There’s an intensity and something really primal about Painted X-Ray. It is potent and dynamic with insistent guitar and violin interweaving around a pounding and constantly-evolving rhythm section of taiko and bass guitar.
Alun Woodward, curator of Mix the City Glasgow and co-founder of Chemikal Underground Records
太鼓トランス、カッコよかったよ
Your taiko trance was stunning cool
Hiroshi Motofuji, top Japanese taiko drummer (translation by his student, Yumi Célia)
Unmissable! Such musical and emotional intensity, such originality — a beguiling fusion that astounded me first time I witnessed it (and it IS a kind of ‘witnessing’), and still hooks and beguiles me now I’ve heard you three times. Fiercely original, and hypnotic — a listening experience that reverberates right into your bones.
Carol McKay, poet and author
I was lucky enough to catch a live performance by this epic collective in Edinburgh & it was easily one of the best gigs I’ve seen for a long time! PXR summoned huge and uplifting energy waves of sound: mountainous guitars, incandescent violin patterns, spiralling dream-like vocals, folded and woven around the centrepiece of utterly transcendental drumming. If you haven’t heard this band yet, then you should experience it for yourself. Their performances have a transformative effect that seems to channel light and dark matter in equal amounts. The visceral melodic spirit-force feels like an uplifting embrace, as well as a call to action. After all, wasn’t the drum the first sound to emerge from the void?
Andy Green / Burnt Paw, musician
I got to Painted X-Ray headlining at Henry’s Cellar bar in Edinburgh last Friday night, and left the gig the way I always do after seeing/feeling them play, viscerally altered, deep in my guts, and heart and through all my channels. This group of people come together and generate a totally incredible blend of beautiful, layered melodies, dense, fragile and percussive guitar and basslines woven through with ethereal and urgent fiddle that underscore and accent the complex beat forms and patterns of two astounding women drumming Taiko — in the mix on some tracks are also vocal litanies and repetitions, often times also tectonic depths of noise guitar. I have seen them play again and again and I always find the same words come to me, that it is a kind of medicine. The final piece of the set on Friday, Ellipsis, held me like trance, like an underwater realm, slow motion, emotional break point, all at the same time. I was left with the ocean of sound, and the drummers’ immensely focused, unison dance wielding the thick Taiko sticks high and letting them fall centre skin and drum rim, swimming in my dreams. The experience is sonic and visual. It keys to the soul, sometimes like a ritual lament, sometimes wild euphoria. A place where things can process in us, watching/listening/being sounded in our bodies. It’s not often I encounter this level of immersive, communal experience. It’s so deeply needed. I’m so grateful. If you get a chance to see/feel/be with them, go.
Lisa Fannen, musician, poet and author
I’ve been fortunate to see some incredible moments of music in too many years. Like when a little dimmer switch is sort of turned slowly up in your brain because the senses have become overwhelmed and you feel elated. It is acting, it is incredible musicianship (phenomenal even), it is listening to each performer, it is not knowing what it is that is happening to you, it is swaying and giving up your body.
That is not even close to what Painted X-Ray were doing last night. The drummers are like dancers. Their strength and power is in their bodies and faces before they even start to move. The sticks click and whirl and beat a monotonous thundering rhythm while a violin howls and vibrates. You cannot pin down the bass or Jer’s [guitar] playing. They are fluid and alive as if creating the sounds right there, unrehearsed, real, organic and held, constant, in the certainty of the those Taiko drums. The dancers swap positions. Their faces are stone. They are dancing. The other musicians are on their tip-toes. The drummers’ arms and sinews the arms of dancers or warriors of sound. They are creating such immense controlled power as each layer builds and builds upon each beat and each chord and each discordant note. I’m lifting upwards. I’ve forgotten what it was I was thinking about. I’m flying. I am dancing.
Bob Oliver, audience member
When they come onstage, after a morale-boosting huddle, they get straight down to the first of three fairly lengthy numbers (“Hachijo”), all instrumental. With the two women (Alison and relative newcomer Yumi) bashing the big drum from each side, Rafe on fiddle at the back led off with a sawing, King of the Slums-esque repeated riff, while Jer on guitar and Ali on bass backed up the main riff and the thundering percussion. For the second track, “Shiburoku”, a further three drums are shifted from the rear of the stage to make 4 now horizontally placed drums at the front of the stage. For this number Alison and Yumi get somewhat faster and more complex than in the first number, all the while looking directly at the audience. It is a visually and aurally arresting spectacle, and it is also damn loud, especially as Jer and Ali start to up the ante with guitar riffs and bass drones, while the fiddle is also still present.
The closer, and longest number (“Ellipsis”), is damn near apocalyptic towards the end as Jer in particular shreds his guitar and sends musical missile shards of noise directly through the speakers – the whole cacophony sounds something like MBV vs the Edinburgh Tattoo.
There may have been a bit of a break in between but Painted X-Ray Mk2 are tighter and more sonically furious than the previous version, and that’s really saying something!
Betty Mayonnaise, music reviewer