I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: UNTIL THE RIBBON BREAKS-Tiny Desk Concert #420 (February 17, 2015).

I’d never heard of Until the Ribbon breaks–a synth band from Wales–before this show.

It’s hard to imagine what their recorded songs sound like (this is evidently really stripped down).  The notes say that in order to achieve this sound, the solution involved a spaghetti strainer, a paint bucket and an acoustic guitar.  And as the show starts you can see the drummer putting a spaghetti strainer down and laying some paint buckets around.

They play four songs and they are all good.  They are fine.  “2025,” “Pressure” “Until the Ribbon Breaks,” and “Spark.”  In this stripped down form there’s really not that much too them, but they’re not bad at all. The lyrics are topical and current about relationships and the like.

I like that the drummer plays guitar instead of drums on the  third song (which is quite mellow).   The final song, “Speak” is my favorite–it is quite catchy with great backing vocals. You can watch the Tiny Desk here.

I just checked two of their recordings and they are very electronic–very dancey and moody.  I like the acoustic stripped down version of “Sparks” better, but the electronic aspects of “Pressure” make it a little more interesting than the stripped version.

[READ: January 5, 2015] An Almost Perfect Thing

This is a fascinating play told in a fascinating way.

There are three people in the play: Greg, Chloe and Mathew.

Six years earlier, Greg (who is a journalist) wrote a story about Chloe, a girl who went missing.  Now, six years later, Chloe is free from her captor but, rather than go to the police, she hunts down Greg and offers to give him an exclusive story about what happened to her.

Greg is excited about the prospect (even if he does think she should go to the police).  But she tells him that she won’t reveal her captor or give any details, she just wants to relate the experience to him.  He imagines that it could be a very successful book, but she says no, it must be installments in the paper.

We quickly learn (the way the play is devised) that Mathew is the person responsible for her kidnapping.

What is interesting about the way the play is written is that the three characters’ lines overlap constantly with Chloe talking to them or to us (I imagine it would be clearer and certainly more impactful seeing it performed). But what is even more interesting is that the way Chloe describes to Greg what happened seems to contradict what we see as her experience with Mathew.

But then again, we don’t really know if the parts with Mathew are even real.  She keeps referring to her “dad” and how she doesn’t want to upset him.  And yet, in the Mathew scenes he asks her to call him “dad.”  And in fact, it sounds like Mathew is actually not so much of a kidnapper as just a psychologically abusive boyfriend.  Could she have been safe all along?

She reveals a time when she could have escaped but didn’t.  And that when Mathew finds out she  could have escaped, he threatens to hurt himself not her.

But as the stories overlap, it almost seems as if Greg and Chloe are developing the same kind of relationship that Chloe and Mathew had.  That Chloe is introducing elements form what happened to her in the way she is able to manipulate Greg.

Of course as the story gets published both Chloe and Greg become famous, but they are also scrutinized for not helping the police to capture Mathew.  Why is she protecting him?