With Volcano the Bear and Hanne Hukkelberg music-making is like an animistic ritual that awakens the secret sonic souls of undiscovered "silent” objects: everything is a potential instrument – household appliances, bikes, natural objects. With the aid of a magic microphone they bend natural acoustic sounds into unusual shapes and combine them with electronics, traditional instruments and the human voice. Hukkelberg is dismissive of obvious melodic structures and simple musical phrases. She is an alchemist, trusting her voice to bind her songs into a sensitive, touching and funny amalgam, somewhere between Electronica, Improv, Pop and 50s Hollywood Jazz. Music-making here is also a shamanic performance that calls up profound visionary powers and allows contortions into multiple shapes. The members of Volcano the Bear tap into the subconscious to access reservoirs of free expression as fuel for mercurial improvisations: Dadaistic noise collage, a seaman’s shanty, distorted Folk, a holy invocation, Avant-Rock, Prog or all of it all at once. Their music is like the folklore of imaginary lands or like un-idiomatic glossolalia. The same is true of the “instant fake traditionals” by Marc Marcovic, who sings songs in nonexistent languages in an impish role switching from fool to narcissist to elegist. Here, as with Asiplus, it is the fragility of the singer-songwriter exposed to the public that enchants with the strength and vulnerability of an individual personality. A fractured sensibility from which radiates a gentle glow around artist and audience, spreding like a trembling aura. The intimacy of the situation and voice, with spontaneity and intrinsic imperfection, conjure up a deeply human sound for tonight.