“Ah!” “What?” and “Whoas!” pierce the air as cellist Wes Swing told Café Nine about his recent cello travails.
“We had a crazy cello disaster. It broke in half,” Swing said. Tuesday night while finishing up his sound check in a Providence venue, Swing had turned around to grab his guitar and knocked his cello over in the process. It did not survive the fall.
Swing’s injured cello was sent to local strings mender Kevin Chapin for fixing. A mere 24 hours later at Café Nine Wednesday night, he was back at it, cranking out his usual set with the personal, hand-crafted borrowed cello of Chapin himself. Despite the traumatic incident (band member Jeff Gregerson deemed it worthy of a spot on online magazine Brightest Young Things’ “Nightmare Gigs”), Swing brought celebration to the cello in a flawless performance.
Wednesday night’s performance paid homage to round, orchestral sound with back-to-back performances from Swing, a Virginia native, and New Haven local Olive Tiger. The two graced the stage with not only their strings, but a unique folk-electronic-alternative sensibility to an instrument normally reserved for classical stylings. They breed from a growing genre of indie interpretations of classical instruments linked to artists like Andrew Bird and Kishi Bashi.
“We’re a little outside the norm,” Swing said gingerly. Swirling smooth vocals with the drama of the cello, the musical workings of Swing and Tiger alike were anything but ordinary.
The night began with a gentle introduction to the strings with opener Jay Sirianni. Sirianni boarded the stage solo, accompanied only by his strapped guitar and set of keys. As fans rolled into the bar, Sirianni welcomed the crowd to what would be a night of the experimental though adept blending of vocals with high-pitched mixings on the keys and strumming melodies on the guitar.
Swing was next to bat. With a touch of sorcery, Swing used his dream-like set to cast fans once sipping beers and leaning on tables into silent, entranced listeners tranquil from hypnotic rhythms. He performed songs off his 2011 album Through a Fogged Glass like “Ghosts” and “Middle of the Night” which capture the hazy meaning of the album’s title.
The secret to Swing’s magic, he said, lies in the practice of looping.
“I do live cello looping,” Swing said. “I use several pedals on my cello. There’s the looping pedal — the main one, and the delay pedal — the second one.”
Those pedals record Swing’s music live and then repeat it throughout his songs to layer his sounds on the cello. The loop pedal is the primary melody-repeating device and the delay pedal spurts out recorded music late like an echo.
“Once I discovered looping I could be a one-man cello band” Swing laughed. Such was the case for his Café Nine set as he jammed on-stage alongside his synthesizer bandmate Jeff Gregerson in what could easily be mistaken for a many-manned orchestra.
Tiger also drew her musical charm from the looping of vocals and cello. She was not accompanied by a synthesizer like Swing but instead used her deft loop pedaling to craft layered instrumentals as the final performer of the night. Attributing the focus of her music to her vocals, she described her musical aesthetic as the desire “to create a soundscape.”
“That is the feeling I am trying to convey,” she said.
This was certainly the case as a crowd of loyal and local fans cheered upon her entrance to the stage, and after each song that followed.
The classics have not always resonated with Olive. For Olive, the cello is “wonderful and terrible.”
“It’s my soulmate,” she said. “But like any good marriage, there’s bumps in the road.”
She reminisced on the “steep learning curve” she endured when discovering how to mix the loop pedal with the cello. But with time, she came to adore her stringed partner. “It’s an absolutely beautiful instrument,” she said. “I so much love the sound of it.”
So what brought the cello to the hearts of both Olive Tiger, Wes Swing and the doors of Café Nine? The artists agreed that the love of the cello stems from its humanity.
“The cello is the instrument that resembles the human voice the most,” Tiger said.
“The whole human range,” added Swing, “the cello can cover it all!”