At the show, inBOIL gradually magnify a small, often overlooked sound into a turbulent, thunderous sonic tsunami. I barely made it into the Living Room to catch the beginning of inBOIL's set, a hushed jingling of car keys. After a brief silence, what sounded like a scraping brick emerged so slowly, so quietly, that the surrounding sounds--the hum of the lights, a creaking chair, the person breathing next to me--became eerily present.
Gradually swathed in upsurging super-saturated slapback echo, the scraping tone elongated into gently pulsing feedback that soon receded into a cloud of hiss. The residual pulsations got louder, thrumming like a disciplined army of cicadas. Above me, picture frames rattled. After a startling feedback spike and a fleeting tidbit of hiss, the set concluded with a leprous elephant's trumpeting call being compressed and encrypted into twinkling high frequency bursts for an interstellar transmission.
Alto saxophonist Wally Shoup, cellist Brent Arnold, and percussionist Greg Campbell commemorated 10 years of Project W with a short but scorching set at Lo_Fi. Shoup brings the blues into unstructured, freely improvised music. There's no trace of the now-hackneyed 12-bar formula; Shoup's feisty saxophone exclaims, moans, and sighs when the time is right. Arnold's forceful cello pizzicati and slashing bow strokes coupled with Campbell's handsomely dexterous drumming seemed to propel Shoup, who scurried, squalled, smoldered, and blazed amid a poetic torrent of sound. CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI
