August 12-18, 2004

musicpicks

Taurpis Tula

ROCK/EXPERIMENTAL

Examining drones and loops — from the epic cragginess of The Dream Academy and Terry Riley to its currency amongst laptop popsters and free-guitar types — has long been a passion. To create improvised, trance-driven music with subtlety, emotionalism, hymn-like melody and physicality is rare. Glasgow, Scotland's Taurpis Tula is that precious find. Guitarist/shortwave radio operator David Keenan (also the editor of the British mag The Wire) and vocalist/pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh Murray make a highly charged, soul-soothing music, borrowed and blue. Atop wave-generated ambience — an opera of muffled tones influenced by Holger Czukay's experiments in church music and oblique sampling — and haunted vocal reveries, they scratch, scrape and caress their guitars. This technique, adapted from the pounded-meat playing of Fred Frith, has become sensuous in their capable hands, resulting in the crying sounds of steel strings that any country cowpoke would envy.

Sun., Aug. 15, 8 p.m., $8, all ages, with Kiyo Butai and Wrist and Pistols, Vox Populi, 1315 Cherry St., fourth floor, 800-594-TIXX.

—A.D. Amorosi