“I remember at our first gig, people were just shouting, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’” says Crystabel Efemena Riley, recalling her debut outing as a drummer. In the early 2010s Maria & The Mirrors, her trio with Keira Fox and Charlie Feinstein, wrongfooted many who saw their PVC-heavy stage outfits and garishly smudged makeup and failed to anticipate an ecstatically punishing twin drums and electronics assault. “People often booked us for how we dressed, then would hate the music, or booked us as they liked the music then would hate us for dressing up,” she continues. “But the whole process added to the sense of unease that we were interested in. Makeup work and drum work were equally important.”

That statement continues to be true for Riley today, even while hecklers have been replaced by appreciative audiences who come for surging, exploratory solo sets such as the one documented on her recent release Live At Ormside, or to hear her beats weave around the contributions of musicians such as Sue Lynch, Seymour Wright and Billy Steiger, all longtime comrades in London’s improvising scene.

Recorded at South London’s Ormside Projects, Live At Ormside's single 18 minute track reveals her drumming at its most tangible and colourful, mixing her signature tom rolls that cascade like rounded pebbles with harsher timbres from cut-up drum shells and multiple layered drum heads using other players’ discarded skins. “By the time you take a drum skin off you’ve got more marks and dents,” she notes. “The air and the space is interesting. It creates different sounds when you’re working with the skins when they’re doubled and layered.” Further effects are added using custom electronics made by Steiger, allowing her to adjust volume and gain and control how the beats are amplified in the space.

As Riley no longer uses cymbals, the metallic sounds in the set come from metal items that she had smelted herself. “Slowly, I realised the only thing I liked about the cymbals was their metallicness,” she explains. “So it was just trying to find different ways to be metallic without it being a cymbal.”

Crystabel Efemena Riley is interviewed by Abi Bliss in The Wire 497. You can pick up a copy of the issue here. Wire subscribers can also read the interview in the online library.

Credits

Video: Mike Levitt & Susu Laroche
Live sound and mix: Josef Kurtz
Mastering: Taku Unami