On Repeat: Three Live Performances

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening (and, per below, viewing) from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Marcus Fischer documented a live solo set with electric guitar and dual reel-to-reel machines circulating a single, extended strand of recording tape. He uses the amps, and the space, and the unique qualities of his equipment to shape sound in real time. Pay particular attention to how he keeps the feedback under control.

▰  An ambient jazz performance by electric guitarist Eivind Aarset’s stellar double-drum band, recorded during their set on May 23, 2025, at Vilnius Mama Jazz Festival. The group features Audun Erlien, bass; Wetle Holte, percussion; and Erland Dahlen, percussion. I’ve found in recent years that I’m listening to fewer studio audio recordings and more live performance videos (which is the primary reason I pay for YouTube’s advertisement-free tier). In chamber music and in jazz especially, watching musicians who’ve played together for a long time is especially appealing and informative.

▰ I know next to nothing about choreography. The extent to which I’ve engaged with the topic is that I interviewed and researched several choreographers for my 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. This performance for two dancers caught my attention because the track they’re dancing to is “The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits” off The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint, by the great trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. The dancers are Sierra Drayton and Kaden Golding, performing a work by Ricky Ubeda, whom I believe to be the same person of that name who apparently won season 11 of So You Think You Can Dance in 2014, the same year the Akinmusire album came out. I don’t know how recent the piece of choreography itself is.