Music
At Ba-Tsu Gallery on Saturday night, Chelsea made her Tokyo debut as part of Red Bull Music Academy
Live: Chelsea Jade @ Red Bull Music Academy’s Culture Fair
If you break it into its components, Chelsea Jade’s (formally know as Watercolours) soundworld is about carefully crafted lyrical text, soaring pop-aspirational melodies, club-ready rhythm magic and sleek synthetic atmospherics. When these qualities all dovetails together, they generate a fragile-yet-firm window into her interior world.
Listen close, and you’ll hear numerous intricately sculpted sonic details deep within the mix. Listen loud, and you’ll realise that what might seem like calm and soothing music carries an intensity and pulse that’s punishing at its dynamic heights. While it’s easy to draw comparisons with the likes of Cocteau Twins and Glasser, the spirit that underpins Chelsea’s work is hers, and hers alone.
At Ba-Tsu Gallery on Saturday night, Chelsea made her Tokyo debut as part of Red Bull Music Academy’s weekend long Culture Fair event. Taking to the small stage just after 6pm, she quietly slipped behind her electronic performance console, abruptly filling the air with elegant shimmering synthesiser pads and evocative field recordings, all followed by voice and punchy rhythm. With an intensity in her eyes, Chelsea worked through a cycle of songs taken from her last two EPs, Beacons and Portals.
The audience, a mixture of record collectors, music fans and Red Bull Music Academy staff, lecturers and participants stood in subdued focus. Attentively taking in her work, they applauded every song with clapping and roaring cheers. After performing a spot-on rendition of ‘Visions’, Chelsea stepped off the stage, singing ‘Find Me’ (perhaps the standout song on Beacons) as she drifted on a circuit through the crowd. In the process, she broke the fourth wall. It’s a trick I’ve seen her deploy before, and as per usual, it loosened up the crowd considerably.
From there it was a small stretch for her to convince the whole room to clap out a rhythm for her to sing over. For the rest of the performance, she spent as much time on stage as off-stage. Between songs, Chelsea made jokes with us. Five so songs in, she admitted this was the point she normally felt like throwing up. Instead, she threw some colourful candy into the audience and broke into one of her sadder numbers, ‘Pazzida’. When Chelsea hit the couplet, “or the tears will trickle face first / down my face first,” the song snapped into a syncopated rhythm. From there we were treated to marching percussion, and a chorus so big you felt like you could touch the sky at its peak.
Continuing to play with tension and release, she drifted through several more songs. At the end of her set, Chelsea wound things down with the haunted beatscape of ‘Under’, the final song on Portals. Drenched in mood, it brought the pace of things right down, closing her set out on a reflective note. It was a powerful performance, one suggesting the beginning of a new chapter for one of the more talented performers to emerge from New Zealand in recent times. Show by show, she’s connecting with the world.
Check out some of the best photos from the academy here
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