BLUE SHIFT (Night People)

Blue Shift is one girl from Providence, RI who stands facing into a big amplifier and plays the electric violin really violently. The time I saw her play in a Val Verde living room was harsh and shoegazy and cult. Total feedback immersion, shrieking string-scrapes, hair flying, back to the crowd, head down. This self-titled CS on Night People is a cut-and-paste document of some semi-recent live sets of hers, and finds her in a far more classical mood. Several of the pieces are accompanied by stomping drums, but the majority are just an unamplified violin bowing out some weird, wandering note-flurries and then stopping. Lo-fi, mild, fine. Way less raging/demented than the epic “incinerated humanoid” cover art suggests. Maybe I caught her on a wild night. Or a drunk one. I do recall Aaron from Sword Heaven standing on his head in a kiddy pool screaming across the hillside.