Listening In Live to Presto Descanto (with audio!)

David Ellinwood is Presto Descanto.

He plays with ghosts.

This is the album.

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When the time came for him to go on, most of the crowd had dissolved. It was well after midnight in Bucktown and the bar was dead, so Presto Descanto performed his new album in its entirety from start to finish for twenty people while the rest of the world really missed out.

Way back in 1998, I used to spend my Friday nights at the Clintonville CRC, a little bungalow off High Street that had been rehabbed into a local information station. The CRC used to host "coffeehouses"--all-ages concerts put on by neighbourhood kids. I first saw an early incarnation of my own band at the CRC, along with my longtime, now former, boyfriend's high school group. It was also the first place I ever saw David Ellinwood play.

Walking into Ronny's is like walking into my first coffeehouse: everyone seems to know everyone else and you're not quite sure you're in the right place. You're sharing the same linoleum the bands use for the stage and you're pretty sure the sound guy is your friend's friend's big brother. The modest venue is small potatoes, I guess, but I couldn't ask for a better place to see David make this fresh start as the one-man band Presto Descanto.

Two week ago I published a review of Presto Descanto's advance single, the opening track on Promise and, consequently, the first song David performed. Pumping his MC-505 and guitar through a familiar crate, "I Still Love Gold" filled the room and moved the floor. The sound was clear and balanced as it is on the record, but provided a dimension that doesn't appear in his studio recordings. And this is no small feat: the CD is impeccable.

During the set, David was constantly dressing up and undressing, with something like four costume changes. He played with childhood props like a bubble machine, a classroom calendar, his onetime favourite book and a giant stuffed turtle. But contrary to the whimsy of his stage props and his hopeful electro clicks and pings, the songs on Promise are intensely personal and usually downright sad. Some, like "When Things Were Less Than Desperate" wax resentful about the past: "If I'm the last one who remembers; was it ever real?" Others offer lonely snapshots of someone talking to you when you're not there. They expose, well, at least my own nostalgia, and they give a different weight to all those toys.

The pieces of Presto Descanto are not obtuse or self-important. They don't pretend to be anything but what they are: straightforward and accessible. But they fall together flawlessly from beginning to end. What's most impressive, though, is how David makes electronics sound so organic. Raps and buzzes and tones that sound plastic elsewhere are really emotive in Promise: they purr and wail and sigh and caress. This album is more than a brain child or a labour of love, I think: it's a heart-to-heart with the man behind it. I know it was a long time coming.

You can buy Promise at Presto Descanto's MySpace page or by clicking here. Doing it Radiohead style, David would like you to decide how much this album is worth to you. If you like the tracks I've published around Newsvine, please pick up a copy. You won't be disappointed.

David, I'm so proud of you. I mean, look what you did.

© 2008 Ryan Stolte-Sawa for Listen In. Some Rights Reserved. All photographs © 2008 Ryan Stolte-Sawa. All Rights Reserved. Album art for "Promise" © 2008 David Ellinwood. All Rights Reserved.

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