Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Walking a Tightrope at Cat's Art MusikCircus

Michi Renoir came back to play at Cat's Art MusikCircus and each return warrants a report as he never seems to do the same thing twice.


So let's do a different kind of picture this time with Michi Renoir on the stage and his lady friend, Janeel Kharg, dancing to the right.

You can always tell when Michi has come on-stream as you will hear him laughing.  He has one hell of a lot of fun with this and that's part of the magic.  He was asking people for three letters.  No-one quite got it for a minute until he said he needed three chords to start.  What he was about to do is an old bit but the clever part isn't knowing about it, the clever part is making it work.

As soon as Michi had three chords, he started improvising around them and we were off and running.  It was classically Michi in that he put a huge beat behind it and was playing all manner of diverse voices off each other and the result was gorgeous.  That song went on for, oh, ten minutes or so and then he decided it was time for some more.  To a chorus of Bravo! from the audience, you could hear him laughing and he asked again for three chords.

And so it went through the show as he got suggestions of chords from a different person each time and then went on to improvise a song around them.  So that's one kind of tightrope:  go into a set without any plan at all and make up the entire thing!

Meanwhile, Reis and Aldo would play the next hour and Reis was watching from the Moon.


The Moon is quite a good place from which to watch music shows!


Reis and Aldo have the magical gift of being able to make their music sound fresh and live every single time.  Even if you have heard one of their songs before, it doesn't matter as it will be as good or better than it was the last time.  That may sound like hype but that's not my purpose at all as I'll tell you when things go wrong.  This isn't hype at all but rather marveling at their talent.


Reis always goes all-out with her outfits and her visual performance and here you can see it for yourself.  This is just one part of the show and she changes the visuals as it goes along.

In the old days of Second Life, the majority of performers were just playing box guitars and singing cover songs.  Today the quality and capability of performers has improved tremendously and even in the face of that Reis and Aldo stand apart.  Aldo is very much in-demand as a composer and you can hear that on Aldo's Web site.

(Ed:  What about the tightrope?)

I wasn't kidding.  Here is Yevette Nishi nearly taking a dive from up there!


No, no, no, it ain't easy!


For the first half of the show it was very much a performance of synthesizer with Aldo's extraordinary percussion and Reis' voice singing angelically over it.  I've marveled at that before and it's always for the same reason in that it doesn't seem like it should work but it sounds wonderful.

Here's a picture from their actual studio so you can see them doing it.


(Thanks to Mel for this one!)

Aldo uses real computers (i.e. Apple) and you can tell it from the logo on each one.  What the rest of the equipment may be is anybody's guess but the computers are relatively small next to the rest of the kit.

While Aldo's Web site is largely focused on his compositions, you can see news and pictures about Reis and Aldo together on Facebook.


Sine McMahon said she thought there was something in her lolly that was making her float away but I'm thinking it was the music.



The second half of the show started with "The Girl from Ipanema" and Reis singing with a highly sensual voice.  This kept building to the end of the show with "Embrace" in which she embraces the audience with her words, one by one, and the audience embraces right back.  It's a beautiful and sensual moment and that will have to hold everyone until May as they are going on tour.

For the next month, Reis and Aldo will be going to Grenoble to perform and then on to Paris to do some recording in a high-end studio.  Aldo has been working furiously on it as he wanted to write an hour of music for the sessions.  This sounds like a wonderfully romantic time coming very close to a Springtime in Paris for their recording.  We wish them the very best for this tour and will miss them until they return on May 24th.


And Cat ... walked the tighrope too!


Well, actually she was hanging from a rope from the ceiling and what a spectacular way to do it!

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