Gorky's Zygotic Mynci at Bowery Ballroom

It used to be that a violin in a rock band was an oddity. It would turn up in the occasional Neil Young song, or in anything that was supposed to sound "authentic," like post-Cougar stuff by John Mellencamp. And Camper Van Beethoven owed more than a little of its success to the sheer novelty of the alt-rock fiddle. But now the damn thing seems to be everywhere, from the Dave Matthews Band to Beth Orton, from the Dirty Three to random bands on the Jersey bar circuit. The instrument doesn't connote the ragged folksiness it once did; it might as well just be another trigger on the synth pad.

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, a Welsh band that's been around for a decade now, does interesting things with the violin?not to mention good old guitars and keyboards and drums and stuff. Last year the band toured England as a double feature, opening up for its own electrified set on acoustic instruments. An EP of this material, The Blue Trees, came out earlier this year on the Mantra label. It's all pastorals?peaceful, bucolic things, breath and air and clouds, real British Isles stuff.

Onstage at Bowery Ballroom, Euros Childs, the boyish, stringy-haired leader of the group, fumbled around nervously between songs and made what sounded like typically self-deprecating indie-guy comments, though in his downhome Welsh accent they were barely intelligible. (At one point he said, I think, "This next song's from America. Where in America, I don't know, but it's American.") Childs seemed completely confident, though, as the band played "This Summer's Been Good from the Start," "Lady Fair" and other little slices of Welsh country pie. It was hard to take your eyes off him, and when you did they tended to go to GZM's cute brunette fiddler, Megan Childs, Euros' sister. She wore a little black evening dress and swung her legs beneath her chair when she wasn't wobbling back and forth playing the fiddle.

According to the program the band distributed for the concert there was something called the Interval, during which we were supposed to get up and have another drink while waiting for Act III (which was to be "Gorky's Zygotic Mynci standing up to play"). So I had a drink. And when Act III hit, it seemed at first like a different band, droney and electric, focused around dissonant keyboards and a throbbing beat that had something in common with Krautrock. Euros Childs led from the keys and quivered and shook and banged his head in ecstasy as the music climbed to noisy climax.

There seemed to be little link to the first set?but then came the sound of the violin. In the absence of a lead guitar part, Megan Childs held the melody for many of the songs, and she still swung her body around girlishly, though this time she was standing up, all less-than-5-feet of her (a biographical nugget from the program: she wanted to be a ballerina but gave it up because she was too short). Her sound was louder but still gentle, a sound as elfin and Welsh as she looked. Overall both sets gave me the impression that GZM have found some sort of middle ground between Fairport Convention and Stereolab, which to my ears is a pretty unique achievement. It's a link between earthy, backward-looking folk and arty, self-conscious, "futuristic" music that basically owes its existence to the German avant-garde. And to think that it happened in Wales.