Aldous Harding

Right up until a few minutes before Aldous Harding appeared on the Monk's stage, I still had that curious uncertainty that the event might not actually happen, a kind of "Waiting for Godot" scenario perfectly in keeping with the elusive character of the New Zealand artist. I didn't know what to expect. Her records have been with me for years, and yet I've never quite managed to pin her down. Every listen seemed to slip away from a different definition: too oblique to be reduced to folk, too theatrical to inhabit the singer-songwriter register alone, too ironic to be trapped in the image of the enigmatic artist so often attributed to her. It's as though her music systematically resists any attempt to fix it into a definitive form.

The feeling doesn't change once she takes the stage: at 9:30pm she appears, in a baseball jacket, walking with a hesitant step, as though the stage carpet were made of quicksand, followed by a band accompanying her through the various legs of the tour. A few moments of silence to conjure up that "negative" space needed for her music to come into being, and then the minimal notes of "Train On The Island" break the quiet. With slow-motion tai-chi-like movements, Aldous sings a measured, vaguely childlike melody, with impressive control over phrasing and dynamics, while her body traces a gestural language that is minimal yet constantly shifting, made up of twists, sudden stiffenings, small shifts that seem to arise from the rhythmic structure of the songs rather than from any performative intent. Nothing feels decorative, nothing is left to chance.

With "I Ate The Most" and "One Stop" this scenic grammar becomes even more evident. Harding speaks very little, occasionally allowing herself no more than a greeting, forgoing any form of mediation with the audience. And yet there's no distance. Her presence is built through a rigorous expressive economy: silence becomes compositional material, pauses acquire a tension equal to that of the notes, every movement seems to extend the breath of the music. It's a minimal but absolutely perceptible theatricality, to the point that, at one moment, someone in the crowd asks the others to sit down so they can see her better. The songs alone don't exhaust the performance. Between one song and the next, in the silences and in the almost choreographic precision of her movements, Harding builds a second language, every bit as eloquent as the music.

Especially with the songs from her latest record, the impression is almost of witnessing the creative act still in progress rather than a finished form being delivered to the audience. It's intensely psychological music, and the fact that Harding does nothing to meet the audience halfway makes the experience all the more inscrutable. In this context, the tracks in the setlist drawn from earlier records, such as "Treasure", "Passion Babe" or "Leathery Whip", offer moments to catch one's breath, amid clearer melodies and a more relaxed delivery. But it's in the live rendering of the more recent compositions that the concert reaches its fullest expression. "What Am I Gonna Do" unfolds over a bare-bones rhythmic base, threaded with gorgeous harp flourishes, swinging between bravado and childlike insecurity, before closing on a hypnotic instrumental coda. The nocturnal "San Francisco" is even more striking, its Fender Rhodes touches forming a backdrop to a voice that shifts register with every line, moving through doubt, disillusionment and fragility.

It's no surprise, then, that the setlist favours this very repertoire, with as many as nine songs. Rather than alternating old and new, Harding builds a continuous flow, in which each song seems to exist in function of the next. The concert thus takes on the shape of a unified organism, governed by one and the same expressive tension, where even the excursions into the past don't interrupt the narrative but expand it. So "Fever", greeted with palpable enthusiasm, isn't perceived as an inevitable "classic" or a moment of crowd-pleasing gratification: instead, it ends up confirming the surprising continuity of a body of work that, while shifting shape from one record to the next, keeps its identity fully intact. The encore leaves the farewells to "Imagining My Man" and "Designer". Harding performs them without altering their emotional register, steps toward the front of the stage, bows discreetly and disappears. No return, no final gesture. A spare farewell, perfectly consistent with a performance that found in subtraction its most eloquent form.

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