Aleks/Eva...no...Magic Key

So I saw Ms Aleks under the new band name Magic Key at Whistler this Thursday 29, September. Whistler is such a small venue, it's easy to fill the bastard to capacity. It looked that way as I was looking for parking. There was a line in front. Normally that is discouraging enough to have me go home, but I did not put on my dwindling supply of rose oil perfume for nothing. The intimacy of the place is worth the wait. I make it inside and on time, yay! Magic Key....Aleks continues to play all new songs I think including one that she wrote yesterday. I say Aleks because the rest of the band was not on stage with her. That can be a drummer.... formally known as The Drummer and perhaps one or two other musicians. For the moment we still only have the CD May A Lightning Bolt Caress You. It's just 5 tracks and so you know there is more. Rarely does she do anything from that CD. They still point in the direction of what she is doing now, you still see a distance. They can barely speak about what is to come. The new songs are as dark and urgent and more elaborate with multiple layers of sound that still carry you in a rushing current. Well, that's with a full band. On stage that last Thursday of September Ms Aleks went solo. After this performance I put her in the same company as Fielded and Telepathe. Huh? So what if I've seen them all at Empty Bottle? Fielded, in it's most ambient never bores, too tense. Aleks in this solo show has this and so the comparison. As many times as I've seen her, it's always been with a full band. The idea of a solo show at Whistler is not the same thing as Empty Bottle. I think Aleks felt a little outside that comfort zone as she seemed shy to me at first. I always go on about how cool it is that Whistler is small, but sometimes that means you can hear people talk when you don't want to, and that can bother the artist sometimes.

To this day my father listens to the classical music station, and so since my childhood I acquired this high you get from listening to classical piano. There is a rawness, a sincerity that contemporary rock and pop lacked during periods of my childhood and classical piano often was this border-less refuge. There's a point. Yes, it relates to Aleks.....before I forget. Classical piano had this singular authority in how it articulated emotion. Just with the music you felt with the weight of a narrative. The composer knowing how to weave different scenarios for conflict, and breathless climax. There is some of that in Magic Key. And where some bands seek to put you in a state of innocent wonder like some sweet shoegaze does. Magic Key seems to warn about the margins of that wonder-land, colorful but dangerous.