Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Rog / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 18.09.2009
Attendance: 40
Ticket price: €5.00
Some Fridays just come off the hinges, and total switch-off rules. Not chaos, not confusion, just your brain clocking out while you unhitch and give yourself over to pure fun. Eleven had come and gone, it was night, no two ways about it, and Hala Tivoli had shooed us out into the cold, since everything there wraps up by 11 PM. Yep. With a head thoroughly pickled from The Drinkers gig, where booze-fueled debauchery is mandatory, I was in no rush to get home, least of all after Slovenia had smacked Croatia at the basketball championship in Poland and Aunt Tereza was relentlessly pushing for Rog.
For the first time in Rog’s short career, you actually had to pay to get in. But it was worth it. Instead of a ticket, you got an EP by If If Between, the band playing that night. Why it was worth it, more on that below. I was more curious about the inside of the freshly opened club, whose attitude is a direct challenge to what “Metelkova” has to offer. The stage also looks way classier, wider and deeper than any of Metelkova’s four venues. As I slink into the club room, the extravagant French performers If If Between are already roaring away on stage. Great sound, the air full of electricity and rolling energy. Four people, four pairs of glasses, decadent outfits. And a female vocalist. The quartet is Nolwenn Donnet – Descartes (vocals), Kevin Laval (guitar), Benjamin Nogaret (drums) and Christophe Ponsolle (bass). The girl, who else, was the center of attention. But she was no bubble-headed mascara doll, one of those plastic-coated bimbos the tabloids in Slovenia are full of. She was a woman in build and in voice, the way it should be. What the singer pulled out of herself that night is hard to believe unless you hear it with your own ears.
The quartet plays a peculiarly sharp-cut style that sounds like no other band. They’re special, they’re different, they’re unhinged right down to the foundations. They play almost mathematically in the way they stack motifs, seem to work in a trance, yet stay on high alert the whole time, locked in with razor focus on their own thing. There are metal elements, even double bass pedal, furious riffing, and an adventurous, exploratory rhythm section that communicates brilliantly and actually creates an extremely dynamic flow, which is what all of If If Between’s unpredictability and shock factor rests on. Zappa would be proud! Hunting for notes between the notes, in the style of the greatest gurus of musical oddball math of our time, the kind of thing someone like Robert Fripp (King Crimson) would gladly lend an ear to, especially in the songs Girls or Someone is Playing, which the band played in the middle of the set. These motifs sit on repeated rhythmic turnarounds so tangled they demand serious presence of mind. And it all makes sense and breathes an absolutely alternative spirit, one that carves out plenty of room through its musical confession to exist and grow undisturbed under a free sun.
If If Between are dark, apocalyptic, spooky, and they scare the hell out of everyone with their artistry! All through this mix, where the rhythms range from pure jazzy weaving to funk dance impulses and a rolling noisiness that fits right in with metal, which likes to sneak into the basic motifs that really do flow into one another “by heart” and mathematically, there’s even the odd ethnic motif. That’s the reminder that If If Between are French. Singer Nolwenn Donnet – Descartes is of course the central figure. The girl can produce totally uncontrolled sounds, and her use of vocal cord articulation with a closed mouth is especially interesting: she presses the microphone against her throat and it works as a kind of theremin, flooding the airwaves with the weirdest space-shaped squeals, moans, echoes and whatnot… Nolwenn also has no trouble imitating a neighing horse or doing death metal growls, but what comes easiest to her is, of course, normal singing, in which she once again proves her capacity for unbelievable vocal acrobatics, which is one more element of the total spontaneity and shock factor of If If Between. One moment you hear The Cranberries in Nolwenn’s voice, the next Bjork. Annoyingly crazy. A positive kind of annoying? Why not. The vocals are the main carrier of the punk touches in the expression, along with the way she improvises, thanks to the sheer energy she radiates.
The band entertained the roughly 40 people present for an hour and 20 minutes on stage and wrapped up the show with the most wound-up song of the night, played as an encore: Road Racer Suck’in, where you could hear the band’s unbelievable stage chemistry one last time, with a fantastic contrast between the bass “slapping”, wildly fractured rhythmic turns, riff eruptions and, of course, completely stripped-bare vocal improvisation. A perfect storm in Rog!
It happens often that the best moments come when you expect nothing at all and just show up curious. One of those happened this night in Rog, the new temple of alternative music, which I hope will keep up this tradition in the future and lure even more music gourmets to its rooms, the kind who only treat their ears to the best! If If Between are hot, they’re putting out their studio debut in January, and maybe they’ll sneak back to our parts before long. When they do, keep your eyes peeled too, so you don’t (again) miss such a colorful musical phenomenon by accident. Sobering up after The Drinkers was more than effective!
photos: Tereza Vuk & Aleš Podbrežnik
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