The song starts with a brooding undertow of cello. Then come the voices, reverb-soaked siren calls from the spirit world, shimmering with vibrato. It’s the kind of musical moment that makes you stub out your joint and take off the headphones, just for a little reality check, before diving back in for the wild ride.
And while the ride does get wilder — when cellist Valerie Thompson’s bow starts getting a little Hitchcock and Vessela Stoyanova’s electric marimba kicks up a creepy blend of rhythm and melody — it’s not entirely unfamiliar. At least not to fans of the band Fluttr Effect. The tune is “Tarantula,” which appears on the band’s debut album Trithemis Festiva (Trojan Horse). But there it centers on a rippling stallion of an electric-guitar line. Here, on Swallows and Sparrows (Trojan Horse), it’s a spare sonic wind in the night.
Swallows and Sparrows is the debut recording from the Fluttr Effect Trio, a spinoff from the four-year-old quintet that packs its estrogen-charged members into one compact, softer-edged unit. Musically, the Trio can generate testosterone when it’s necessary. But, in general, the combination of Stoyanova’s MIDI-fied marimba, which often sounds like piano, Thompson’s strings, and Kara Trott’s precisely pitched clarion voice has a subtler spell. Without the thunder of drums and amplified guitars, their interplay is more finely etched and attuned. So passages like the cello and marimba counterpoint in “Awake,” a tune that’ll also be on the next full-band album, can work their own off-kilter hypnosis.
Those who missed the Trio’s two-night CD-release party at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge in February will have a chance to hear Trott, Thompson, and Stoyanova on their own at T.T. the Bear’s Place this Saturday, where the full band will headline a night that includes Peter Moore’s Count Zero, the Ghettobillies, and Allison Taratia and Rhonda Everitt. Somewhere in Fluttr Effect’s set, the subset will break out and be featured.
“It’s really interesting when we pare it down to the trio during the full-band set,” Stoyanova says. “It gives people a chance to rest their ears, and sometimes it changes the entire feeling of the room. People might be talking when Fluttr Effect is playing at full volume, but the Trio really seems to give us an amazing influence over them. When you begin playing gently in the middle of a set, suddenly people become quiet and start paying attention.”
Playing without guitarist and primary songwriter Troy Kidwell and drummer Jason N. Marchionna is also more demanding on Trott, Thompson, and Stoyanova. “We have to play our asses off to keep the energy up with the Trio,” Stoyanova says. “People remarked after the Lizard Lounge show that when we played the Trio songs Val and I looked really serious, like we were concentrating really hard. That’s because we were. And they said that when Troy and Jason came back on stage we looked all relaxed and were smiling. The truth is, I’ve played the Fluttr Effect songs so much I could play them drunk and not have to worry about it. With the Trio, it’s so new that it’s really demanding.”
There’s a different level and type of improvisation at work within the Trio. With Stoyanova and Thompson required to step into a more rhythmic role, it’s the already free-spirited Trott who plays looser. Without the additional sound of drums and guitar — and both guys play loud — she’s able to weave her already yoga-flexible voice into even more ornate curlicues, and to tease and hold notes with greater impetuousness, although the use of that word may underplay her musical intentions.
“We make ourselves very vulnerable in the Trio,” Trott says. “I’m much more of a warrior when I’m performing with the band. I can reach a certain level of ecstasy just being in front of people performing who are receptive. I feel like I have a message to give. I haven’t quite fully explored it in my art yet, but I’m getting closer every year to what the energy is I’m trying to express. And I think people are getting a lot more of that in the raw with the Trio.”
When I meet the Trio at the Middle East, Trott is wearing a little drawstring bag around her neck, dangling off a necklace that also sports a coyote tooth. In New Orleans, they’d call it a gris-gris bag. In Mississippi, a mojo bag. To Trott, whose heritage is part Native American, it’s a medicine bag. It was given to her, full of lovely polished stones, that afternoon by a homeless woman in Salem.
