Brian Slattery Photo
Sam Moth.
Guitarist Kryssi Battalene, going under the name Kryssi B for a solo set at Never Ending Books, thanked everyone for coming out on a Monday night. But she spoke through a tremolo effect, making her voice distant, submerged, the consonants blurring together.
With the house lights dimmed, it was an apt beginning for a night of music that often swelled and floated in surprising yet soothing ways, as four acts ranging from folk to electronic music — Battalene, Sam Moth, Village of Spaces, and Kath Bloom — showed what they could do.
“I usually have a band, so it’s pretty strange for me to be doing this by myself,” Battalene said midway through her set as she retuned her guitar. In the New Haven-based bands Mountain Movers and Headroom, Battalene lets her guitar soar over a driving rhythm section, creating a wall of sound. With just the guitar, the wall became a canyon, full of space and vibe for Battalene’s tremoloed vocals. It was atmosphere sliding over atmosphere, and the audience loved it.
Sam Moth‘s set was an undulating wave, at times dreamy and pastoral, at other times thrillingly unsettling. When the New Haven-based Moth sang, her eyes moving from audience member to audience member, the message was often one of solace and peace, an earned contentment. The instrumentals between them, meanwhile — often played or conducted by Moth on a pad — suggested anxiety, motion, a sense of being unmoored. This reached its apex as Moth set to brooding, shifting music the looped voicemail messages of the phone tree for the Capitol in D.C. (“Thank you for calling the United States Capitol”; “to be connected to your senator’s office, press 1”) interspersed with the signals of ringing on the line and the tones of the numbers on the keypad. It told a story of people constantly calling their elected officials and never getting to talk to them, or even leave a message, over and over again. The solace Moth’s songs spoke of had to be found closer to home. But as the crowd’s enthusiastic response to her set suggested, it could be found.
Village of Spaces, from Maine and finishing up a tour, performed a set of eerie folk music that found Dan Beckman-Moon on guitar and vocals crooning his vocals over a pulsing rhythm from his right hand while multi-instrumentalist Bob New proved a wizard at creating atmosphere, whether with keyboard, lap steel, or pedal steel. His dense harmonic flourishes gave Beckman-Moon’s songs a menacing air that only grew thicker as the set progressed. The audience, by now in a kind of late-summer dream state, fell right under the band’s spell.
Local folk legend Kath Bloom then ended the night with a selection of her songs, accompanied by Flo on drums and Alexander on guitar, and both providing backing vocals. In between songs, Bloom was full of humility and humor (“I’m having trouble with my tuning. If anyone knows any jokes, this might be a good time to tell them”), but as soon as she started singing and playing, she was transformed. Now more than four decades into her career, Bloom sang with wisdom and insight, aided by material that’s as strong as ever. By the end of her set, with the song “Changing Horses,” she had the audience singing in harmony with her, creating a chorus that sounded almost like a lullaby.
Fond applause met her at the end.
“Keep New Haven going,” she said.
