VAUXHALL PLEASURE GARDENS – Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens – CD – CS434CD

The amazing vocals of British (but currently living in US) singer, performer and composer (as well as certified teacher of Deep Listening and – very important detail – former student of Pauline Oliveros -) Viv Conningham, ranging from a sort of possessed yodelling, almost hysterical flicks and other great stunts in the thrilling set of ritual-like percussions Stephan Flinn and the hits on glass objects by Miguel Frasconi (including the funny echoing/imitation of a sort of door bell in the first seconds of the track) opens this good outputs, whose title quotes the pleasure gardens (known as Vauxhall gardens, as such a fashion was started in the well-known area on the Southern bank of Thames river in London) where the rising bourgeoisie had fun (but also something else) in the more or less public areas of park of major cities in the eighteenth century (mainly in UK, Belgium, and France). In the beginning, they just offered a dancefloor, a space for small orchestras, but they gradually evolved into the core of less visible aspects of social life, and they gradually offered amenities such shops for frivolous items, private rooms, and masonic temples. I guess these three skilled performers were running these ideas in mind while staging the impressive settings they rendered. Viv’s vocals are really impressive, as she turned her voice into a key element of the scenography, sometimes by means of complete sentences – the hiccuping “don’t tell anyone” turning into a strangled clucking in the second untitled track is an amazing example – or by imitation of natural elements – can you perceive the wind she seems to imitate on the third thrilling track? -, but she doesn’t really need them to render vivid emotions and the way she matched her voice to the highly reverberated percussive sounds by Frasconi and the sometimes sinister entities by Flinn.

Vito Camarretta / Chain DLK