With the arrival of Saturday, things calm down a bit at the Festival with only one event for each of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
Exultant A Cappella With Freeplay
Inside the Stockey Centre, the energy level ramped up several hundred percent with the high-stakes live show presented by the duo FreePlay. It's an intriguing name for a duo that presents an entire evening of what can only be described as "accompanied a cappella music" in more styles than you can shake a stick at.
"Accompanied" a cappella? Yes, it sounds like a total oxymoron -- but it isn't. Dylan Bell and Suba Sankaran create the most intricate accompaniments for their songs by imitating instrumental sounds with their voices, using a computer to capture the sounds and repeat them in a technique known as "live looping." In some numbers, the duo laid down as many as three or four "accompaniment" tracks and/or vocal tracks in this way before beginning the actual song. All these tracks were laid down seamlessly, with no pauses or stop-starts, and all created live, in real time, right before our eyes. Ears. You get the meaning.
Of course, this live looping technique requires songs with a regular repeating pattern to them, but there's no shortage of such songs in the world's pop culture realms. FreePlay accordingly took us on a musical tour of the world, with English, American, Brazilian, Latin, Canadian, Bollywood, even classical European all represented. With a repertoire like that, the instrumental and vocal sounds alike had to cover an incredibly broad and diverse range. For these incredibly diverse and imaginative artists, no problem.
It's hard to single out favourites in such a broad range of styles, but I found some numbers especially engaging -- Rockin' Robin, What's Going On, Sweet City Woman, Anitra's Dance, and River to name a few.
Judging by the enthusiastic applause, I wasn't the only person who found this entire show to be entertaining, indeed captivating. I'd be glad to hear FreePlay in live performance again any time!
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A footnote about the diversity of these artists: I've encountered their work before, in a context that could only be called -- to put it mildly -- wildly different. Here's a link to a review I published of a streamed concert in October 2020 which was curated by Sankaran and included music performed by her, and music composed by Bell. At the end of the review there is a link to the free concert video, which is still available to view.
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