Son Lux showcased their experimental sound June 9 at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. The show was part of the Granfalloon Festival celebrating Indiana author Kurt Vonnegut.
Son Lux was preceded by KAINA, a Chicago-based singer-songwriter joined by four other Chicago musicians, including NNAMDÏ, who performed at the Granfalloon Festival in 2022. The group performed KAINA’s music, creating a laid-back, groovy feel.
Their performance was high-energy, with complex rhythmic figures and improvised lines supporting KAINA’s powerful voice, and she even invited the audience to sing along during “Good Feeling.” Despite the performance’s intricacy, the group blended together well.
When Son Lux began setting up, roughly half the gear onstage went away. The trio had a fairly minimal, clean setup of guitar, drums and keys with laptops and other devices expanding their repertoire of sounds.
This repertoire was among the most impressive feats of the performance; the band produced a dizzying array of timbres using guitar pedals, drum pads, keyboard patches and pre-recorded tracks.
Although the tones themselves were diverse, the band’s sound as a whole was generally wide and ambient, with lengthy sustained sounds filling the space to the brim. They jumped in and out of time multiple times in each song, but even when the rhythm was there, it felt loose and flowing.
This feeling was led by the drumming of Ian Chang, who conducted a consistent sense of time for the band while often leaving the groove well behind the beat. This created a slippery, shifting rhythm that always ended up in the right place — an incredibly satisfying effect.
Rafiq Bhatia’s guitar took on a number of different roles. He contributed harmony at times, but he primarily acted as a bassist, providing a solid low-end foundation for the band. IU alumnus and founder of Son Lux, Ryan Lott, played keys and sang, filling out the harmony and guiding the melody with his effect-laden vocals.
The three were clearly listening to each other incredibly closely, and the speed and skill with which they reacted to each other was astonishing. Chang was the glue holding the expansive sound together; with his precise playing and intuitive instinct, he had meticulous control over the music’s feel and form.
Son Lux’s music confidently takes many risks, not necessarily in its composition — although it certainly does that, too — but in its performance. Each musician seemed to be throwing himself to the whims of the other two, and the trust and confidence between the three allowed these risks to pay off superbly nearly every time.
The group also invited Indianapolis-based rappers Oreo Jones and Sirius Blvck to the stage for a song, with each taking a verse. Their sound changed only slightly to support the rappers — mostly in volume — but the energetic verses brought a fresh feeling to the tune.
Son Lux is perhaps best known for their recent film scoring of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which earned them an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, but they chose not to acknowledge this until the encore. The humility of their presentation set an expectation for their music that they blew out of the water with a bombastic and dynamic deluge of inventive sound.
