After
running yet
another sad-but-true obit the other day, I'm happy to
announce an anniversary! If asked to name someone still living out
the Lucid Frenzy ethos in musical form, in defiance of today's
play-safe world of taste dilution and corporate sponsorship, I'd be
hard pressed to come up with a better contender than The Ex. Who as
it happens will shortly be celebrating
33 1/3 years of existence at London's Cafe Oto.
Alas
this is just another event I have neither time or cash reserves to
attend! But my spirit shall be there in my stead, and my hat doffed
to their consistent refusal to accept the confines of 'punk' or any
other genre, their persistent ability to survive outside the workings
of the music industry and their absolute non-acknowledgement of
anything resembling fashion and trend. One day all bands will work
that way.
I'd
prattle on further, but I'd just be repeating what
I said the last time... Instead, here's some of what I'm on
about, live from Moscow last year. Hoping both they make it to 45,
and I that I get to go along to that one!
Given
my previous Julia Wolfe review, readers may not be too
surprised to hear that composer Michael Gordon was another founder of
new music ensemble Bang On a Can. But the genesis of this film
soundtrack project lay not with him, but when Bill Morrison visited a
film library and came across the scene of a boxer battling an
amorphous blur (see image above) - and sought out more such decaying
footage. In an interesting reversal, Gordon composed the music and
Morrison then edited the assembled footage to fit.
One
immediate reading of that boxer image might be that it illustrates
disease. When we fall ill we are attacked by ever-morphing shapeless
microbes which we have to fight off. This image just evens up the
scale between the two. Alternately the decaying film of earlier eras
could be seen as part of post-modern condition. We've become removed
from the past and it's simpler, more linear world of derring-do. That
title, after all, sounds a portmanteau of 'decades' and 'decay'. By
it's nature much of the footage hails from that oxymoronically titled era of
classic modernism - where technology was thought to be on the point
of liberating us all. Both of those views have some traction. But
it's ultimately saying something more universal and more double-edged
than both of them.
Perhaps
ironically given Gordon's past associations with Wolfe, this work is
more similar to Christian Marclay. Both not only plunder the past for
collage material, but incorporate it's 'foreign country' status into their aesthetic. Yet with Marclay that aesthetic is vinyl
fetishism seen through hindsight, whereas here the distressed nature
of the footage is important in itself. But of things previously mentioned
in these parts, it probably has a closer-still association with 'Koyaaniqatsi'
or even 'The
Sinking of the Titanic'.
Yet,
as ever, the differences become a better guide than the similarities.
While 'Titanic' was about the transience of
memory, this is more concerned with the inevitability of entropy.
(Or, to give it its colloquial name, decay.) However, even that's not
quite it...
From
Lovecraft's many-angled ones to cheesy monster flicks such as 'The
Blob', (above) formlessness is forever defined as a foe while
heroes are square-jawed and clean-cut. But slowly, as proceedings
unfurled, I found myself leaving the boxer's side and taking more to
the blur. It came to seem less representing disorder than the return
of some sort of primal order on which we've superimposed ourselves -
like the Wyrd-world
of shamanism that follows its own rules. And of course in
shamanism sickness was often a means of spiritual insight. (In my
typically lowbrow fashion, it also reminded me of the time vortex
during the credits of 'Doctor Who'.)
In his
pre-show chat, Morrison commented that in his search for footage he
homed in on figures on the brink of revelation or triumph. (He noted
sagely that indexing systems don't tend to have a category for that.)
If the boxer was the starting point, the film opens and closes with
images of a whirling dervish. Contrast this with the sequence which
concludes 'Koyaaniqatsi' - a space rocket falling
back to earth. These epitomise the difference between the films.
'Koyaaniqatsi' is concerned with the modern
condition, which it sees as a life thrown out of balance.
'Decasia's concerns are less contemporary, more
universal and more double-edged. Our struggle is to embrace that
primordial world as much as escape it.
The
importance in using found footage to achieve this end couldn't be
overstated. The screen isn't displaying the summation of an artist's
will, a thought brought fully formed to fruition, but an interaction
with the chance processes of the wider world. Seeing those glitches and
mis-shapes blown up on a giant screen, like the universe of microbes
revealed by a microscope, and knowing they'd evolved by pure chance
just makes them more beautiful. (Disclaimer: some of the 'decay' was
artificially enhanced, though none of it was faked.)
Gordon's
music is similarly double-edged. At times it's tremulous to the point
of being blurry - as if the scores had been left out in the rain
until the notes all ran together. At other times it was as stirring
and strident as anything by Tchaikovsky. Sometimes it's both at the
same time, the balance between them overlaid and ceaselessly
shifting.
In one
sense it pulls off the seemingly irreconcilable task that
post-minimalism set itself. It combines the immediacy of minimalism
with the power and epic sweep of classical music - the sheer thumping
force of a full orchestra in full swing. True, it abandons the
meditative serenity of minimalism, its language is much more
volatile. But it retains minimalism's comparative sense of scale,
it's refusal to hold the big above the small. (Perhaps not too much
should be made that Gordon composed this piece rather than Wolfe.
Wolfe's programme jumped from minimalism to post-minimalism and back,
but was composed of shorter pieces.)
Yet of
course it does something better and more important than any of that -
it works as the perfect accompaniment to the film! It was as if those
blurry strings were symbiotically linked to the flecks and marks upon
the screen, one rising and falling with the other, not the product of
two separate minds at all.
This
festival had a fantastic-looking programme, from which alas I could
only attend these three events. But even without seeing the rest,
surely with 'Decasia' I caught the highlight of
the whole shebang. The thing was a triumph!
And so to sum up...
Overall,
I'd emphasise that while the three pieces I saw were unconventional
and adventurous, they never fell into the inaccessible. It wasn't
some great challenge to get your reward, like chewing raw wholegrain.
It doesn't rely on in-depth knowledge of music theory. (Of which I
have scarcely any.) It's just great music, waiting to be heard by
anyone whose mind is open enough to give something a try...
In
one of my few complaints Queen Elizabeth Hall's conventional venue
layout worked against some of the more unconventional styles of
presentation these pieces have used in the past. It was only Marclay
that tried anything like this. But even given those limits perhaps
more could have been done to take things in that direction. Perhaps
if there's another year...
I
would have loved to have taken in more events from this Festival but
not enough money, not enough time! Here's just a couple of random
YouTube snippets...
The
fame of this bunch precedes them. Wikipedia
comments the band “is particularly
renowned for its energetic live performances”, while their own
website claims them as “the greatest live act in Britain.” I've
attempted to see them live twice before.
There's
eleven of them in total, all singing, all dancing. (Well, most of
them singing.) They sport fancy waistcoats. Though they come out of
the folk world, they at times feel more like a big band (with brass
aplenty) and at others as Brechtian cabaret. (Albeit that kind of
via-Tom-Waits Brecht.) Arrangements can be intricate, tracks crammed
with breaks, episodes and joined-up segments. They're like a cross
between folk's answer to the Mothers of Invention and folk's answer
to Madness.
The
curtain pulls back to an elaborate nautically-themed stage set, which
the audience applaud like a night at the theatre. At one point,
someone shouts “very good”. Which seems to sum the whole thing
up. It would be hard indeed to deny they're very good. But they're
equally hard to love. They feel like a show with a band attached.
Bellows can give vital oomph to something. But this feels not
Bellowhead but All Bellows, the oomph without anything particular to
be oomphed, lungs without heart.
Inevitably
for me, I enjoyed the more Brechtian moments the best. While the
sound and fury let loose elsewhere seemed to signify little, these
had a slither of darkness to them. Lurching rhythms set to cynical
lyrics, acidly disparaging everything with which they came into
contact. Life as a leaky boat and then we drown.
But
for the rest of it... well, marks for effort.
Not
from Brighton, from Dartford earlier this year.
FUCKED
UP
The
Haunt, Brighton, Fri 16th Nov "All we need is for something to give, The dam bursts open, we suddenly live"
The
most arresting thing about this Canadian hardcore punk outfit isn't
that in-your-face expletive-undeleted monicker, but their unlikely
frontman – who trades under the equally unlikely stage name of Pink
Eyes. He's not in the first flush of youth, balding and overweight
enough that when he tries crowd surfing he just plummets to the
floor. When he swings the mike around his head, his expression is
less of effortless cool and more a schoolboy with a sum to do. He's
like an all-in wrestler crossed with a clown, somehow misbooked a
singer slot but eager to make a go of it. He's not a great singer,
even by punk's broader definitions of the term. He's not even
that good at shouting, he's kind of hoarse. It's
hard to work out what he can do.
But
whatever it is, he's great at it. There's quite
possibly more chaos here than I've seen at a gig since the classic
hardcore days of yore. He spends half his time in the audience. Half
of whom spend half their time on the stage. (By the end the stage is
so crowded the band retreat to the drum riser.) But he ceaselessly
welcomes stage invaders without ever surrendering to them. He
holds our attention throughout, and never misses a
beat.
Better
still, perhaps there's something about his cheery clownishness, his
sheer apparent wrongness for the stage, something
in the music or a blend of all the above. But the set channels all of
hardcore's energy and drive, while letting in none of the nihilism.
It's a euphoric set to watch. Now I like negativity as much as the
next man. But for those of us who finally despaired of hardcore, as
it fell further and further into macho posturing and crowd violence,
this is a welcome change. It's like the shot of spirits without the
hangover.
The
band behind him look so different, I wondered if that might be
deliberate. Rather than punk attitude, they exude a kind of
preppiness. Bass player Mustard Gas in particular seems to be
modelling that look from old films, where the Secretary is seconds
away from taking off her specs and letting down her hair. The music
they're pumping out is impressively tight and surprisingly melodic,
with some tuneful backing vocals. Behind that clown mask there's a
sharp and focused outfit.
The
word which keeps coming to mind is 'faux.'
A term we often use to mean 'fake', but in a positive sense. Pink
Eyes seems such an everyman it's impossible not to be engaged. His
persona, as much as the music, may be the invitation for so many
punters to jump on stage. But at the same time they're an invitation,
the band are also giving us a watermark to live up to. As John Lydon
said himself “Do it yourself. But properly.”
Ultimately,
what could be more punk? A wall of muscle, blubber and attitude,
veins popping, screaming in our faces - “Let's be together, let's
fall in love.”
And we
did.
I
couldn't find any clips from the Brighton gig, so this is from London
earlier this year.
(Also
check out this clip for audience-interaction antics in Sydney.)
Given
the way I've written about this gig, you'd be forgiven for thinking
the band are a live-only affair. Which is often true of hardcore
bands – but not in this case! To prove my point, I'm also linking
to the video from recent single 'Queen of Hearts'.
The track's from a hardcore concept album about a worker in a
lightbulb factory in Thatcherite Britain, who discovers love, radical
politics and metafiction in more-or-less that order. But the video's
in the style of Haneke's 'White Ribbon' and
instead of the singer's vocals features a chorus of children. (I am
not making this up. In fact I'm impressed anyone
could have made that up.)
Coming Soon! The final part of my write-ups from the Ether festival. It's underway, honest! Just knew I wouldn't be finishing it today...
Christian
Marclay is a Swiss American prankster, cut-up and plunderphonics artist, chiefly
famous for the video work 'The
Clock.' His concept for this performance was a 'video
score'. He provided a video collage, culled from a thousand films,
for both us the audience and the musicians – who found in the
screen images a set of instructions.
Which
is of course a great concept. Why have music based on notation in a
post-literate age, when music was always about going beyond what
could be written down? But great concepts can sometimes turn out to
be too great, and end up lacking in realisation.
The actuality becomes simply illustrational, mere demonstrative
busywork. The concept sometimes just works better as
a concept, a suggestion implanted in your mind - leaving you free to
think up your own score. (Which of course is the basis of conceptual
art.) Overall, I've noticed a growing tendency to stop seeing
conceptual pieces, because I'd rather read of them and imagine them.
Furthermore,
I wonder if we now fixate upon mixing media to the point where we
blithely expect it to come true of its own volition. Different media
have different properties, and getting them to blend together can be
like getting Pandas to mate in a zoo – don't expect it to just
happen, even if it's going to work at all. Anyone
who read my thoughts on Bang On a Can's similar field recordings nightmight recall my doubts over such things. (“Concept-driven nights
can... become like art projects, casting rigid parameters across
everything while music is surely somewhere you want to traverse with
instinct as your guide.”)
As
is common with Marclay the clips are banded into thematic group, such
as doors being knocked. And, as is equally common with Marclay, one
such sequence is based around the iconography of playing records. As
Julia Wolfe did over the bagpipes in an earlier night,Marclay celebrates their imperfection - homing in on the snap,
crackle and pop. The clips also play with the retro nature of vinyl
fetishism, taking us back to an era when putting on an LP was this as
a swish and sophisticated thing to do, as filmable as driving a car
or making a phone call had been to an earlier generation.
But
perhaps there's a more philosophical point. We tend to assume we are
artistically freer than previous eras, able to play pick'n'mix with
the past in a way not possible before. But that hand-placed stylus
made records manipulable and editable, whereas the files we listen to
nowadays (whether CDs or MP3s) have to be taken as sealed units,
black boxes we purchase and resort, but without prising them open.
The
film clips seemed to work best when at their most anonymous. As soon
as you think 'Point Blank' or 'Barton
Fink' you're taken out of the moment, and find yourself
accessing a memory of the film itself. In fact this may be true of
any image too visually striking, whether we've previously seen it or
not. The film clips are an ingredient here, not a meal in themselves.
The more mundane and (to coin a phrase) everyday they are, the more
open they are – the more scope there is for the
musicians to respond to them, the easier it is to transform them into
something new.
(Interestingly,
samples don't seem to have the same problem. This may be because they
don't involve marrying one medium to another in the same way, or just
that we have a sight-based culture in which images naturally
dominate.)
Despite
Marclay's promises of no-score-but-film and the presence of
arch-improvisers such as Steve Beresford and John Butcher, I couldn't
help but suspect some structure - or at least the musicians having
some prior knowledge of the film. At one point one player strikes up
just as the screen throws a light over him, like a celluloid
spotlight. But that's a minor quibble at most.
Mostly
the musicians were confident enough to let film be dominant.
Instruments drop out, at points all lapse into silence, like natural
pauses in a conversation. The film clips sometimes came with their
own sound, or provided obvious sound cues, but unlike with Bang on a
Can the musicians didn't duplicate or replicate those sounds but
responded to them.
My
enduring image of the night will be the brass band, who marched
without cue or warning through one audience door then out the next,
playing the whole while, as if en route to some
other gig. Though a complete band, they can't have been there for as
long as five minutes, an absurdly over-the-top gesture. That spirit
of deranged invention summed up the piece as a whole. Rather than
attempting to bring a grand concept home to earth, the free
improvisation was like free association, a garment woven from stray
thoughts. Wikipedia
quotes Thom Jurek on Marclay “these sound collages of his
are charming, very human, and quite often intentionally hilarious.”
Overall,
in what is perhaps the best compliment you can play such a piece, one
element would simply not have worked so well without the other. It's
like asking how well a work for string quartet would function without
the viola. If it would, then what is the viola doing there? You stop
seeing it as music to a film, or as illustrated music, and just go
with what's happening.
On
the other hand, the night's biggest weakness was running a single
piece at most fifty minutes in length. However good it was in itself,
at today's ticket prices it definitely needed a support act!
I
couldn't find any of this gig on YouTube so instead here's something
else to show the spirit of Marclay. An excerpt from 'Video
Quartet', in which a soundtrack is produced by running four
video screens simultaneously.
Coming
soon! The last word on the Ether festival. (Well for this
year, anyway.)
Regular
readers, should such a thing exist, will know that Julia Wolfe was a
founder member of the new music ensemble Bang on a Can, whose solo
compositions finally reached my ears via Steve
Reich's birthday celebrations at the Barbican in May last
year.
Should
you want map references as to where Wolfe stems from, such pointers
are probably helpful. Certainly her work's a world away from the punk
music simultaneously celebrated in the 'Someday
All the Adults Will Die' exhibition, elsewhere in the South
Bank complex. And yet it's in what seems a very hackneyed
exhibition's nadir, that a strange point of congruence is hit on.
In
a diatribe by John Holmstrom of 'Punk' magazine he
claims punk was originally a celebration of American culture - until
it was corrupted by the feckless and workshy Brits, which has left
the States more open to the threat of communism. Which, if you're
British, a communist and a punk fan, is a pretty amusing thing to
come across. It's like one of those shock jock fulminations which you
can only wish was right.
But
there is actually a grain of truth to be found there, for in a sense
punk really was a celebration of American culture.
As David Thomas of Pere Ubu commented, “our ambitions were to move
it forward… create something worthy of Faulkner or Melville.”
It's
perhaps too easy to flip the flag, to take up a narrow
anti-Americanism and overlook the amount of American art that's
positively influenced you. But there's an irony and a deeper point.
What we tend to hope for is dissident art which critiques America,
but it's often the least mainstream aspects of American culture which
tend to epitomise what's best about it.
Which
Wolfe does in spades. Even when high culture does embrace the low, it
too often feels like some kind of self-congratulatory eclecticism, or
some philanthropic condescension - like donating money to charity
while ignoring that it's those people you're feeding off. Whereas her
music never starts with such separations between popular and higbrow,
but seizes instead on whatever seems to her the most enticing- a
bottom-line refusal to be fenced in. Wolfe will feed your head and
grab you by the gut simultaneously. She writes in the programme of
her desire “to bring something earthy and visceral to the orchestra
– to break with formality and get down and dirty.”
As
we'll see, such outside-the-box thinking leads to off-the-wall
performances sporting the most unorthodox instrumentation. But it's
not through any circus-act gimmickiness that this is music you just
have to see live. There's a visceral force to it that you've simply
got to be there for. (And I should know. A creative juxtaposition
between the timetables and when the trains were actually running
meant I missed the whole first half of the concert, and only heard it
via the live Radio 3 broadcast on the iPlayer.)
Porceedings
opened with 'Tell Me Everything'
- and she's not kidding with that title. For a composer rooted in
minimalism this was pretty maximalist stuff! Rather than serenely
harmonious it was positively cacophonous, like the whole history of
music happening at once, overlaying itself as if composed on sheets
of acetate paper.
Which
is of course the history of music. Whatever the books tell you, music
did not develop through some neat notion of linear progress, with one
formal innovation supplanting another. It was chaotic and convulsive,
a flow diagram where lines fly everywhere, cross and feed back on
themselves.
Or
if not music the piece could be about the way the history of America
is chaotic, different groups and traditions slamming head-on into
each other and throwing up something new and completely
unpredictable. What if you had Superman hearing and were taking in
the different neighbourhoods of New York all at once? - different
strains emanating from every window, adding to the same patchwork
symphony played in the key of life. Rather than the 'melting pot' of
homogenous white-bread America, this was an alphabet soup of new
words and phrases. It felt reminiscent, in feel more than sound, of
Terry Riley's innovative 'In C', in which everyone
simultaneously plays what they feel like and together.
Yet
if cachophonous it's also cheerily freewheeling, like a party to
which no-one is turned away. It was like George Gershwin thrown tipsy
by a cocktail of drugs and post-modernity, it was like
discombobulated dance music. It's the very opposite of the austere
'challenging' label that new music gets tagged with. Wolfe commented
“there were so many times while writing this piece that I broke
into laughter.”
Let's
skip 'Cruel Sister,' which I
didn't make it in time to hear and anyway wrote about last time.
Remember
that old Carol where you get sent for Christmas “eleven pipers
piping”? Well it wasn't Christmas and it involved a mere nine
pipers, but 'LAD' still seemed
in that spirit.
It
was performed by the bagpipe ensemble (I am not making this up) the
Red Hot Chilli Pipers, previous winners of 'When Will I Be
Famous' (I am still not making this up) who have been
described as “bagrock”, and include Who and AC/DC numbers in
their repertoire (it's all true, honest). Though it was written with
this instrumentation in mind, this is only the second-ever
performance to feature all nine pipers. (Most versions have utilised
the labour-saving minimalist standby of playing along to pre-recorded
tapes.)
One
cool thing about the piece is that much of the score is based around
the incidental sounds the bagpipe makes when being prepared to play
(as the bag is inflated), so ends up exploring the uniqueness of
their timbre much more deeply. In this way, rather than trying to
overcome the limits of the instrument it focuses in on them. Then
times it by nine. If 'Tell Me Everything' made
music out of pluralism, this was music which ganged up on you.
The
resultant sound achieves the 'Modernist double' of sounding ancient
and futuristic at the same time. It was simultaneously like being
present at the dawn of time and standing before a UFO gearing up to
defy gravity. The sound was simultaneously fulsome and indescribable.
This
was the most classically Minimalist piece in the concert, and should
put paid once and for all to the dumb prejudice that the style is
about twee little twinkly sounds, the musical equivalent of Christmas
lights. Wolfe herself has said “being in the same room with a
bagpipe (or nine) is sonically completely overwhelming”. When those
pipers get a pipin' they virtually inflated the room!It really wasn't
so far away from the heavy riffing of hard rock bands. This is music
not to stroke your chin but shake your tonsils.
Then
for the finale came 'rISE and fLY.' (Yes, that's hOW iT'S wRITTEN, perhaps to get bloggers annoyed with
their auto-correct functions.) There was only one non-wind instrument
in the whole of 'LAD', one player striking the
floor with his foot. This next piece built on that one element. It
involved an orchestra the size of a swarm, but backing a soloist
playing his own body. Before moving on to a mix of mostly
extemporised percussion, including plastic buckets and – as he
proudly told us - the oven tray from his flat.
...which
of course immediately breaks one of Minimalism's most cardinal rules,
in allowing one player to be dominant. But... you know... in a
good way. In the Seventies era of uber-radicalism,
leftist composers were always arguing a hierarchy between instruments
represented a hierarchical society, with the second flautist and the
triangle player representing a divided proletariat under the
autocracy of the oboe. Like most such theories, they pushed it to a
somewhat obsessive extent but (despite my jesting) there is most
likely some nugget of truth at the root of it. After all, the main
aim of amplification is to ensure that the very bottom of this
hierarchy is you. You can tap your foot or pat
your leg at a gig, and it's normally so loud you can't hear yourself.
You are outmanned and outgunned.
But
amplification here is used to invert the normal acoustic hierarchy,
less megaphone diplomacy and more a democratising device. Some
strategically placed mikes, some slider action on the mixing desk and
rubbing your hands together is suddenly on a level with a kettle
drum. Film can overcome the laws of scale, with 'Battleship
Potemkin' at one point framing the entirety of the ship
and the next blowing up some maggots to the full size of the screen.
Amplification means music can do the same.
Wolfe
was inspired into this piece by the old Hambone tradition of folk
music played on human body, and by “New York City street beats...
banging out grooves on plastic tubs and pots and pans.” She saw the
piece as “its own short history”, the 'body' and 'percussion'
sections compressing this shift between the two eras. (It reminds me
of the segue at the end of 'How The West Was Won',
as the mountain trail becomes the multi-laned highway.)
The
piece worked least well when the orchestra echoed and underlined the
soloist, like a kind of musical exoskeleton, and most when it treated
him like any other soloist and played around him. Even a football
know-nothing like me knows the team players don't run straight after
the guy with the ball, but arrange themselves around him. Moreover,
when playing as a team, the instruments underlined the uniqueness of
the 'human sounds', the hollow slappiness of striking your chest, the
sharpness of finger snaps.
But
best of all, however exhilarating a sight is a grown man battering
his own thighs and chest, was the way you got used to it so quickly.
It went past being a clever gimmick, and soon became another way of
producing music. The oven tray in your flat? An instrument, waiting
to happen.
The
piece was written specially for the soloist, Colin Currie, and
perhaps its chief weakness was that it at times felt like that -
tipping over into an excuse for virtuoso playing. (Particularly in
it's second half.) Which was perhaps a step too far from Minimalism
for me. However much I enjoyed it, it was my least favourite piece of
the night. But then, given the inspirational audacity of the
programme as a whole, perhaps that's to praise with faint damning.
Four pieces, each striking off on it's own, but sharing the same
underlying ethos – the future of music lies in it's roots.
Next
time someone claims the Americans do nothing but steal foreign folk
traditions and sell it back as packaged blandness, tell the
know-nothings to listen to some Julia Wolfe.
Coming
soon! More from the Ether Festival. (Yeah I know, a bit
late in the day! Are you not used to that yet?)
