Queen
Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, London, Sat 13th October
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 night might 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.
Even
irregular readers will be familiar with my resorting to the cliché
of scored music being like reciting a speech, and improvised music
more a conversation. But, in response to those staccato clips, this
music was more like pre-speech, embryonic lines
and proto-phrases. These
were described by Aqnb as “a run of splenetic, stuttering
outbursts.”
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.)
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