It was a big night at The Chameleon for folktronica act VÄLVĒ. The BBC Radio 6 Music endorsed band, fronted by Wiltshire-based musician and composer Chloe Herington, had returned to Chloe’s hometown of Nottingham for their first ever headline gig in the city, to celebrate the release of Tiny Pilots, their second studio album...
Valve is something of a passion project for its central duo, Chloe and Emma Sullivan. Both musicians have buckets of experience performing with various experimental and boundary-pushing acts like Chrome Hoof and Knife World. But VÄLVĒ is special, inasmuch as the music overlaps with lots of different forms of expression like sound-design, text, image and literary reference resulting in an abstract, free-flowing, and utterly unique dark folktronica type-of-sound, the like of which is impossible to find anywhere else.
It felt special therefore, for my friend and I to become a part of the atmosphere that night; to join two overwhelmingly talented musicians in a city that meant a lot to them, and to witness the duo indulge in the experimental kind of music that mean the most to them.
Chloe’s Notts based younger brother Alex Herington, AKA Hexiale, played the opening show. After silently emerging onstage, he proceeded to create the perfect foreword to VÄLVĒ. Surrounded by stacks of modular synthesizers (which together looked taken straight from The Starship Enterprise), Alex well-and-truly got into the zone, weaving together clouds of ambient and IDM textures, which seemed inspired by the best and most atmospheric kinds of electronic music, from Orbital to Boards of Canada. After he finished his set, and his stacks of equipment were hauled off of the stage, the feeling in the air was one as if we’d been invited into a surreal and electronic kind-of-dreamscape.
A wonderful sense of indulgence and experimentation permeated the whole gig
When Chloe and Emma started their set, alongside two other supporting musicians, the show started to feel all-the-more immersive. The surreal and impressionistic lyrics of Gertrude’s List and Delicate Engines for example, sounded all the more attention grabbing and wonderfully uneasy when you heard them live; I couldn’t quite grasp what Chloe meant in singing "You should stop me before I ruin your delicate engines. The stone man sees it all inside us," over a menacing bass guitar line, but I was loving it all the same. What I did pick up upon, however, were literary references to Berthold Brecht and Shakespeare, and as a former English student, I certainly felt spoken to.
A wonderful sense of indulgence and experimentation permeated the whole gig. The band would all jump to and fro between an array of instruments; Chloe played bassoon, modular synth, drum machine and, interestingly enough, a garden trowel, while Emma held down the bass guitar and Minimoog synth and the two other musicians traded responsibility over guitar, drums, drum machine and keyboards. The band exuded a palpable joy for the endless possibilities of music-making, balanced with those aforementioned uneasy and surreal qualities. The gig overall was the enriching type of show which challenges you with its experimental qualities, and gives you the chance to have as much fun as the band are in equal measure. Keep a close eye upon VÄLVĒ; I’ll stress, once again, that there’s nobody else quite like them.
VÄLVĒ performed at The Chameleon on 23 November 2023
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