Owen Pallett takes the stage with little more than a keyboard, microphone, and violin, but you wouldn't know it by the range of sounds he summons up from the relatively spare setup. His violin alone speaks in voices of bass, pizzicato, and a chirping upper register, at times all looped into the same phrase. It's in performances like this that the stakes of classical training are most clearly legible. At the crossroads of compositional rigor and pop accessibility, Pallett's style is engaging enough to keep the audience on the same page, while virtuoso enough to maintain a "how is this all coming from inside one person's head" distance, always a few precious cognitive steps ahead.
While the solo aspect of Pallett's show at Flamingo Cantina was a major selling point, he did announce mid-set that these SXSW shows would be his last as a solo act. He said he would be working with a drummer thereafter, and from the percussive bent of his set, that addition should open up a whole exciting range of compositional and live performance potential.
