A CD of 14 songs with intros. This collection of live music was recorded in December 2009 at Joe's Pub in New York and The Independent in San Francisco.
Vienna Teng's creativity is seemingly endless. Her songs cover a wide volley of emotion, expressing the great and small aspects of the human condition. But her songs are only a portion of why she is so spectacular live. On-stage with Alex Wong, she uses absolutely NO pre-recorded sounds. Instead the two of them use a simple looper to create amazing results: from the eerie backwards piano on "Gravity" to the use of cadenced breath as percussion on "The Last Snowfall." Her sweet, perfectly-pitched voice creates a mix of both eerie and beautiful. Mr. Wong is equally impressive. Not only is he an excellent singer, he is also a man-of-all-trades when it comes to musical instruments: the drums, xylophone, guitar, and an instrument of his own invention called a waterphone, which is of a sort the ghostly, weeping cousin of the violin, used in the shudderingly gorgeous "Blue Caravan." His own song "In the Creases" is one of the highlights of the live album, an unconventional love song with excellent overlapping vocals, very similar in arrangement but completely opposite from tone of the co-written "Antebellum," which is undoubtedly one of Teng's best songs of all time. Together, Teng and Wong are fearsome to behold, with a loose, unplanned setlist and dramatic style. The explanations of the songs are especially enlightening.