Strings And Things
Killick Hinds blows a fuse at the Lilypad on Sunday, 16 June 2024.
Federico Balducci and Becca Pasley camp out in the Sonic Environment.
The Jamaica Plain Music Festival is coming!
Also known as the JP Music Fest. That’s got more zing.
It will be the 12th edition, coming your way in September, and each year is organized with tender love and care by a neighborhood community that loves live music and knows how to have a good time. This is a bottom-up affair, by and for the people, and it needs your support.
If you missed the annual Smell The Love fundraiser, you can still donate below!
If you missed the fundraiser show in March at the American Legion Hall with Rick Berlin, Colonel Broccoli and the Legion Basement Band, and Fantastic Trees, you can still donate below!
And if you didn’t make it out to Midway Cafe on June 4 in time to catch the annual classic fundraiser John Casey’s JP Bar Wars, you can still donate below!
Do your part to keep Jamaica Plain fresh AND funky.
Three musicians and three sets on Sunday. Balducci and Pasley, who also served as the night’s sound tech, paired up for a moody, cinematic opener. With Pasley providing wispy, liminal textures on the upright bass, Balducci improvised on the electric guitar.
It was a special sort of improvisation, assembled on the fly in response to an effects box with a built-in randomizer. Neither Pasley nor Balducci knew precisely what sort of flange, phase, delay, echo or otherwise the guitar signal would be sent through at any given moment.
The great unknown was always one step ahead, and the first set was one continuous take in an attempt to catch up.
Killick Hinds brought two instruments to the stage: a curious-looking guitar and a curious-looking electric cello. The latter blew a fuse at the start, so the experimental musician out of Athens, Georgia prepared the crowd for an all guitar set.
All guitar, plus a treasure chest of unconventional odds & ends to rub, scratch, tap, feather and whatever you like over the six strings. Eschewing the traditional guitar pick, Hinds tested the the various textures that could be produced by what looked like (but probably wasn’t) a small vibrator, a hinged slide, and enough thimbles to cover most of his digits on both hands for a tap-tap-tapping technique up and down the neck of the guitar.
Killick Hinds and Federico Balducci closed out the evening with a guitar duet that explored spacey regions at the edge of ambient and progressive jazz.
In other Lilypad news, the mural at stage right is starting to take shape…