“Spell-binding. Loops that shouldn’t end”
If artist Sade decided to poetically narrate a slightly surreal dream about how you felt as a teenager, the ensemble Acolyte comes very close to realizing that dream. It is about “feeling a little weird” Iona Lee, award winning poet and spoken word artist confesses into the dark theater. A part of the new Soundhouse Winter Festival in Edinburgh, this spoken-word, psychedelic ensemble delivers its last performance of the year and, for an hour, inner turmoil is given a hypnotic groove.
Bassist Ruairidh Morrison, crouched over a spread of effects pedals, deftly builds a live bass loop. Layers are added. Gloria Black as a vocal shadow to Ionas lead, fills the compositions with merging harmonies and warm galactic synth drones. Suggestions of natural elements such as breathing, heartbeats, whistles and wind sounds are heard. Percussionist Daniel Hill is most expressive yet contained and marks out sections by switching between sticks, rods and mallets for different textural variations on his drum set, the eerie cymbal scratches being a favorite. Iona, our lone narrator, is a bewitching raconteur, her presence and delivery smooth and darkly compelling. She possesses the power of capturing and releasing tension effortlessly with contrasts of sharp image descriptions falling into surrealist storytelling. She deliberates mortality, want of attention, hangovers, self awareness, longing…spiders. These subjects may stem from feeling a bit weird but their attack is never heavy or foreboding and Iona moves through them like a vaguely bossa nova spell-wielder and is seeming pleased to catch the audience off guard with moments of unexpected dry humor or searing description.
Over all, it is refreshingly genre-bending, this perhaps coming from its psychedelic feel. The soundscapes created were transportive, suspending and demanded a certain relaxation—the grooviest meditation session. Looping cyclical melodies and rhythms have existed as far back as human musicology can reach and the response to it is deeply innate, this becoming more and more prominent the longer you are exposed to it. The spectrum of music and poetry is greatly enriched when mixed and stretched with experimentation and what Acolyte has done is prove how effective this can be. They have created their own gorgeous little world of it.
Acolyte is stunning and it is always impressive when an ensemble is so tight that it translates into the effect of being a bit out of body. With the promise of an EP coming out next year, what a treat we are in for from this hypnotic ensemble.