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KiloWatts (a.k.a. Jamie Watts) was given an hour of airtime, and in return he gave us a quietly captivating, forward facing expression. Live On Star's End - 01.29.2023 (60'00") presents the complete live performance. His single sixty minute segment yielded an experience of sonic invention and immediacy available only in this late-night broadcast period. A mood and mind moving journey, the music drew on opposite sides of Watts' personality - only realizing itself in the act of playing. Finding peace in the steadily falling night, musician and audience followed a sprawling sleep narrative of sound and spirit. Within a chamber of reverberations and resonances subtle harmonic contrasts cast their suggestive spell. The atmosphere thickens and thins, light rises and falls, visions come and go, and somewhere out there on the timbral plain the artist is profoundly revealed. As an impressive sonic dexterity lulls listeners, we may try to identify a grand piano or clarinet in the mix, but nothing much more makes its way in from the conventional world. Next to drifting melodies and fluttering modulations we are lead to where shadows play, and beckoned further inside this substantial Ambient soundscape. A gently cascading power, triggered by a command of music and technology, mood, tone and atmosphere, enlivened this KiloWatts session. Behind all the electric-synthetic, warm circuitry lies a calm humanity animating this music - someone wondering about the path this music will take on its way through the brain. Works like Live On Star's End - 01.29.2023 propose a new native landscape, one which confronts time and its captors that are depleting our inner and outer realms. With this impressively secure rendition KiloWatts offered the late-night radio listeners everything from the promise of dawn to the dark poetry at the heart of mankind - a rare and restful space of possibility, dreaming and drifting through the cosmos.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 20 April 2023 |
