6 July 2007 Attrition/HIgh Blue Star

This is Ms Laurie Reade from High Blue Star and Attrition.  Watching her perform is almost like watching an actor in a play, for me that is how I would begin to describe it.  When she goes into performance mode it's as if she goes into character.  That character then goes mental on stage like in her High Blue Star performance.  Expressions storm through Laurie like she's enjoying an exorcism, or fighting one off.  Her eyes role up and her arms flail about.  The id encounters no speed bump.  In the absence of a scripted scene where one needs a story to explain the state of a character, we have Laurie ranting about.  Oh, and she has the voice of an opera star.  It's far more than just a live concert.  It's experimental industrial theatre.  Ms Laurie puts a visual stamp on the music you will eventually hear in your car, or getting baked at your cousin's apartment.  A lot of the theatre comes from Laurie's performance, and the range of emotion and character that she displays.  A young opera star performing a role, and Iggy Pop in a single performer.  But it's also the experimental sounding music, it was atmospheric at times but it was always something to dance to.  And so you only get a real High Blue Star experience live.  On CD it is but one part.    

  When she is singing for Attrition it's this brooding intense, thinly veiled energy.  Different performances, different characters.  I remember seeing Attrition before Laurie joined.  And it's a totally different thing now.  Laurie here continues  her operatic expressions, not just the voice.  And she combines all that with a kind of robotic dancing.  

   It made me think about the differences in the bands that she plays in.   You know how Johnny Depp just totally owns every performance he does, yet every person he plays so vastly different, save for a few quirks in them that only he can flesh out.  It's the same for me with Ms Laurie.   In High Blue Star mode, she was bouncing all over the place.  It was hard to get a good shot of her.  It just occurred to me that I have not even mentioned the music.  I like it when industrial bands play all their instruments live like a regular rock band.  I saw a guitarist, (could have been a bass player that I saw instead).  There were other musicians on stage with her.  Calling High Blue Star industrial is just a beginning.  It struck me as more willfully mysterious than say I:Scintilla (who I saw perform for the first time after them).  

I have a lot of pictures and video stored up in memory cards, stuff that needs to be said, thoughts that need to be expressed that were contained in those cards.  Perhaps all that is said her in this blog is a chemistry of state of mind when present in these events, what happened , my subjectivity.  

Zig