MELBOURNE FESTIVAL
MUSIC ★★★★
Lisa Gerrard
Hamer Hall, October 19
The first time they came to hiss like pestilence and cackle like demons. The next time they bickered in lockstep stutters and harmonic drones. The fourth time they just stood there and bore witness to Lisa Gerrard's unearthly wail.
Arf Arf is a trio of … let's call them poets: Marisa Stirpe, Frank Lovece and Michael Buckley. Part comedy, part anxiety, their scurrying invented-language chatterings were gritty relief to the immense airborne sound sculptures that ultimately silenced them.
It was an unfair fight from the leading lady's grand entrance, swathed in voluminous bolts of regal cloth that hung deathly still from her perfectly poised frame.
Her musicians were attired as medieval courtesans, or maybe angels, offering cello, bamboo flute, congas and keys to the sonic cathedral where the high priestess channelled her message of love.
Yep, channelled. "Singing" doesn't describe the way Gerrard commands the air to behave, rumbling from the deep and soaring to astonishing contralto highs, ringing in endless caverns of reverb, somehow more revelation than invention.
As always she spoke almost exclusively in tongues to disarm logical thought; in her own words to "defy the prisons of judgment and academia". So we surrendered, as cascades of glorious, unthinkable melody took flight in mystical middle-eastern swirls and trance rhythms and lofty operatics suddenly cut with playful soul and gospel asides.
Sleep came at last in words we could literally understand: the earth mother's sublime murmur of comfort in a bickering and stuttering world. Funnily enough, we'd been feeling that all along.
The Age is a Melbourne Festival media partner.
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