If you have listened to the excellent debut double album by Drink The Sea, you may have some sense of what awaits at their concerts, but description still falls short. The experience is intensely emotional and immersive. The music ebbs and flows, shifts through moods, textures, rhythms, traditions, cultures and geographies, reconciling contradictions as it goes. It is hypnotic and arresting, ethereal and danceable, serious and playful. Dynamics and colors weave constantly through the soundscapes, light and shade coexisting, often within the same passage. The performance unfolds in dialogue with Tad Fetting's films projected behind the band, yet it is never anchored to them. The music lives on its own terms, stretching, evolving and mutating in real time, like the sea itself that the audience has come to drink.
The range of instruments on stage hints at the breadth of the sound. Barrett Martin shifts between drums and vibraphone. Dr. Lisette Garcia moves through an array of percussion, chimes and kalimba. Alain Johannes handles a constellation of stringed instruments including slide guitar and electric oud. Duke Garwood channels the full spectrum of his vocal timbre alongside electric guitar and reeds. Abbey Blackwell grounds the low end on bass and acoustic double bass. Peter Buck anchors everything with his signature chiming Rickenbacker and warm acoustic textures, giving the music its skeletal framework of song.
The turnout was unfortunate, with La Maroquinerie only half full. Yet sometimes quality outweighs numbers, and everyone present leaned fully into their role as listener, just as each musician committed completely to shaping the sound. In that sense the distance between stage and floor dissolved. What emerged was something ritualistic, almost shamanic. Something that gathers people, that lifts the veil for a moment on the larger unknown. It has a simple name. It is music.
