The night just gets better and better with my personal favorite set of the festival, the wonderful Loibner/Beier Duo, a group that has Austrian Loibner on hurdy-gurdy and Australian Beier on percussion/trapset.

Looping his beautiful-sounding hurdy gurdy (a bowed machine from Celtic music that the player plays by winding a round crank case that lowers a circular bow over drone strings, while fretting the instrument with a keyboard in the left hand) through a laptop (and I can never see what software he uses to loop, though I suspect it was Abelton's Live), Loibner has a wonderful approach that marries Indian raga sensibility with Celtic and even fusion. Beier plays a very creative blend of eastern and western drums on his "kit". He has a beautiful huge double-headed kick drum (which as someone says later, "means there is no need for a bass melodic instrument"), traditional cymbals and even a large Indian dohl (double-headed drum) turned, creatively, on its side and used as a floor tom.

The group weaves odd-time combinations in intricate dances. Loibner's creative use of the half speed/double speed function (meaning he probably has an EDP in his rack) with his midi footpedals means that he can play different ostinato figures against his own improvisation, changing the time signature or even the tempo at will. I use this trick a lot when I play pieces for the melodica, but he really has it down to a science and it is really impressive. His playing is beautiful and sublime ......... and sometimes ferocious. He has prodigious technique and sometimes sounds like a very advanced Sarangi player (the hurdy-gurdy's timbre is very much like the droning sound of the Indian Sarangi, which has sympathetic drone strings and is one of the most bluesy and emotional of all the bowed string instruments). The group changes from Middle Eastern to Celtic to Indian themes and I am just entranced.

The looping is seamlessly connected to their playing and the whole thing is one of the most intriguing blends of world music fusion that I have ever heard. I played in the World Beat/New World Fusion movement for 25 years and I have really high standards for this kind of fusion, and I just rarely hear anything so impressive and successful artistically. It is interesting and coincidental that these guys also come from countries so far away from each other that both start with the letters AUSTR.

Rick Walker, Artist, Santa Cruz, California