In the press leading up to Angel Deradoorian’s solo Australian sojourn, much was made of the familiarity of her voice due to her former place in the critically acclaimed Dirty Projectors, amongst others. Upon hearing a track from her latest solo work, The Expanding Flower Planet, and as a fan of both Dirty Projectors and Anticon (the indie beats & production label releasing EFP), I was excited to see what the bearer of such considerable cache had to offer.

It being a Sunday night, and me being a highly qualified space cadet, meant that I arrived at the Zoo amidst a small handful of people for only the final few minutes of the support, Brisbane’s avant-garde veteran Andrew Tuttle, who was playing the final movements of a laptop-fed banjo piece. Despite not being blown away, this was mostly my fault for arriving late; for although its experimentalism inherently sees chance and variation from set to set, I enjoy Andrew’s music and was glad to see that he had secured a support slot for the show.

After a beer slowly drank and some feeble chatter thrown up in defence against the inexorable silence that accompanies those final Sunday hours, Melbourne’s Sunbeam Sound Machine took to the stage and started methodically punching out their concise dream pop hors d’oeuvres. Primarily a solo effort of Nick Sowersby, who writes and records all of Sunbeam, it translated well to a full band live setting. Ultimately, although it probably didn’t intend to, the music couldn’t really get past the very fact that it was someone’s dream pop thing, and I was left feeling like I could have been watching this almost anywhere on earth anytime within the last few years, and wished instead I had caught the full spontaneous contingency of Andrew Tuttle’s set.

Finally, well into the onset of gloom that was not helped by a predictably underwhelming crowd attendance, Angel Deradoorian and her playing partner took to the stage. Clearly de-energised by the lack of attendance for the final show of her tour, she opened the set with some throwaway lines about Brisbane being kind of shit to small ripples of laughter through the audience. Ordinarily I wouldn’t make much of this, Brisbane is often the butt of whatever performers are coming through town and thankfully a good few of them actually do, but it ended up forming part of my meditation throughout the set. It should be said at the outset that Angel Deradoorian’s voice is genuinely great, and it was given room in the sparsely arranged backing of bass, analogue synths and live-looped low-fi percussion to really shine, and was complimented well by her co-performer. The crowd, seemingly just an assortment of people in the know who had trumped their Sunday indolence by purchasing tickets in advance, were probably grooving as much as the music and atmosphere afforded, which wasn’t exactly much but at least the set was well-received by the people who’d bothered to make it.

With that being said, I couldn’t help but feel slightly underwhelmed by the set. It was a combination of things really – as I said, the opening clichés about Brisbane fell flat on my ears, and I couldn’t help but marry them discursively to other factors that encouraged some critical analysis. In the write-up for the show (and her own various bios), some overly excited praise suggests the transcendent, divinely inspired, anciently familiar quality of the music, promising that, “A new world springs from ancient traditions—with East Indian, Middle Eastern, traditional Japanese music and Native American rhythms aligned with Deradoorian’s singular orbit.” Whether Deradoorian positively cites all of those influences alongside her Armenian heritage in her musical foundation or not, it was enough for my visibly prominent skeptic’s nose to pick up faint wafts of bullshit and set me slightly on guard. To be sure, it’s creditable for any young alt-pop artist to recontextualise themselves within their own cultural lineage. However, the notion that it takes a Brooklynite who’s benefitted from plenty of the right opportunities and privileges to appropriate exoticized cultural and musical aesthetics from just anywhere that fits the vibe, and mediate them to a presumably disaffected and spiritually starved audience (particularly if they’re from shitty backwards places like Brisbane where stuff is still closed on Sunday, I too readily and perhaps erroneously inferred from the subtext of her opening comments) is deeply problematic in a number of ways, and I wasn’t prepared to let that slide completely.

Ultimately Deradoorian’s performance to me represents a reasonably savvy bedroom project brought to fruition through access to the necessary resources that enabled its creation, distribution, publicity, and then international touring. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and parts of the set were really enjoyable and distinctly unique; let it not be said that Deradoorian hasn’t done precisely what artists do and taken things that already exist and skilfully refashion them into some more personal expression. However, much of the philosophical stock that the album and its performances ride off suggests that there is something so much more than that going on, as if it were a spiritual salve derived from ancient, irreducible sources that flow over and around all cultural constructs. Perhaps it is, and god knows if the answer to the existential crisis of late-stage capitalism just dropped in our laps one day we’d be too riddled with neurosis to realise. But, in a world where cultural, spiritual and physical medicines are so rabidly commodified and carelessly extracted from sources both prehuman and dizzyingly contemporary, it’s important to keep asking who is doing the taking and for whose benefit. With that in mind, I would be cautious in suggesting that Deradoorian’s performance on Sunday night was much more than a kind of cool show for kind of cool people that will soon be lost within the seething torrents of modernity. I’m giving it some stars out of a larger number of stars.

- Ben Stimpson