“Does not my countenance resemble yours?“
Two years on from Kayo Dot‘s previous tour – celebrating twenty years of Choirs of the Eye – frontman and mastermind Toby Driver returned with a very different ensemble. This tour celebrated his solo work, with three albums over eight years, most recently Raven, I Know You Can Give Me Anything. To make it a double feature, he and his band also performed an Alora Crucible set, showcasing an instrumental side. Local support came in the form of Black Arrows‘ ritual folk music. The evening was an incredibly intimate affair at New River Studios, behind two strong double doors which completely insulated the attendees from the bustle of a warm spring night in London.
Words and photography by Dobbin T, contact Dobbin prior to any use.
Black Arrows
Driver‘s music has always been adjacent to “metal”. It is ostensively guitar music (with exceptions for Coffins on Io and Plastic House on Base of Sky), and carries a lot of swirling darkness. Yet it is too irreverent to sit comfortably alongside the rest of the genre, its lens focused on something else. In a very similar way, the dark folk music of the likes of Wardruna and Heilung carries an energy that is unmistakably heavy, yet has nothing to do with riffs or distortion. With an audience no doubts drawn in from his work in mauldin of the Well and Kayo Dot, focusing on adjacency was a smart from the promotor’s support slot (Chaos Theory). Black Arrows is the musical side of Aliki Karveli, a modern take on folk tradition. It comes at you through a mix of pedals, loops and microphones, yet is mostly sourced from simple percussion and voice. The vocal element carries much of the melody, occasionally delivered in English, but mostly in an indistinct and otherworldly language.
Karveli began by performing a smoke cleansing for the audience, giving the enclosed space an inviting ambiance with warm-spirited intent. She made an animated entrance, wielding percussive antlers and chanting towards the stage. She began her layered pieces, including “Bones of the Brave” based only on samples from her drum, and “Naruca” (excuse my guess on the spelling) which combined all her clinking and shaking gear into the busiest loop. A few pieces incorporated synthesiser, oozing a deep chord that prowled through the pieces for a hypnotic effect. The final piece used a shrill sound prayer bowl, which became a smooth drone once it was wrapped around in the loop. Throughout these pieces, her vocals went high and low, occasionally shrieking and always compelling. The sum of all this was an effective solo performance that took you somewhere else entirely. The aforementioned folk artists are ideal comparisons to Black Arrows, though they set a high bar for production style, so we await Karveli‘s studio releases with interest and patience.
Toby Driver & Alora Crucible
Every Driver album has aspects that compel and confound; it’s what makes his work so magnetic, especially for long time listeners. To put it one way, once you’ve come to understand an album or two, it can be hard to go back and see the genre as you once did. It’s very tempting to call the Toby Driver solo albums a sort of “acoustic” take on his prior work, but this isn’t quite true. It’s more welcoming and gentle, vocally focused and uses minimal timbres – hints of reverb, less-is-more drumwork, simple guitar tones and distant pad synths. Yet his unusual approach to composition and timing are abundant, making this music far from an “unplugged” form of another project.
Another essential aspect of his approach is not simply being weird, but being quietly weird. A complex rhythm is not presented to merely impress you. Its purpose unfolds gradually, woven into the story of each track. Complexity is never its own reward, and never more so than with these solo works. And unlike my frequent response to the music, the band was not at all confounded – their delivery was precise, serious, and sublime. The drums were especially stoic, providing less a beat to tap your feet to, and more a scaffold for Driver‘s vocals to define the tale. These vocals are a key part of the mix, with Driver‘s voice showing no sign of road wear despite this being a show near the end of a long tour. He hit some particularly swell highs on “Raven, I Know You Can Give Me Anything“, the closest his solo career has come to a rock banger.
The set included tracks from across the three records, including the re-record takes of They Are The Shield and the album that launched this sound, Madonnawhore. The set was a good way to highlight how significant this body of work has become. Whilst one could start anywhere, tracing the records from old to new feels like the most canonical experience, especially as Madonnawhore‘s sparse compositions will bring you into Driver‘s solo world in the most gracious way.
Following a brief intermission, the band switched formats and performed material from the Alora Crucible records. Much more than a simple addendum to the set, this was drum-free, even more loose than the prior material. A cursory listen would have you thinking that these instrumentals were largely improvised – far from it, these were once again meticulously detailed and exactly timed pieces, lasting up to ten minutes. If the prior set was about holding your breath, waiting for the gentle climax of each piece, this was the release; a sonic bath. Progressive music is always at risk of being self-important, too delighted that it pulls off what it considered as being “interesting enough”. The progressive ideas at play in Driver‘s music, now more than ever, are understated, present for narrative and atmospheric reasons – which ultimately is why we come to these genres in the first place.
Photography note: the venue lighting was fixed to a solid red, so I’ve taken the initiative to meet Driver‘s request for blue lighting by shifting the hue. Thanks very much to Chaos Theory for the camera access. On a personal note, my interest in gig photography was first sparked by watching Estie Joy shoot the 2023 Kayo Dot show (specifically Maud the Moth‘s set), so it was a delight to be able to document the show in this way.
You can catch Kayo Dot at the Friday of ArcTanGent this year.