

Wife is a band or rather a duo-project between Andrew Thomas and Nick Steinhardt, who use only guitar and bass, as well as this Moog synthesizer foot-operated on certain songs. They played an in-store at Vacation Vinyl on Friday night for the release of their record, and their constant pedal-knob-turning-adjusting occupation, as well as the foot action on the Moog while playing guitar during the whole set, was very intriguing and impressive for me. How do they do that? How do they know what they are doing with this complicated technology?

The music was very slow building up itself, static with stretched fuzzy notes echoing and reverberating, a hypnotic kind of thing, progressively ascending through the same repetitive groove. I particularly liked the tracks using the Moog as they had some solemnity through their loudness, some vastness capable to evoke anything majestic wonder of nature, a mountain, a giant tree,…
The long tracks were vibrating through the whole body, as each note was a loud elongated and manipulated story in itself, constructing repetitive circles with others, layered with lower riffs resonating deeply inside.

At times, their atmospheric soundscapes had something from those of Scottish Mogwai, sometimes they were wandering on their own, lost and finding some inspiration in their own loops.