Darcy Spidle’s chik white jaw harp project/personality: harp as range, using all of the animal. chik white master move: jam out in a natural setting, integrate with landscape and weather, while holding open a discussion between outsider and outside. A chik white live set completes a different circuit, something between performer and audience, and perhaps contrasted against playing out to an open sky. The newest bit is on Chocolate Monk, and it’s a collection of live performances called their faces closed.
chik writes: “Their Faces Closed is a collection of live recordings from my fall 2017 cross-Canada tour. I didn’t sleep well and my thoughts were uneasy for much of the trip, yet the beauty of the country, especially the mountains out West, put me in a reverent and contemplative mood. I had a lot to work through each night on stage…”
Note the variety of forms and energies this working through takes; white’s contact mic’d throat blurs instrument and body, so that the harp’s bug zapper twinges play against a swamp of windpipe gasps, mouth plosives, quasi-utterances, and general straining sounds like the first fish to come on land. Sometimes, the harp barely features, serving on “new blood rags” for example as a faint tapping somewhere inside a rusted iron lung worthy wheeze.
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