Monday 4 August 2025, Beijing, Aaron Dilloway at You and Me Festival 3rd
The Sine Revue is pleased to announce a sudden dispatch from the third so-called “You and Me” Festival in Beijing, China.
I’m sorry but the clothes really were of radical importance: over and above the question of textile decorum, the perfectly fitting shirt (what colour question mark) tucked in to buckle belt and pants and tucking in a heat which will become decisive (well, they always were (decisive)) as the minutes wear on.
I saw a tape- and bowman in the inland-style. Salt water is pumping through the body, hidden and contained, bottl’d-up if you like (it can’t be a bottle of sea water), ineluctable sweatnergy. Garment-pressurised-heat-cooker. He spits protestations or autobiographies out of the microphone stuffed into his mouth. Visage in the pure pleasure of dignified disdain, comptroller behind the station, Midwest madness (we are geographically impaired). Later, claw upturned, the consummate stranger becomes the picture of holy possession, messy mix of affect and inhibition.
All great practitioners of feedback, ever since Matt Earle (and possibly before, your today pompous correspondent does not claim to be a historian, in any case some might observe we have already committed an error of basic chronology) know how to live, during that rarefied time, in the waves. When he unleashed himself from the tape its intoxicating pulsations, Dilloway knew about this. When he shoots up, when he self talksing, even when he makes discursus with sound-surrounded mostly-white pipe. But especially as he disappears off stage, as into the horizon. I can inform the reader that the stage is no more than a few yards long.
As always, we must conclude this evening’s review by admitting that we have yet again not reached, as we never can and never will, the original inspiration, dear friend, the marriage of text and event.
