Niobe

Second live set in the Veneto region in just over three months for Yvonne Cornelius, aka Niobe. While the first, on December 5, 2009 at the Flat in Mestre, was a solid and highly enjoyable piece of entertainment, the second, on March 28 at Pixelle in Padua (one of Padua's offshoots of Pulse Data, alongside Stalker, Mela di Newton and Summer Student Festival), took on the character of a genuine stylistic exploration.

This was confirmed by the absence of the electronic assistant on the decks, who had accompanied her exuberant performances months earlier. Alone with mixer, distortion pedals, CD player and double microphone, Niobe manages to probe, perhaps even more sharply, the many facets of her artistic persona.

Her voice is one of the most modulated around, almost volatile and malleable. Though rarely acrobatic or showy, it's nonetheless haunted by soul, vocalese, dixieland, and at times edges close to the asthmatic high notes of Beth Gibbons, as geometric as it is expansive.

Her repertoire of backing tracks encompasses a vast range of ingredients with which the artist crafts unreleased songs destined to make up the corpus of her forthcoming album, from a preparatory version of "Brazil" to a whole catalogue of Cuban dances, dream-pop disturbances, exotic rhythms and retro cadences (vaudeville skits, ragtime, Broadway music-hall) dished out with almost obsessive intensity.

Among the already-released songs, the classics were left out in favor of digging deeper into those drawn from "Blackbird's Echo", and the artist handles them with the mastery of a true officiant. At her most demonic, Niobe fires up distortion pedals and unleashes electronic effects, while her voice crackles and warps, in a chic rendition of Don Van Vliet.

Her stage presence confirms her as an elusive figure, made up of hinted-at movements and barely sketched dance steps. In the end, it's a rationed, somewhat snobbish kind of charisma, throwing off gestures rooted in a phantasmagorical physicality — far more emotional and magnetic (with no interest whatsoever in courting the audience's amazement) than deliberately choreographed.

Taken as a whole, Ivonne comes across as a sprite playing along the borderline between reinterpreting old material and singer-songwriter music that makes structure its strength, oblivious to convoluted genre-hybridizing, intellectual posturing and hollow introspective urges.

(Photo contributions from camcorder footage)

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