The first evening of performances for this year's OBEY Convention featured a wonderfully fluid jam from Toronto's Not the Wind, Not the Flag. Colin Fisher and Brandon Valdivia found a spiral path that began with a slow build of jittery clicks and squelches from their instrument pedals through more purely acoustic sax and drums free-jazz territory and back again. Their play had an easy drift, instrument to instrument without any obvious leader/follower dynamic, coming from good intuition and confidence in each other's choices.
Valdivia stayed busy, pressing microphone to drum head to add echo effects when not standing to deliver a noisy woodwind harmony to Fisher's sax skronk or eventual barbed guitar figures. Never sacrificing their momentum, the duo easily bridged the broken genre gaps between noise and jazz and rock modes of play, bringing the fire of inspiration into check with a nice, controlled burn.
Valdivia stayed busy, pressing microphone to drum head to add echo effects when not standing to deliver a noisy woodwind harmony to Fisher's sax skronk or eventual barbed guitar figures. Never sacrificing their momentum, the duo easily bridged the broken genre gaps between noise and jazz and rock modes of play, bringing the fire of inspiration into check with a nice, controlled burn.