Madison Cunningham brought her electronic folk to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester to guide us through hope and heartbreak. Cunningham floated through her opening songs, with the resonant hum of multi-instrumentalist Jesse Chandler’s accompaniment letting each track fuse into the next. 

Opening for Cunningham was Martin Luke Brown, who professed his anxiety around playing to a crowd which he presumed was “50 percent musicians”, affirming Cunningham’s place as the ‘musician’s musician’. Brown held this Manchester crowd in the palm of his hand, everybody trailing on the end of all his light-hearted jokes before effortlessly bringing the house down with his final chorus on ‘love is a black hole !’.

Brown’s appreciation of Cunningham rang true. Her ability to craft and develop a live performance is mesmerising, slowly building layer upon layer of harmonies before letting her lyricism weave amongst the music. Opening her set with ‘Shatter Into Form I’, in which the arpeggiated grand piano danced with the flute as Cunningham and Chandler crafted their soundscape. Throughout the night, songs flowed one after another, the audience often basking in fifteen-minute medleys before bursting into rapturous applause.

When the looping saxophone settled, the Steinway grand piano rang out, and the audience settled back in, we began to understand Cunningham’s drive. Throughout her performance lived a continuous, underlying birdsong – the quiet passing by of natural life sitting in juxtaposition with the complexity of her music. The performance of ‘Mummy’ perfectly encapsulated the dissonance laced within Cunningham’s work as she delicately sang “some days I hate you so much, I want you back”. 

For Cunningham, her newest album ‘Ace’ is the result of channelling her belief that “music’s fun” in order to navigate her own experiences of heartbreak. The end of a relationship can be complicated and take intense soul searching, yet it is so simple – you’ve reached the end. This two-fold approach to love and loss is adopted in Cunningham’s performance, adopting a stripped-back, piano and vocal performance in ‘My Full Name’ – an introspective look at her relationship with “everything that isn’t you”. The restrained piano performance sits in stark contrast to ‘Golden Gate (On and On)’, an outstanding performance which pulls you from moment to moment – placing you in the heart of Cunningham’s all-consuming life experiences.

Undoubtedly, the standout song from the evening was ‘Break The Jaw’, a swirling sound which is constantly propelled by the accompanying clarinet. Cunningham encapsulates frustration and the feeling of being motionless in ways nobody can. Therein lies the wonder of Cunningham’s performance, for the best part of two hours, she oscillated between hugely impressive, sustained vocals and withdrawn, delicate vocalising – before displaying a masterclass in pushing the guitar beyond conventional uses. Her musical presence, much like life and the themes of her album, is multi-faceted in its brilliance. 

For long-time fans in the audience, Cunningham’s encore of ‘Life According to Raechel’ and ‘Song in My Head’ brought us back to the early stages of the Grammy-Award winner’s career. On the whole, this Manchester crowd enjoyed something sonically and visually different from what they might have become accustomed to. Throughout the show, both performers were constantly on the move, adjusting effects pedals or reaching for their next instrument, with less focus on visual aesthetics and the pursuit of their perfect soundscape.

The lasting impact of an evening under the spell of Madison Cunningham was how she could pull you away from the world you live in and take you wherever her music demands. For one evening, the RNCM Concert Hall enabled and emphasised the deep reverb of Cunningham’s guitar and allowed her instrumental breaks to develop into a semi-experimental, ambient cacophony of music. Then, almost without you knowing, she drags you right in, each piano note drawing you in to cling onto the next – an entire room in the palm of Cunningham’s hand.

This is, of course, no coincidence – Madison Cunningham’s night in Manchester is one of many stops on this tour. This was the result of every show that came before it, two musicians who have built an almost telepathic knowledge of how the other will interpret their next move. The awe with which you are overcome is crafted by a group of people whose tour schedule has moulded them into something seriously impressive. Cunningham quipped about how she’s spent so much time with her fellow musicians - “we’ve all just learnt each other’s breakfast order”, and the quality of performance on display is evidenced in that. Madison Cunnigham’s tour continues into Ireland before heading back to her home in the US to embark on a new chapter in her album’s cycle.

Joseph Madden

@josephmaddenwriter

Images: Ailish O'Leary Austin