Location: Cerkno / Gabrijel / Slovenia
Date: Saturday, 23.11.2019
The closing act of this year’s festival Keltika — its 24th edition in total — was a concert evening at the Cerkno bar Gabijel, featuring two seriously interesting and compelling acts: The Frictions, led by the iconic Chris Eckman, and young Slovenian singer-songwriter extraordinaire Martin Ramoveš with his backing band. An evening, in short, well worth spending heart and soul in Cerkno — a place we always find ourselves coming back to, time and again.
Bar Gabrijel drew a very respectable crowd. The venue officially holds up to 100 people, and while the turnout this time didn’t quite reach that number, a solid seventy-odd curious souls is still a fine achievement!
First up on stage was Martin Ramoveš. The Slovenian singer-songwriter brought his band along — bassist Marko Petrič and drummer Rok Skoliber, the latter also a member of the sensational Slovenian blues revivalists Bad Notion. Martin Ramoveš is an extraordinarily creative and sensitive artistic soul who skillfully combines his musical poetry with an innate gift for visual art, which is why his last three studio albums — »Nesojeni Kavboji« (2014), »Astronomi« (2017), and the current »Rob« (2019) — were all released alongside animated comic books. In stark contrast to his reserved, almost modest off-stage persona, Martin absolutely goes wild on stage — a total energy explosion! For this occasion, Tina Petrovčič also joined the crew as a backing vocalist. Over the course of a good hour, the wiry but hugely agile and lively Martin delivered an extraordinarily well-crafted, one-of-a-kind musical picture book, proving that he’s not only a supremely skilled vocalist who delivers his messages with tremendous heart and conviction, but also an excellent guitarist — something the public somewhat unfairly tends to forget. Martin makes heavy use of pedal effects on stage and stays faithful to the organic warmth of the original Telecaster sound — and truth be told, the Telecaster can produce a remarkable range of sonic effects if you know how to exploit the physics of the instrument itself, and Martin is extraordinarily adept at belting it out energetically while playing very, very good guitar at the same time. He frequently dives into a neat solo break too, and throughout the performance moves through a thoughtful palette of sonic colors that he uses to contrast and accentuate the message of each individual song. The current album »Rob« is built around settings of poetry by Ivan Rob and has drawn considerable attention, though Martin naturally dipped generously into the older era of his creative output as well. Martin Ramoveš has a powerful, signature singer-songwriter presence, but what’s particularly endearing is that he remains utterly unleashed when it comes to letting the decibels fly through his phrasing — to put it bluntly, he cranks it up full — which gives his distinctly homegrown musical character a clear rock ‘n’ roll edge, a streak of alternative rock jangle, and a pronounced blues undertone. A signature performance from a signature guy and his crew, then.
The Frictions, led by the legendary Chris Eckman, are a four-piece crew of seasoned veterans. Seattle musician Chris Eckman has been living in Ljubljana for two decades now, so it was no surprise that the well-known frontman of the cult band The Walkabouts — a refined sonic engineer, exceptional performer, arranger, and composer — was the main concert attraction of the evening. The Frictions released their second studio album, »Torch«, this year. About time, you might say. Alongside Chris, the lineup still includes bassist Tomi Popit and guitarist Bernard Kogovšek, both well-known faces from the cult Slovenian punk rock sensation Hic Et Nunc, while Luka Šalehar (Kamerad Krivatoff) holds down the drum kit. The Frictions are a byword for staggering mileage and experience. I’m talking about individuals, headed of course by the uniquely monolithic, charismatic figure that is Chris Eckman. They function as an incredibly tight, coherent unit, communicating and reading each other on stage with flawless ease — as if they’d been playing together intensely night after night, even though that’s not the case.
Their music embodies the musical roots of its individual members and their respective bands. Bare, stripped-down, unpolished yet pleasing — a thoroughly organic and natural guitar »jangle« that cuts through assertively and incisively, often navigating dissonant turns, where a fascination with the “less is more” axiom, in achieving flawless minimalist impact, carries out its rock ‘n’ roll mission with great distinction. The occasionally intensely sensitive Eckman makes no secret of his personal fascination with the great Neil Young, while the aesthetic of absolute minimalism invites comparisons to bands like Television and The Velvet Underground, with Richard Hell & The Voidoids also springing to mind. But The Frictions are, of course, above all else a completely self-contained musical entity that belongs heart and soul to the alternative rock underground. Chris rather surprised the crowd when he tackled two of his own compositions in the first half of the concert, both from the album »The Last Side Of The Mountain«, on which he set the poetry of Dane Zajc to music. He opened with the more intimate Ransom, followed by the lightly country-tinged, rhythmically »jagged« Stranger. Toward the end, both were joined by another Eckman original — the excellent Many Moons, released in 2013 on his solo album “Harney County”. The band played mostly original material from both released albums, and the concert moved along at a great pace as The Frictions rolled one track into the next without pause. Forceful rhythmic kinetics, a striking contrast between the punchy bass and the jangle of both guitars, with Chris and Bernard trading simple guitar licks back and forth through the passages. Bernard took the lead particularly in moments when Chris needed to focus on singing.
Chris Eckman and the crew delivered the first The Walkabouts track in the latter part of the concert. It was the scorching Stopping Off Place, with the closing Crime Story keeping it company at the tail end of the setlist. Before that, the band had played Townes Van Zandt’s Snake Mountain Blues. An excellent concert evening that was over far too soon. Eckman’s towering charisma, powerful compositions that get under your skin immediately in their stripped-down »drive« — sucking you in at once in the voracious rawness of a bare rock ‘n’ roll sermon — represent holy communion for every alternative rock enthusiast in search of art-punk eclecticism.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist MARTIN RAMOVEŠ:
1. Razpelo v gostilni
2. Sanjajo mi rože
3. Kristal čaroben
4. Konjiči
5. Emblem
6. Beton
7. Dan za podganje življenje
8. Prepozno za domotožje
9. Zemlja te ne rabi
10. Črv
11. Zgodbica
12. Sprememba klime
13. Zima na Metelkovoj
Setlist THE FRICTIONS:
1. 1976
2. Last Resort
3. Cut & Run
4. Give It Away
5. Ransom
6. Stranger
7. April First
8. Fever Gone
9. Torch
10. While The Getting Is Good
11. Many Moons
12. Stopping Off Place
13. Ghost Rider
14. Snake Mountain Blues
15. Gut Check
16. Crime Story
