Sparklehorse feat. Fennesz + Dirty Three

The rhythm of breathing – slow, mute, invisible – marks the descent into the shadows. Ocean sirens and horse-headed creatures, gashes and silences. To reach the bottom of the soul one must cross a dark well: on a warm Milanese night, it can happen to meet Warren Ellis and Mark Linkous pointing the way for the journey.

First comes the time of catharsis, and it falls to Dirty Three to take the stage at Transilvania Live. Warren Ellis dominates the scene like a Dostoevskyan demon, risen from the underground with the mad audacity of one who has seen the gates of hell. His long, thinning hair and the smirk hidden beneath his thick beard give him the wild look of a faun with a possessed stare. Turning his back to the audience, he grips his violin with the movements of a shaman and leads the dirty trio in giving visceral form to his own instrumental visions.

The waves of the masterpiece “Ocean Songs” grow even stormier on “Backwards Voyager” and “Sea Above, Sky Below”, as Mick Turner's guitar and Jim White's drums tear at the skin, leaving Ellis's violin to pour salt into the wounds. Over the furious distortions of “Red”, the violin howls like an animal blinded by pain: a possessed Ellis rides the songs' relentless crescendos, unleashing his cynical, hallucinated sarcasm in the pauses between them. After nearly an hour, the pagan dance of “Some Summers They Drop Like Flys” closes out Dirty Three's appearance on a note of hypnotic anguish.

It's only then that the moment comes to look one's own heart of darkness in the eye: the flames give way to ash, the blood to scars. Mark Linkous seems to want to hide behind the fisherman's hat pulled down over his face and the thick frames of his glasses. In a dark T-shirt, cigarette between his lips, he sits before the microphone cradling his guitar. “It's A Wonderful Life” arrives like a message from beyond, carried only by vapours of keyboards and digital tremors, while sepia-toned images flicker in the background.

Sparklehorse materialise in an unexpected form, one that has little to do with the traditional idea of a band: accompanying Linkous is in fact the electronic duo The Dead Texan, made up of Greek visual artist Christina Vantzou on laptop and keyboards, and Adam Wiltzie of Stars Of The Lid on guitar. Linkous's voice, as ever filtered down to a metallic whisper, drifts with unreal slowness through a diaphanous, spectral dimension, suspended between wobbling arpeggios and dust clouds of Kranky sound. There's no room here for the sudden electric surges that make up the more abrasive, extroverted side of Sparklehorse: only the occasional drum machine accent steps in now and then to mark the beat with a bit more clarity.

From the funereal music box of “Sad & Beautiful World” to the narcotic slow motion of “Weird Sisters”, Sparklehorse's set is an implosion into a black hole that demands total empathy from the audience. It's not easy for the crowd to follow the invisible path of Linkous's ghosts, hampered by the venue's inadequate sound system and by the overall monochrome quality that binds together the rarefied succession of songs. And yet the searing melody of “Heart Of Darkness”, the organ carousel of “Painbirds” and the piano of “Sea Of Teeth” could belong to a sedated Eels or a Grandaddy in the depths of a depressive crisis. And when, on “Homecoming Queen”, a hushed choir rises timidly through the room to accompany Linkous's voice, even the most sceptical or distracted can't help a shiver of emotion.

The videos made by Christina Vantzou, projected onto a screen behind the band for the whole show, accompany Sparklehorse's music with clips from old films, sketched animations and nature-documentary-style footage. Adam Wiltzie, for his part, weaves his own minimal sonic carpets, switching between guitar and keyboards. Songs from the debut “Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot” dominate the set, while the latest album, “Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain”, contributes only a “Getting It Wrong” worthy of the dreamiest Air.

The much-anticipated guest of honour, Christian Fennesz, actually stays backstage for almost the entire show, appearing only for “Spirit Ditch”, which the Austrian artist helps wrap in a dreamlike shroud of hisses, whistles and glitch reverb.

And it's already time for the encores, with a mournful “Saint Mary” and the closing “Babies On The Sun”, on which Linkous sets aside his guitar to create noise and interference with a tape recorder, while Christina Vantzou accompanies him, singing through a kind of small toy megaphone.

Mr. Sparklehorse seems almost eager to flee after his brief, disorienting performance. He offers a quick wave, a half-smile. Then he vanishes into the darkness of his sad and beautiful world. There's no coming back from it unscathed.

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