The fog curls slowly upwards towards the dome of the hall at Berlin’s Silent Green. It is dark. Only a single cone of light illuminates the stage. There, withdrawn into the shadows, stands Maria Somerville with her bassist and drummer. She appears as a motionless silhouette, the only movement the unceasing, hypnotic striking of her electric guitar.
You can just about make out that the Irish musician is wearing a down jacket with a fur collar, her black hair falling across her face. All the more striking, then, is the effect of her voice. When Maria Somerville sings, it is gripping. At times it is little more than a whisper; at others, her voice nearly disappears into the wash of distorted shoegaze, post-punk and ambient.
While her current studio album Luster is a work of soft, delicate textures, the audience this evening is met with unexpected force and volume. The sound is rough, often distorted. Chords appear as veils – a fabric rising and falling in waves, layer upon layer placed on top of one another. There is a post-punk grain to it, something of grunge and noise rock too, joined by the heavy bass and forceful drumming.
Between these layers, warm, bright passages open up like flashes of light in the dark before being overtaken by the next wave of volume. These are the brief moments in which one senses the lightness that supposedly characterises Somerville’s music. Yet little of it remains on this evening. Some of the songs are hardly recognisable. A pity, since it is precisely these finely placed contours and facets that make Luster so compelling and versatile.
The band’s sound is massive – a controlled, aggressive and atmospheric roar.
And yet these reinterpretations of the songs hold the audience’s attention. Almost motionless, it absorbs every second of the performance. In this particular climate, Somerville’s voice does not function as a narrator but as a clear stylistic device. It often lingers in the reverb while fragments of words repeatedly dissolve. Precisely because so much arrives only as syllables, breath and distant melody, the body of the band feels all the more massive – a controlled, aggressive and atmospheric drone.
Contact with the audience remains sporadic. There is a brief introduction of the band and a short shout-out to the support act Nashpaints – aka Finn Carraher McDonald, who was also involved in the production of Luster and is a member of the band Princ€ss – whose set earlier had unfolded vague, timeless textures with an impressively supple pop echo.
All of this fits her artistic position while also expanding it. The concert stands alongside Luster like a second reading of the same idea: mysticism and reality not as opposites, but as overlapping states. On record, one discovers that it is possible to lose oneself among all these facets. Live, things are different. Here, a sense of physicality takes hold – wrapped in the reverb of the vocals and the ever-surging distorted waves of guitar, one finds form.
