SPILL (GER/AUS)
CONCERT 4pm - 5pm
Recital Hall East. entry with festival pass.
Magda Mayas - piano & clavinet
Tony Buck - drums, cymbals & percussion
“Spill is the Berlin-based duo of Magda Mayas on piano and Tony Buck on drums. While we've all heard pianos played percussively, it's much rarer to hear someone play the drums with as much attention to melody as Buck. High-pitched bowed cymbals form harmonic sequences with brushed straw, wood on wood popping and bass thump drags. This duo isn't the kind where one person challenges and relents and waits for their partner to do the same. The friction they generate is instead the result of being so continuously and seamlessly intertwined that conflagrations of star-burning intensity naturally appear at every other twist. Mayas has a spectacularly gifted ear for timing, and translates it into her hands on the keys, giving Buck the freedom to create more and more unusual combinations of melody and rhythm. This duo is one of those rare groups where not only is the instrumentation perfectly matched, but the style with which the musicians approach their instruments is so personal that it's astonishing how well it all comes together." Andrew Choate - Facsimile Magazine
“The next night’s highlight was the duet by Tony Buck (percussion) and Magda Mayas (prepared piano). Harmonics seeped from all that they struck, scraped and wrung out producing a luscious ebb and flow of complex layers. Lost in the evocations of this piece, I imagined at one point that I was hearing the everyday sounds of a small town, notated and reproduced in musical form. Eyes closed, I lost track of instrument identity sometimes and had to look back at the stage to understand exactly what was creating these sounds so full of cadence, resonance and melody." - tony osborne: the now now festival 2011 - real time arts