Who?
A Florida native named Ashanti Floyd perhaps best known for his recordings alongside Lupe Fiasco, Lil Wayne, Sean Kingston and Nicki Minaj (no wait, come back…), but slowly building a sizable following of his own right with his fantastically named ‘Symphony Crack Orchestra’. Floyd’s doing his own thing right now, and recently rocked up in Dublin for Indie Week Ireland. Which he won, and having been part of the judging panel, I suspect he did so quite comfortably. He may have caused a few lovingly ecstatic dance floor seizures along the way, too.
What?
Dubstep with violins. Violin raves. Covers of The Beatles and Swedish House Mafia in the same set. Three and a half million YouTube views for a strings meet beats rendition of Ellie Goulding’s ‘Lights’. There are a lot of covers, sure, but The Mad Violinist gets away with it because his modern take on orchestral ‘development’ is simply breath-taking. The live show had the kind of pulsating energy that had this reviewer searching (unsuccessfully – sort it out Sir!) for importable hard copy albums the moment I stumbled in from a show. They turned Sweeney’s on a quiet Thursday night into something truly special.
There’s something almost punk rock about the live show, with the orchestra set up the extreme opposite of the semi-static performance you might expect from anything entitled ‘orchestra’. They leap their way through sets and fuse genres from every corner of the musical spectrum, diving into the crowd and dousing things in hip-hop rhythms and the occasional spoken outtake. It’s scattered – bordering on hair brained – but in this case different is a winner.
Why bother?
It’s a violin rave… Why wouldn’t you want to see that? Our music scene is exceptionally strong at the moment, and it’s not hard to find entertainment in Ireland’s larger towns of exceptional quality night after night. This is something that doesn’t come along every day, though, and certainly not an angle I’ve ever seen indulged in before. It’s a far cry from our own violin raver Daithi; both have a whole lot to offer.
And the flip side?
You’re not going to track them down in a hurry, though the mutual love-in that was Indie Week might bring Mad Violinist back to Ireland sooner that we’d normally expect. The obvious point of comparison in terms of a blend of live performance with more traditional instrumentation and laden with a heavy modern twist is probably the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, who drop in our shores extremely frequently. This, however, is a love affair we might have to have largely from afar. If you’re the kind of person who just can’t tolerate even an inventive violin remix of Swedish House Mafia, of course, this is less likely to push any buttons, even if many of those adaptions (and there’s plenty of originals, too) are closer to a live remixes than a cover version.
Catch them…
By taking a long flight, or – more realistically – heading over to their extensive YouTube Channel or iTunes, where you’ll find their album ‘Just A Taste’, and grabbing yourself some of the most inventive covers you’re ever likely to find.
Links
Up & Comers is jointly produced fortnightly by Goldenplec and
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