"I know people from Vermont are here," Nico Muhly declared. "I can just smell it."
In fact, the performers' families had come down from the 802 area code to watch Sam Amidon, Thomas "Doveman" Bartlett, and Muhly play together on Sunday evening. The three of them did not perform three distinct sets, instead performing their own songs and their collaborations in overlapping clusters, working out the set list as they went along, casually swapping instruments, and behaving themselves with the camaraderie of equally brilliant siblings, right down to the hair-pulling (see above).
Bostonist was prepared for mere laptoppery and sensitive warbling. We were delighted, then, by Amidon's jaunt down the aisle to "lope like a buzzard," and the unanticipated liveliness of everything. Muhly handled three sets of keys (piano, synthesizer, MacBook) while seeming to conduct violist Nadia Sirota with his rather articulate eyebrows. He shared a piano bench with Bartlett, who breathily summoned the dolor of a Nick Drake and the coziness of a sun-drenched hammock. Shirley Collins is still alive, but Amidon channeled her ghost anyway.
The show culminated in a epic rendition of Muhly's "The Only Tune," a three-part disassembly and refurbishment of a folk song about sororicide and fiddle-making. Echoing the murder that facilitated its construction, "the only tune that fiddle would play was 'oh the dreadful wind and rain"—singing this, Amidon's haunted vocals were caught and repeated in Reichesque loops. (It was the only tune this Bostonist's head would play for the rest of the week.)
A standing ovation procured no encore; after a second round of bows, Muhly, Amidon, and Bartlett pranced out into the Remis Auditorium to greet their relations.
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