SOUNDTRACK: TASH SULTANA-Tiny Desk Concert #610 (April 7, 2017).
Tash Sultana is a force of nature. I’d heard her song “Jungle” a bunch of times on the radio before seeing this. I thought it was interesting and kind of catchy with some cool guitar work. But it never occurred to me that Sultana was doing the whole thing BY HERSELF!
For this Tiny Desk, she recreates that song (and two others) entirely by herself with loops and loops and effects and all kinds of good stuff.
As “Jungle” opens, Tash plays the guitar chords and loops them. And then she plays the opening riff. And loops it. And then more riffs on top and loops them. She creates a huge sound for about a minute and a half. Then when all that sounds good, she starts playing the drum machine.
It’s so much fum watching her dance around her little area (barefoot, mind you) tapping pedals and setting effects on and off. And when she starts soloing, she’s got a perpetually big smile on her face just really enjoying all of the work she;s doing and the sounds she’s making.
She finally starts singing and she’s got two microphones–the chorus gets the second microphone which has a processor and echo to totally change her sounds.
And then towards the end of the song she starts messing around with a solo and has all kinds of effects at hand for whichever part of the solo she’s doing, including a wild, ass-kicking, classic-rock style solo that all mellows out into sweetly echoed section and a gentle guitar ending. The song itself isn’t that complicated, but holy cow she packs so much into its 7 minutes.
So who the hell is Tash Sultana?
This 21-year-old Maltese-Australian got a guitar from her grandfather when she was three, she says, and has played it every day since. It’s astonishing to watch Sultana’s fluidity on her instrument, like a natural extension of her body. (She also plays bass, saxophone, trumpet, flute and more, but kept it “simple” at the Tiny Desk.) I thought I had a lot of energy — watching her bounce from guitar to drum machine to two separate microphones — and then hopping barefoot from looping pedal to effect pedal as she builds her songs was exhilarating and exhausting.
She says she wrote “Notion” when she was having a difficult time with myself… and someone else.
It opens with that her singing “oohs” into that processed mic and it sounds otherworldly. And then again she jumps around from guitar to drum machine looping more and more. Although it’s interesting that most of the song stays kind of mellow. Her melody is very pretty and her voice is great. The only trouble is it’s kind of hard to understand what she;s singing. But its fun that she’s singing some of the song without playing anything else (it’s all being looped) and how intensely she sings it.
After playing the song for some 9 minutes, she hits some pedals and the just takes off on a wailing guitar solo.
“Blackbird” is very different–it’s all played on acoustic guitar. There’s no looping. She says she wrote this while in New Zealand. She was wandering and got lost in a cave.
But acoustic doesn’t mean simple folk song. She plays some great riffs with her right hand while hammering-on with her left hand. The part around 19:15 is just fascinating to watch. She must have an alternate tuning as well because when she plays opens strings it sounds great (and it’s 12 string as well, so it sounds even more full).
After singing a few verses she plays an incredibly fast section.
There’s just so much going on, and I have no idea if all of that is part of the songs or if she’s just going off into her own world.
I was so impressed by this set that I just got tickets to her when she comes to the area in a few weeks.
[READ: January 31, 2017] “Mo Willems’s Funny Failures”
I have never really written about Mo Willems, even though my family loves his books (I’ve even got an autographed copy of one of them).
The Piggy and Gerald books are wonderful first readers (and are fun for adults too) and Pigeon is the best bad-tempered character around.
Since I like Rivka Galchen and post about just about everything she writes, I wanted to include this here. It is a biographical essay based on a few interviews she had with Willems. (more…)
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