WE
HAVE AN ANCHOR
Barbican Hall, London, Tues 31st March
Barbican Hall, London, Tues 31st March
This
live soundtrack with a difference was part of 'Compass and Magnet', a retrospective on the independent American
filmmaker Jem Cohen, best known (and in my case at least, mostly
known) for the well-received 'Instrument'
documentary on the hardcore punk band Fugazi. And where to go from
hardcore punk but a verite-style documentary on Cape Breton, a
peninsula so thinly attached to Nova Scotia as to normally be thought
of as an island? The musical accompaniment was provided by Gui
Picciotto from Fugazi, Jim White from the Dirty Three no less than
three members of Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchesra - and more!
The
music mostly resembled Mount Zion's parent band Godspeed You! Black
Emperor, ambient string openings tugged by expansive guitar riffs
into more anthemic sections. Yet Godspeed tracks tend to be whole
pieces, however much they may morph along the way. Here they'd often
play minatures, more akin to your actual film composition. And the
ambient element was much stronger, often playing along to the
incidental sounds of the film clip. (Cohen commented in the programme
“I wanted them to make weather out of sound”.) They sit in just
about enough light to find their instruments, chiefly with their
backs to us the better to see the film themselves.
And
the film itself... Mostly the material is just presented, with no
maps or scene-setting, interviewees un-named. The lens seems
unselective - we see the rugged wildness of the province, but also
the fast food signs. A verbal, largely anecdotal description of Cape
Breton's recent history appears briefly, and some way into the film.
But in one rare moment of on-screen contextualisation, an
already-dilapidated backwoods shack is shown in successive years,
succumbing more and more to nature. There's still places left where
the wilderness stays in charge.
Some
images are held shots, perfectly framed, almost sublime in nature.
(Check out the one above.) While others are incidental and almost
ephemeral – roadsides, litter rolling around parking lots, a spider
climbing a blind – often shot in grainy super 8. The screen often
splits into multiple frames, sometimes merely giving us different
views of the same thing. In the self-same programme Cohen states “I
often build work from a loose archive, gathering without ever knowing
it there is a project at hand or what shape it might someday take”.
Seeing such ephemeral images in so large an audience, set to music
and thrown up on a large screen, cannot help but transform them. In the same day's Guardian Cohen was interviewed and described his
style as 'essay film', citing Chris Marker as an influence. But this
is more of a tone poem. In fact, three of what could be described as
'your actual poems' are quoted.
Tourist
trips can start to follow the structure of adventure games, getting
through the task list of finding and snapping each of the photo-ops
listed in your guidebook, before moving onto the next. Get through
them all before your holiday expires and you're the winner. But its
in passing through a place that it rubs off on you, sinking into your
pores without your noticing. Yet at the same time, at one point an
interviewee says “most things here aren't apparent to outsiders”,
and a great strength of the film is that it doesn't pretend
otherwise. Instead we have to stay content with the outsider's view.
Cohen comments in the programme how little of the native folk music
makes it into the soundtrack, just enough to give us a flavour of it.
We see just enough of a snaphot of the place to know there's a whole
lot we're not seeing. Its like meeting not just a stranger, but
someone whose whole way of life is unaligned to yours.
Cohen
mentions the cultural, and even geographic, similarities between Cape
Breton and the wilder parts of Scotland. And indeed the film reminded
me in many ways of my recent trip to Mull. And very much of what you
notice is what's been taken out. We're so used to our sight being
compressed by walls, to feeling the presence of other people around
us, that all we notice is the sudden space. Sometimes you travel less
for what you might find than what you can leave behind. And big open
spaces seem perfect for this, expanses of snow like unwritten white
pages. The title, from the hymn 'Will Your Anchor Hold' ironically emphasises the
sense that the film is in a state of perpetual drift. The
'rolling road' shot somehow always feels compelling, even when its
become so ubiquitous as to show up in bogstandard Hollywood flicks.
Here it comes into its own.
This
feeling is evoked verbally by one of the poems Cohen incorporates,
'Cape Breton' by Elizabeth
Bishop:
“The
road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever
the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
Unless
the road is holding it back,
In
the interior,
where we cannot see...
And
these regions now have little to say for themselves”
(You
can read the whole thing here.)
It
also reminded me of a quote from the cartoonist Kevin Huzunga:
“The
work becomes meaningful insofar as its form allows people to invest
it with meaning, like a sign in a field that says 'space
available'.”
And
perhaps the event works so well because concerts are in themselves a
smaller way of clearing a space, of upping anchor and of placing
everyday life on hold. Perhaps Cohen needed the strange taste of a
real place just to show us what a film or concert can do.
For
much of the running time, this is nothing less than enthralling. I
did feel at times it might be a little over-long, though ninety
minutes is only the average gig length. On reflection this may be
more a problem with the vox-pops, which can be jarring in two ways.
First, they seem to require a different part of the brain to process.
(A little like the mental gear-switching required for Laurie Anderson's recent performance in this venue, but perhaps
even more so.) But also the interviews with the locals seemed part of
a more conventional film and vied with the spirit of the travelogue.
Alas
this is the only event in the programme I'm likely to make, though
I'm most likely greatly missing out. Cohen has even made a concert film of those great Lucid Frenzy favourites The Ex.
SPECTRUM
OF SOUND 2
Queen
Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London, Sat 28th March
After
getting all excited over the first part of the London Sinfonietta's Spectral music programme, I'm back for the second instalment - with
a fresh analogy.
It
is true that, with least three of the four pieces perfomed, sounds
were sometimes used that might seem at the margins of music – the
scraping of bows, the ambient blowing of wind instruments without
forming notes, and so on. But overall, any metaphors along the lines
of 'edge' or 'margin' point the wrong way for any understanding. The
right term for spectral music... well, actually it's spectrum – in
the sense of full spectrum dominance.
Standard
notation music can be like climbing a climbing wall. After a while
your hands know to go to the regularly placed handholds. At which
point you might expect me to compare spectral music to a mountain,
but really I don't think it resembles the impregnable face of
anything. Its more like plunging into the sea. Music engulfs and
cascades over you, no longer reducible back to individual notes or
instruments. Tom Service has described Ligeti's compositions as “a
'micro-polyphony' of incredibly dense pile-ups of musical lines so
that you're more aware of an ever-changing amorphous cloud of sound
than the movement of individual instruments or voices”. But the
description could apply throughout.
If
Georg Friedrich Haas again came away with the gold, I've gushed on about him so much lately I'll try not to do it
all over again. Performed in this company, 'Ich Suchte, Aber
Ich Fand Ihn Night' (in another UK premiere) threw into
sharper relief how much Haas can combine cutting-edge modern with a
hearkening back to Romanticism. The title, roughly translatable as
'I Searched, But I Found Him Not', even comes from
'The Song of Solomon' - the only book of the Bible
devoted to romantic love.
Except,
however much Romanticism broke contemporary bounds in its mission to
evoke mood, it kept to music's dramatic structure in a way Haas
simply doesn't. Bjorn Gottstein, writing in the programme, comments
how he builds “up a tension from moment to moment which then fades
away to nothing... musical processes are resolved not redeemed”. As
he points out, the searching woman of 'Song of Solomon'
is eventually reunited with her lover. Whereas Haas offers no such
closure, just the searching.
In
his introductory talk, Professor Jonathan Cross mentioned that the
Spectralists could consider themselves in opposition to the
contemproaries the Minimalists as much as their predecessors the
Serialists – and went on to play compare and contrast between them.
No small part of this may have been down to transatlantic rivalries,
Minimalism was an American phenomenon while Spectralism largely
haunted Europe. And perhaps, as an avowed fan of Minimalism, I'm more primed to notice the
similarities. Buts Hass's wave after wave of undulating, mesmerising
sound pass over you, they give Spectralism a sense of always being
'in the moment' which would seem a main point of comparison.
Giacinto
Scelsi's Kya' proved a rare exception to Service's
rule of no individual player dominating. A solo clarinet is set
against seven other instruments, the cello and brass players often
providing little more than drones, a horizon line above which the
clarinet flutters and rolls. The trumpet sometimes catches it in a
dance.
Scelsi
was perhaps the most spectral of the Spectralists, in the sense of
spirit-like or other worldly. If the Spectralists do in some way
parallel the Minimalists, then Scelsi may be their Terry Riley. His
music often feels pitched at the edge of both hearing and audability,
(just listen to some of those pitches the clarinet reaches) as if it
has the ability to pass between realms and is seeking to draw you
across the threshold. At times he'd create compositions from single
notes, honing in on them and finding the microtones locked within.
Gyorgy
Ligeti may the the most known Spectralist, thanks to the use of his
music in Stanley Kubrick films. (Though apparantly strictly he's a
'proto-Spectralist'.) His piece was simply called 'Chamber
Concerto', the standard nomenclature a case of hiding under
sheeps' clothing if ever there was. It perhaps packed in more musical
ideas than most composers manage in a career. String players would
pluck at their instruments, strum them like banjos before coming back
to something more recognisably harmonic, then flying off again.
It's
main strength almost became a weakness, there was just so much
compressed into it that not all the sections had time to shine and it
became hard to assimiliate – like watching a film on fast-forward.
It was simultaneously exilerating and befuddling.
Like
Claude Vivier before, Tristran Murail was the wild card of the night.
(Though in his case I'd heard at least a little by him.) And like
Vivier, I greatly enjoyed his piece. But I seem to have used up my
repositiory of superlatives for now, so that might have to wait for
another time.
Not
from the South Bank, the first movement of Scelsi's 'Kya'...
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