On the 1st of February 2018. SKINBOW performed live at LazyBones in Marrickville, NSW, Australia.  SKINBOW is Colin Offord & Calvin Welch and on that night played with special guest Dave Panichi.

Music critic Bruce Elder was in the audience. This is what he had to say:
There is something magical, something both earthly and otherworldly, about the glorious interplay of sound that is the SKINBOW Project.
Take a musician who wants to play everything in the natural world – original string instruments such as his unique evolution of the Australasian Mouthbow, double flutes and harmonic windpipes of wood, bamboo and feather, Conch shells and vocals which range from dangerous poetry through to throat singing and some of the sweetest sounds this side of an operatic aria, and you have the unique musical world of Colin Offord.

Add the mesmerising percussion of Calvin Welch – he can beat out deeply resonant bass lines on drum kit or on huge Bailer Shells (the Xylopt); tantalise with vibrant rhythms produced on a range of drums from the lightest washes of brushes across cymbals to Soul, Funk and African-influenced pulsating rhythms. Welch’s playing is some of the cleanest and most sensual drumming you may ever hear.

SKINBOW produce an impossibly sensuous and seductively beautiful music. A music that is full of space, power and joy, which is immediately accessible (you know this is avant garde but you always feel that it is only micro-millimetres away from the mainstream accessibility).
It is music from, and for, the world. Music where Offord’s vocals hint at the old world and the new world, the melancholy and romance of Celtic folksong and the exotic, wailing, incantations of the East; where the experimental soundscapes of Offord’s unique great Mouthbow are as accessible as a guitar or cello and yet are beyond easy categorisation.
It is a unique sound designed to seduce an audience. What is it? Folk music. Yes. Country and Eastern. Yes. Hints of Australian Aboriginal music from the Dreamtime. Yes. Delicious and sophisticated improvisation worthy of the greatest jazz combos. Yes.
This is a true rarity: immediately accessible music which defies all categorisation and reaches deep into that part of our being, our soul and psyche, which is touched by the ancient and timeless beauty of music. It is beyond a specific time and a specific culture. This is music for all time … and it is being made … now, in the present – and unforgettable.

It is the living embodiment of the great art critic Walter Pater’s famous observation: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
Bruce Elder - music critic for forty years in both Australia and the U.K., as a Contributing Editor to Rolling Stone, London Correspondent for Double Jay ABC radio and as a Senior Music Journalist - Sydney Morning Herald. In 1996 he became the first contemporary music critic to win the only prize of criticism in Australia - the Geraldine Pascall Award.

Xylopt Dancing

Colin Offord

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