Award-winning composer, DJ, and turntablist, Shiva Feshareki took to the stage of the Lowry’s Quays Theatre and announced, “I’ve never played in a theatre before.” Feshareki’s first performance in a theatre was also the first performance she has done with the accompanying visuals of Helena Hamilton, projected on a screen at the back of the stage. At the front of the stage was Feshareki’s turntables and electronic effects equipment. Over the next fifty or so minutes, Feshareki would proceed to create a shifting, at times minimalist soundscape, deconstructing some recognisable pop songs into something else altogether different.
To try and place Feshareki’s work in some form of musical context, the performance at the Lowry certainly owed a little to Lou Reed’s infamous 1975 album Metal Machine Music. Reed’s album was a double album of guitar feedback which Reed had manipulated and mixed at varying speeds resulting in work which was for the most part a punishing listen but, with some close attention, revealed repeated melodies buried within the surrounding wall of noise. While Feshareki’s performance was not as extreme as Reed’s work (which was recorded as a joke in reaction to the more commercial, pop music of his Sally Can’t Dance album), it did certainly contain the element of creating melodies within repeated noises. Likewise, Feshareki’s performance owed much to the turntable skills of hip-hop artists such as Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy’s Terminator X, and DJ Shadow, who took samples from existing songs and reworked and blended them into new works, as well as adding a dash of inspiration from the 1981 collaborative album from Brian Eno and David Byrne (of Talking Heads) My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts.
As Feshareki began, sounds from the records on her turntable rang out, at times sounding like a sonar radar, at other times sounds from the vocals on the records where distorted into noises, played backwards, or looped around. What made these sonic excursions even more thrilling was in the moments when Feshareki would let small sections run uninterrupted and the audience could clearly make out that what they had just heard came from Stevie Wonder’s Another Star or Madonna’s Like A Prayer. Realising that the clipped, repeated staccato sounds were extrapolated from Wonder’s “la la la”’s or the synthesiser beats of the chorus of Madonna’s pop classic, certainly brought home how skilled Feshareki’s sonic manipulations and turntabling was, especially as she was clearly getting into her stride as the performance went on, bobbing her head up and down.
The visuals from Hamilton made the performance even more striking as they altered on the screen in time to Feshareki’s turntabling and looping providing a visual comparison to the aural experimentation: the visuals broke up, rearranged themselves, switched from images taken from filmed footage and computer-generated shapes and constructs. As the sounds broke up into looped noises, so did the visual images on the screen. Some of the visuals had a MC Escher quality to them which echoed the musical performances use of repetition and loops of sounds.
Feshareki’s performance was undoubtedly on the more avant-garde side of turntabling and electronic manipulation and would not be suitable for anyone suffering from tinnitus. While her work will not appeal to everyone, there is still much to find of interest within the fragments of sound and loops for those prepared to go in to one of her performances with open ears and minds. An astonishing, fascinating, and at times sonically turbulent experience.
Reviewer - Andrew Marsden
on - 24/3/19
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