Concert Review - Unwoman: The Concert in the Queen Mary Boiler Room

It was a dark and mysterious place for a concert...

During the late evening of January 11th, I found myself among a small group of music fans in a most unusual venue for a live performance. The artist we were there to see was cellist-singer, Unwoman. The location; one of the boiler rooms of the RMS Queen Mary ocean liner. It is not exaggerating when I say it is quite possible we shared in experiencing one of the best concert performances of the year.

Unwoman (née Erica Mulkey) is an artist whom I primarily knew by reputation and through her collaborations with Amanda Palmer and Abney Park, prior to seeing her perform on this particular evening. The event was part of the conservatory programming offered by the second annual edition of Her Royal Majesty's Steampunk Symposium.

While at first glance this appeared to be a solo performance, it in fact turned out to be a duet in an odd sense. I have seen live music played in spaces ranging from re-purposed storage rooms to Olympic-sized stadiums, but never once have I experienced the sound which was created as Unwoman played amongst the aging steel hull and girders of the legendary ship. The sound of her voice and cello quite literally wrapped all about you. The resulting duet between Unwoman and the Queen Mary was the sound of two ladies playing in magical harmony.

To give some perspective on the size of the space, the gutted boiler room of the Queen Mary is actually two massive areas separated partially by a steel wall with a large opening connecting the two. By my estimate, the rooms were about 300 feet long, with the performance space being close to 115 feet wide and probably 75 feet high. (Ed. Note: These are totally ball parked numbers forumlated using a bit of logic and the ship's measurements. My apologies to the nautically inclined if they are way off and also for any landlubber terminology). Doing the math, that comes to over 2.5 million cubic feet of space which Unwoman and her tiny amplifier filled completely.

Frankly, I hesitated recording video of the performance; partly because of the low lighting but mainly because capturing the aural ambiance of what we were hearing seemed impossible for a professional sound crew, let alone someone with an inexpensive pocket camera. While watching these please be aware the lighting conditions of the boiler room were very low and that these were recorded using an older model Canon Digital Elph with the intention of trying to capture a bit of the sound. It isn't the visuals I want you to pay attention to anyway. It is the sound. In fact, you know what, don't watch these videos. Press play and just, listen.

Another thing to keep in mind is I wasn't planning on recording anything during the set. Something inside me though said I'm going to want to at least try. If you disregard what I said before about closing your eyes, you will see the opening and closing shots of "For the Killers" does give a bit of an idea of the scale of the boiler room.

The last video I took has become my favourite Unwoman song, and did so, quite literally, as I was hearing it for the first time during this very performance. Erica invited the audience to join in and contribute to the melody/chorus of "Haunted". Given the paranormal happenings and history of the vessel, perhaps some of the Queen Mary's spirits lent their voices as well. Unfortunately, the camera's battery reached the end of its charge before the piece concluded. Or perhaps it was something else.

I came away from this concert both speechless and unable to stop talking about it, both of which lasted well into the next day. Given that I had never heard any of the music Unwoman played prior to seeing her live, it was an incredibly fun and memorable way to be introduced to her. The TV producer portion of my brain kept trying to figure out how could a future performance like that be captured properly on video, or even just the audio, to give a better representation of what the audience experienced. In the end, I'm not entirely sure any set up could truly do justice to the sound Unwoman created that evening inside the boiler room of the Queen Mary. These videos are just ghosts of what really happened during a truly spectacular, once in a lifetime performance.

While you may not get to hear her exactly the same way we did, I highly encourage you to check out Unwoman's music, and should you find yourself near one of her live performances, whether in a haunted ship or not, by all means, go experience her music in a live setting.

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