Live Review: Szun Waves

Experiencing experimental electronic music in a live setting can often be a chin-stroking art gallery experience, where one has to work to bypass the clinical nature of the performance and find some emotional resonance in its wordless soundscapes. Placing the music of Szun Waves in the cavernous surrounds of a church, with the lofty ceilings giving space and volume for the music to move and wash over the audience, was a good start.

Szun Waves are electronic producer Luke Abbott and saxophonist Jack Wyllie of Portico (both from the UK) and Sydney drummer Laurence Pike of PVT, Jack Ladder's band The Dreamlanders and more. This combination and their collective work with digital and analogue instruments added another layer to the performance in that the audience had three distinct musicians to watch and focus on at any given time. Wyllie was the least animated of the three, standing in side profile and laying out winding, droning, atonal passages — some of which were digitally processed. His playing was so integrated into the sound of the music that it took the saxophone from a lead instrument to a textural and rhythmic one, its steady pulse at the core of Szun Waves. Abbott was the studious professor, massaging sine waves and busily manipulating his modular synth and laptop. His role was to provide the context and melodic framework for the pieces — the kosmische and electronic psychedelia. It was hard to take one's eyes off Pike and his endlessly inventive drumming. Utilising the full kit, percussion and some kind of harmonium, he was essentially the soloist, providing the movement, dynamics and physicality in the music.

Across 75 minutes the trio traversed avant-garde soundscapes that took in free jazz, post-rock and more. It was at times fully immersive and hypnotic, at other times poignant and dreamlike or fiery and dynamic. Perfectly paced and avoiding over-indulgence, it was an endlessly fascinating synthesis of organic and synthetic music made by men and machines.