Plini
The Basement
1 February 2023
Sometimes it’s the notes you don’t play, rather than the notes that you do.
When a friend suggested we see Plini (an artist I knew nothing about)
and described him as an “instrumental prog metal jazz fusion artist” I
have to admit that my eyebrows shot up to my (increasingly receeding)
hairline.
I feared I would be faced with an evening of endless noodling on guitar.
I imagined an evening of Joe Satriani mixed with Pink Floyd with a tiny
bit of Metallica thrown in. It turns out that I was both right and
wrong.
The trick with instrumental music is that you don’t have any vocals to
be the focus of the song, so you need to find another way to bring a
melodic idea for the audience to hold onto. I think Plini definitely
knew this. The 5 piece band (aside from Plini himself
there were guitars, bass, drums, keyboards) were all great musicians,
but they all knew that the songs were the important thing, not showing
off their technique.
Plini obviously knows the unspoken rule of any guitar solo. It needs to
be something the audience looks forward to, not something that shows how
fast you can play your instrument. You need to make sure that the
listener is interested. In fact the whole set
was structured to keep the audience interested. The danger of playing
just “guitar music” is that it could all sound the same after a while.
However, no two songs sounded the same. There were different rhythms,
all of the instrumentalists had a turn at being
the “lead” instrument. In fact some parts of the set went into jazz
territory (while your milage may vary, I thought this was a good thing) and other
parts of the set confirmed my initial preconceptions (Pink Floyd,
Metallica). So, all in all, it was quite a varied
set.
I was pleasantly surprised.
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