Walshe’s text moves quickly, and the music moves at the speed of thought. One moment, her vocals might seem like celebrating internet memes — or the “minor characters” who become “main characters” in a social media day. But before long, he blames the world, or himself, for neglecting weightier matters. The music alternates between gentle, unhurried rhythms and black-metal blast beasts; between ad-jingle saxophone riff and free-jazz skronk; between even-keeled, Eddie Van Halen-style finger-tapped motifs on electric guitar and less-than-smooth plumes of distorted noise.
He also plays with audience expectations. From the very beginning, he launches into a confessional mode, relating a #MeToo-style narrative involving a professor driving one of his students down to his basement. But before long, Walshe leaves the audience there, in the narrative, with no resolution and the professor screaming at no one in particular, forever.
Instead, “Minor Characters” revolves around new obsessions and horrors — an exorcism on a rural farm, reports of a burning planet — as online life often does. When Walshe gives a wild voice to lines like “they know, we all know, and we didn’t do anything about it,” her self-understanding of the climate crisis has a similar edge to Brünnhilde’s – which there are traces of grace and good humor that undercut his grave sense, like Wotan’s in the “Ring,” of the destruction of a world order by its own designs.
Walshe has a wide range of literary inspiration, Wagner included; his contributions to the liner notes for “Peopls” refer to “several sections from Samuel Beckett’s ‘Watt,'” the rapper KRS-One and “the cast of ‘Lohengrin.'” The Wagnerian citation is not a joke. “I don’t do anything ironic,” Walshe said in a brief interview after a performance of “Minor Characters.” “Ironically I don’t like music. But it means something. There must be something at stake.”
“Minor Characters” seems to ask: If everyone is distracted online, following their own tastes, how can we solve problems together? Even though the show seems complete, there is no real resolution.
