Examiner Rates miRthkon: 5/5 Stars
by: Richard Warp – Berkeley Music Examiner
The first thing that you realize upon walking into this lovely theater and seeing the stage is that you are in for a production. Not a gig, nor even a ‘concert’, really, but a full-on theatrical happening. Instruments are strewn about like landfill, there is an assortment of odd-looking and yet tantalizingly intriguing props (we discover they are donnable hats) in a box behind the smorgasbord of clarinets and saxes, and looming at the back of the stage is a projection screen with, well, visual stuff on it.
This was billed as an evening-length affair, a pseudo-anarchic-multimedia-blowyourheadoff-extravaganzafest of epic proportions (to borrow and somewhat re-imagine from the band’s colorful promo vernacular). An uninterrupted hour and forty-five minutes of music from these six formidable talents is somewhat of an impressive feat, especially considering the gymnastic content of their music.
We open with a pummeling intro and jittery visuals, all hi-octane all the time, with saxes Jamison Smeltz and Carolyn Walter fairly glittering in their solo work, giving us a taste of the tightness of this band. Guitarist Wally Scharold flails and thrashes out edgy lines that twist the serpentine proggy harmonies this way and that, while drummer Matt Guggemos and and bass Matt Lebowsky connect the dots perfectly. Then there’s guitarist Rob Pumpelly. Surrounded, temple-like, by a shrine of electro-accoutrements (including a theremin), he does a fantastic job of making you think ‘wait, what?’ with his sonic mutterings and dreamlike textures.
So what about the visuals? So often with ‘multimedia’, there is the tendency to simply go nuts with the visuals, and let them pervade events to such an extent that they wash out the music, leaving you no choice but to stare vapidly at the screen. Not in this case – the interplay between the band and the (often hilarious) screen skits, all in some way an irreverent send-up of all things Californi-corporate, has clearly been very carefully thought out (and presumably agonized over to the nth degree at 3am).
A highlight of the audio-visual montage-making was the fantastically quasi-intelligible ‘Le Valdreaux du Marais’ – a series of opera segments penned by Scharold that were clearly going on about something. There may have been some aliens. And a sandpit. Yes, definitely a sandpit. It was completely enthralling and beautifully put together, even if it did feel like Kafka had decided to pick up an electric guitar and jam with David Lynch. Wonderful.
If there were to be one criticism of the whole evening, it is that it felt a little strange to be watching this sitting down in a theater and looking down on the performers. Indeed, perhaps the choice of venue explains why miRthkon were by no means playing to a full house. That being said, the evening felt full and festive, and the audience appreciative, even down to the standing ovation at the end of the set – a rare and somewhat incongruous, if thoroughly deserved, sight for a prog rock jazz-thrash outfit.
For those in the know, miRthkon means ‘the illusion of joy” – and for those in the know, this is a misnomer, for there is no illusion. This was pure joy.
