On Sunday night, Greentea Peng’s soulful sounds gently reverberated through the air like the UV rays you can feel prickling your skin in a heatwave. The night opened with a progressive set from DJ Junior, with heavy afrobeat influences and just the right amount of pop remixes thrown in to delight even the more hesitant audience members. Mixing in tunes by Molokai, Nelly Furtado, Missy Elliot, and Benny Banssi, the set was expertly designed to give a sense of familiarity to almost any listener. From the moment I walked into The Rechabite Hall, his set had my hips involuntarily moving. As I stood on the upper decks, I watched the people flowing into the lower dance floor level and slowly building the sea of people moving under his spell. Not restricted by rigid concepts of genre, his set included tribal house but was far from your typical four-four beat. It didn’t matter how you describe it, as the crowd gently swayed as much as the hot Bunuru night would let them. DJ Junior demonstrated absolute finesse on the decks and knew how to warm a crowd up and play to the conditions; an underrated skill.
When Greentea came on, she sauntered onto the stage with the presence of a natural performer. Her demeanour was authentically that of someone who belongs on stage. But not in the big, showy kind of way that you might expect from someone renowned for their stage presence. I felt like she’d be just as at home on the stage of a basement jazz bar or on a massive festival stage. Her physical presence doesn’t need to be overt, as her rizz permeates the entirety of a space she walks in as she serenades a crowd. Her set was smooth and balmy, like the hot summer night where it was set.
Greentea Peng at The Rechabite Hall. Photography by Sophie Minissale.
Her set included “Liberation,” which sent chills through the crowd given the current wartime climate, and “Downers,” which she found sadly relatable to many people. The beauty of live music is that you might hear the songs you love in a slightly different way. Logistical challenges, which we’re well used to in the most isolated capital city in the world, had set her back a bass player, which made her guitar player picking up the six-string bass even more impressive. Not to mention having to re-work an entire show to accommodate one less musician and digitise and mix parts of it differently. If she didn’t mention that challenge, I mightn’t have noticed that there was supposed to be an extra musician on stage. The resourcefulness allows a creative flex that you don’t tend to see in studio versions, which don’t have the same synchronicity pressures as live performances. It also makes you appreciate the lengths that artists go to for the sake of our pleasure.
The dry heat apparently put strain on her voice, which is perhaps why she didn’t do an encore. She blamed it for the lack of chatter in between the songs also, however, I think that just added to the sensual appeal of the whole show. Her music speaks for itself, and I didn’t detect a noticeable difference in her vocal quality in Sunday’s set compared to the studio versions of her songs. A further attestation to the allure of live shows and their immediacy.