The Read
A running column on the players and performances that come through PlanetBYear — artist reads that place a musician in the wider world, and takes on why a single clip is worth your ear. Reviewed by a curator before it runs.
Charles Berthoud
His playing style spans jazz, classical, and progressive rock genres. He utilizes a signature two-handed tapping technique alongside slap and pop bass methods.
Eliott Tordo
He is a self-taught erhu player who performs a variety of music, including original compositions and covers of movie, video game, and anime soundtracks.
Marcin
His style combines fingerstyle and percussive guitar techniques with modern electronic and orchestral production.
Allie Sherlock
She is recognized for her unique, powerful vocals and acoustic guitar performances, which include a mix of cover songs and original music.
Dub FX
He creates layered, bass-heavy soundscapes by manipulating his voice through vocal looping and sound effect processors. His background includes singing in an alternative rock and rapcore band before transitioning to his solo live-looping setup.
Too Many Zooz
The band plays a self-defined genre called brass house, which has been described as electronics-less electronic dance music created by a brass trio.
Daniel Waples
He plays the handpan, an instrument associated with energy work and alternative healing. His early musical background includes joining a military marching band at the age of eleven.
Rob Landes
His style infuses classical violin training with a love of popular music, video games, and comedic stunts. He utilizes a loop pedal to create layered, multi-part arrangements live.
Karolina Protsenko
She performs contemporary pop, classical, and cinematic music on the violin, combining classical training with energetic street busking.
Henri Herbert
His style is deeply rooted in 20th-century American boogie-woogie and blues, drawing inspiration from pioneers such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson.
Karim Kamar
He plays neo-classical and contemporary classical music. His background includes classical lessons as a child, followed by a period of MCing, DJing, and producing garage music before returning to the piano.
Estas Tonne
His music spans classical guitar, Romani music, and fingerstyle guitar. He describes his performances as sound ceremonies and refers to himself as a troubadour.
A shopping-centre piano, and nobody saw it coming
Karim Kamar
Karim Kamar transforms this public space by layering a relentless, rolling left-hand arpeggio under rapid right-hand runs and high-register trills. He demonstrates remarkable rhythmic control as he transitions from a gentle, flowing melody into a highly syncopated middle section, where both hands punch out fast, alternating chords with absolute precision. This physical independence between his hands allows him to build a massive, layered soundscape entirely on the fly.
A whole band from one voice and a loop station
Dub FX
Every layer, the kick, the snare, the bassline, the pads, begins as his own voice, caught live in the looper and stacked in real time. Nothing is pre-recorded. The entire band is built in front of you from one mouth and one pedal.
Boogie-woogie takeover on a public station piano
Henri Herbert
A public piano meant for idle passersby suddenly carries a full walking bass in the left hand while the right improvises on top: two independent parts, one player, at speed. The tell of the real thing is that the bass never once trips.
"A Thousand Years" on the erhu
Eliott Tordo
Two strings, no fingerboard, and he finds the exact pitch of the melody by ear alone. On the erhu the slides between the notes carry more of the tune than the notes themselves; the vibrato is doing the singing.
Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" on one acoustic guitar
Marcin
Watch the right hand hold three jobs at once: the riff, a kick-and-snare slapped straight onto the body of the guitar, and the low drone underneath, so a whole Led Zeppelin arrangement folds down onto six strings without ever thinning out. The swing is the hard part, and it survives.
The Song of the Golden Dragon, live in the street
Estas Tonne
There is no setlist. The piece grows out of one repeated figure and keeps folding new lines into it until a street corner sounds like a film score. Listen for how he lets the noise of the crowd settle into the tempo instead of fighting it.