Stardust we are… Nearly Human, Perhaps Contraption, Vault Festival

We are like butterflies that flutter for a day and think it is forever…

Jimi Hendrix was so impressed having seen the band Chicago in 1969 that he said their horn section played like it was a single set of lungs. Well, from where I was sat tonight, Perhaps Contraption also have two collective lungs, along with a single-minded purpose - a powerfully syncopated mix of movement, words and something like a Vulcan musical mind-meld. This band is so tight and so joyously in tune with each other, their subject and their hugely appreciative audience that you cannot fail to move with them.

I’d seen the band before playing, amongst other things, the most outrageously arranged version of Radiohead’s National Anthem, all perfect be-bop phrasing mixed with a muscularity that one sensed owed at least something to the early jazz-prog of Robert Wyatt Soft Machine, Caravan and King Crimson – as confirmed by Artistic Director also flautist/vocalist/guitarist/tenor sax and contact juggler, Christo Squier after the show. But this is truly progressive music that has modern sensibilities and a desire to make something different.

It’s music as forward-thinking as Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist credited with helping to inspire this cosmic take on life, the universe and the sousaphone… No one else sounds quite like Perhaps Contraption and it’s hard to see many other bands taking on the subject of physics for a stage show that is also being turned into a concept album and, personally, I hope it’s a double and on vinyl too.

The performance starts, appropriately enough with Iain McDonald appearing like a Sousaphone Spaceman and explaining how we’re all so remarkably lucky and unlikely to be here. This is more than just a reference to the irregularity of Southern Rail services – the Vault festival is based in the cavernous underbelly of Waterloo Station, literally and underground festival… but the fact that our atoms, the enamel in our teeth, the nitrate in our digestive tract and the oxygen in our lungs has all come from the heart of stars long ago.

If ever there was a time to think about Man’s insignificance in the vast improbabilities of space, now is surely it. A repeated refrain from the band and the recorded narrators is that extinction is the norm and that survival is the exception and we simply shouldn’t take that for granted.

There are as many molecules in a single cell of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy...

Not that the band are giving us a PC lecture, they are simply celebrating our improbability and urging us to move onwards. Their songs have hooks to burn and they play with such movement and feeling with instruments rarely associated with dance. So it is that even glockenspiel and vibraphonist Amy Kelly plays on the move whilst bass trombonist Yusuf Narcin duels with Mickey McMillan and his trade-mark orange trombone. The King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman’s band may have swung but these guys dance and play as one courtesy of movement direction from Christa Harris and Lucy Ridley.

There so much light and dynamic shade in the group’s music helped by the range of instruments with Jin Theriault’s soprano sax a relatively recent introduction and also a variety of lead vocalists from Christo and Mickey’s masculine lines to tenor sax player Stephanie Legg and French horn player Letty Stott. The band sing close harmonies crowded forward on the playing are while the soloists hold back or mount the steps in the aisles; every inch of the theatrical space is used like a contrapuntal planetarium.

The sound is anchored by the combination of Iain’s bass voice and his sousaphone along with Riccardo Castellani’s drums; on some gigs the band feature mobile drums on a pram but here he has too much kit to wonder far.

The band provided a chart showing how the songs progress from the nature of our atomic particles – The person you love is 72.8% water… so drink them deep! – through a consideration of our place in this universe to the ultimate need to continue our particle journey far into space. A someone who grew up on scientist visionaries like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke as well as Carl Sagan it is music of the spheres to my eager ears. Science fiction was never about escape it was about hope and now more than ever we need more of that.

IThankYouTheatre Rating: ***** This is vibrant, imaginative and playful performance with a hybrid of happy contemplative drama with lung-busting, body-impacting sound! I’m going back to see it again and I’m taking as many of my friends and family whose particles aren’t nailed to the ground.

We are, each of us, a little universe.

Nearly Human plays at the Vault Festival until this Sunday 23^rd February – I urge you to get on quick and book tickets now. Details on the festival website!

You can also follow developments from the band on their website and here’s the link to that splendid version of National Anthem… try getting that out of your head!

More details of the band and their previous works on the PC website here.