FringeReview UK 2025
VVAIF
Meilissa Dylan
Genre: Experimental, Music
Venue: Sweet Venues at the Yellow Book
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
“Musical introspection from Melissa Dylan, unlocking the subconscious feelings connected to their relationships with others and with nature.”
Review
Review of VVAIF at The Yellow Book, Brighton
The Once and Future Festival, 2025
VVAIF was performed by two musicians at Sweet@The Yellow Book in Brighton as part of The Once and Future Festival. One of the performers remained veiled throughout, dressed entirely in black. Both played acoustic guitars, with the occasional appearance of a banjo, and the set opened with an instrumental introduction that established the show’s sonic and conceptual intentions. The performers were entirely still, their focus on the music absolute, the fourth wall firmly intact. This was not a performance in search of connection, it was a composition inhabited and delivered without concession.
The show’s opening vocal arrived as a ghostly, etheric line over a slow heartbeat rhythm, forming a melody that felt like a journey, a hesitant passage through sound. The atmosphere was immediately thick with tension, the occasional discordant note breaking through like an unwelcome memory. When the banjo appeared, it slightly increased the pace without shifting the overall mood, which remained steady, sombre, and intent.
Much of the music rested on two chords, sometimes with barely any variation in rhythm. This deliberate simplicity served as a kind of frame, within which the lyrics could unfold freely. The repetition allowed certain lines and motifs to take on greater weight through assertion alone. It created a ritualistic feel, enhanced by the performers’ near-total lack of visible emotional expression. The songs seemed to belong to an internal world being revealed cautiously, layer by layer.
There were helpful references within the banter and atmosphere to Neurosis’ Souls at Zero and Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show. These were not directly explained but embedded as signals, suggesting to me a shared language of psychological strangeness and dark narrative. I am also a fan of Clive Barker. You can see where they are coming from.
The music moved at an insistently and consistently slow pace apart from one song, each song grounded in story logic rather than traditional musical progression, providing hints of a fragment of an episode, a vignette of an emotion. Indeed, nothing was hurried. It was a set entirely confident in its right to take its time.
Percussion was spare, with sticks used occasionally to create a barely-there beat, more like the background crackle of flame than a rhythmic force. The songs carried weight, sometimes winding laboriously forward like a cart bearing something precious and unwieldy. The slowness was not simply aesthetic, it was central to the experience. It asked the listener to slow down in turn, to lean in and remain attentive to every small movement within the sound.
The singer’s voice ranged across registers: blues-inflected, folk-tinged, dramatic, and sometimes hollow or ritualistic. At its best, it functioned not as a centrepiece but as another instrument, shaping and redirecting the tone of each piece. There was a deliberate contrast between the sparse, sometimes simplistic string work and the emotional range of the vocal delivery. This dissonance gave the performance depth without decoration.
The overall effect was gothic in tone, at times dirge-like, always intentional. These songs would not be out of place in a scene from Wednesday, but here they were presented without irony or stylistic excess. Instead, they lived in their own world, drawing the audience not into spectacle, but into a slow, imaginative realm made of fragments, of story, memory, and sensation.
VVAIF delivered a very good performance, not by playing to expectations, but by holding its own ground. The set had a clear identity: experimental, poetic, slow, and precise. It trusted its form and took the risk of silence. For those willing to surrender to its pace, the reward was something rare, a live performance that revealed itself only through sustained attention.
