Instant Doodle
Instant Doodle Wilson Tsang and friends Z+, 12 Oil Street, North Point, January 2 The title is self-explanatory: no meticulous pre-production, no preposterous lighting effects, no avant-garde set pieces - just an hour of dreamy soundscapes that are as incidental as they are intentional.
As the audience filed in and made themselves comfortable, Tsang's bleeps and synth waves swam across the bare venue - a former godown - sweeping at times, spiky at others.
This was no conventional show - more a surrealist 'happening'. In addition to the seemingly random beats, a child was left to his own devices throughout, running amok, covering his ears with his tiny palms as soundscapes twisted and turned.
You could be forgiven for thinking you were the only onlooker, and everyone else part of the show.
These aside, Tsang's music had a raw and stunning power. The material was a fusion of musical genres, the ingredients so deliberately contorted that they took on new meanings - jazzy stabs intercept grandiose post-rock environs, while fuzzy synthesiser notes floated amid seas of gothic gloom.
All very impressive considering Tsang's instruments were a synthesiser and two dusters - of which the handles were used to perfection as percussion.
In tune with the music's detached schizophrenia, the lyrics were a masterful play of words testifying to existentialism. As in the design of the lyrics sheet supplied to the audience, the words flowed non-stop without punctuation or rest, like the rants of a madman suffering from city sickness and millennium blues.
It read like a mixture of William S Burroughs and Radiohead: 'Through the long night I saw my house finally filled with dead strangers/old and new we looked at each other/for an hour or two and found nearly nothing to say/except from a corner I heard the TV quietly whispering/and it said 'Have a nice day'.' To some, Tsang's wily meanderings may sound more like chaos than character. To those who make the effort to imagine, however, the opportunities of interpretation are endless.
