Photos and Review by Jolene Rheault
CHARLOTTE, NC — On a moody Sunday night in Charlotte, Octave Cat turned the Visulite into a sound lab—testing boundaries, bending genres, and dialing into a frequency where jazz meets electronica and gets swept into space. Making their Queen City debut, the trio delivered a set that felt less like a concert and more like an audio excavation of some hidden layer of the musical universe.
Before Octave Cat took the stage, Charlotte’s own The Wormholes cracked open the portal with a shape-shifting set that shimmered with synth and shimmered even harder with intention. The local duo built a galaxy of layered sounds using just six strings, a synth rack, and a whole lot of imagination. Their ambient-meets-avant-rock soundscapes, particularly cuts from Light in the Dark, gave the crowd the perfect prelude—heavy on mood, low on predictability.
Octave Cat—featuring Eli Winderman (Dopapod) on keys, Jesse Miller (Lotus) on bass and synths, and drummer Charlie Patierno—didn’t just play songs. They conjured them. From the opening pulses of “Metropolis” to the deeper, funk-wrapped hues of “The Epicurean,” their sound was both surgical and expansive. Miller’s low-end modular wizardry pulsed like a second heartbeat, while Winderman stacked cosmic chord progressions and swirling leads over Patierno’s fluid, jazz-laced rhythms. “Buy the Dip” slapped with market crash bravado, while “TitTat” kept things cheeky and tight.
Their cover of Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” shimmered with retro-futurist polish, making it feel simultaneously nostalgic and freshly electrified. But it was their take on “Strawberry Fields Forever” that hit deepest—an unhurried, hypnotic unraveling that bloomed into a sprawling, synth-drenched jam. Trippy without turning to mush, psychedelic but still rooted in precision.
“Charlotte Jam,” tucked mid-set, gave the audience a one-of-a-kind gift—an improv piece born right there on the stage, never to be repeated, that floated with the kind of sync only a trio this dialed-in can pull off. From that point on, it felt like the band and crowd were on the same wavelength, riding through the tail end of the set together in mutual orbit.
Octave Cat doesn’t play to fill space—they play to transform it. And at the Visulite, they did exactly that. Keep your eyes peeled for their upcoming festival sets this season, and if they’re rolling through your city, trust me: don’t miss the transmission.
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