Plastic Sax’s rave review of Second Nature Ensemble’s June performance at Westport Coffee House seems subdued compared to another observer’s analysis of the event that references Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. As the cliché has it, hold my beer.
A concert including two of the same musicians- Seth Davis (electronics and guitar) and Evan Verploegh (drums)- at Charlotte Street Foundation on July 14 inspires additional purple prose. Abetted by Kyle Hutchins (saxophones) and Aaron Osborne (bass), Davis and Verploegh played two sets of sinister improvised music for about 20 attentive listeners.
The opening portion of the first set evoked a whale in distress before the liquid atmosphere gave way to deep space. A glitchy segment sounded as if a denizen of a distant planet was monitoring a decades-old radio broadcast of a Duke Ellington Orchestra concert. The final salvo could have been the soundtrack for a disaster film about an accident at a gene-editing laboratory.
The second set was a two-part guitar-based freakout. A jam in the vein of Mary Halvorson and Susan Alcorn gradually morphed into (Robert) frippery. The veracity of these flights of fancy can be checked against video documentation of the first and second sets. Cross-referencing texts by Nietzsche and Sartre is optional.