Loren Connors and Alan Licht

(Cafe Oto. 6 Could 2023; assessment and drawings by Geoff Winston)

Fragile, magical, elusive – merest hints to explain avant guitarist Loren Connors’ mesmeric enjoying at Cafe Oto. However the long-term ravages of Parkinsons illness, Connors, who was helped and guided onto the stage, and wore a glowing, beaded jacket, maintained a twinkle in his eye and a understanding smile that transferred to 2 beautiful units at Cafe Oto. 

The primary was unaccompanied, perhaps twenty minutes or so, beginning out, unusually for Connors, with tentative strikes on the venue’s grand piano earlier than flipping over to a briefly meditative assertion on guitar. The second was with long-term collaborator, guitarist Alan Licht with whom a detailed and mysterious musical dialogue was woven, as they performed with area and dimensionality.

Connors’ fretted enjoying was summary, past the earthly soundscape, floating, dissolving, chasing sounds, working after notes, conserving them simply out of grasp. Delicate strums turned corners to seek out speeding cascades, uncooked scrapings and scratchings. From low-fi to crushing quantity, but held with shimmering, echoing tones that defied gravity and outlined the ethereal core of his imaginative and prescient.

In duo with Licht a path was carved with hovering chords, the briefest touches of nation and melody, and a way that each interior and outer areas had been being explored – peaceable, poignant, close to and distant, concurrently. Connors swivelled between keyboard and fretboard and close to the set’s climax was enjoying each on the identical time to tread uncompromisingly on materiality.

Outstanding enjoying, a real out-of-guitar-body expertise, music of nice magnificence in opposition to many odds, confounding the predictable.