GAVIN BRYARS ENSEMBLE/ SHOBALEADER ONE aka SQUAREPUSHER (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

'MINIMALISM UNWRAPPED': THE GAVIN BRYARS ENSEMBLE

Kings College, London, Sat 24th Oct

'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet' is perhaps Gavin Bryars' other classic composition, a companion to the afore-seen 'Sinking of the Titanic', perhaps equivalent to Steve Reich's early pairing 'Come Out' and 'It's Gonna Rain'. There are strong similarities between the two, both wrapping indeterminate compositions around ghost voices. 'Titanic' used the tune the band famously played as the ship went down. With 'Jesus' Blood', as Bryars explained in the pre-show talk, finding the originating voice was much more the product of synchronicity.

Helping to sound-edit a film on London's homeless, he happened upon a recording of a frail old man singing. Deciding to create music around the voice, he went back to try and find the fellow - but could not. Similarly attempts to source the original hymn drew a blank, and only then was it realised the old man had made it up himself. More, despite being recorded for a film, there were no images of him. All paths led back to him then came to an abrupt halt. The tape was simply all there was, making it almost ;literally a ghost voice. In the performance the conductor would signal to an off-stage tape operator, as if gesturing to spirits.

Despite the M-word being used in the title for the programme, Bryars confessed to feeling somewhat saddled with the term. And indeed in our last look at him we saw how different to Reich and Glass he really was. Reich's 'Different Trains' is set to human speech, but captures brief utterances to let their cadence create a rhythm. (In that pre-show talk, Bryars suggested “pulse-pattern music” as a more apt term for this.) Bryars lets the whole recording play out, creating surrounding music as the sonic equivalent of a highlighter pen, bathing it in response. The music somehow always appears to be swelling, new instruments and new elements joining in. (In fact, like extras in one of those old BBC battle scenes, they fade out and then reappear in new guise.)

Like many great works, it succeeds in straddling a contradiction. Bryars spoke of how he considered John Cage and Marcel Duchamp as influences, and the piece has some of Cage's sonic audaciousness – as if you can make music from any old thing, even the barely tuneful utterances of a tramp. And yet the music always works in response, never overpowers that original recording. There's no sense that Bryars has done something terribly sophisticated to a naïve source, so we should all now toast his cleverness with our wine glasses. It always feels like a collaboration, even if it is with a ghost. Bryars has said he intended to create a work “that respected the tramp's nobility and simple faith... the piece remains as an eloquent, but understated testimony to his spirit and optimism.”

It partly achieves this through the music itself being so hymnal. Bryars made a point of noting his chosen instrument was the double bass, and his compositions tending to low sonority. Perhaps, rather than Reich or Glass, the closest comparison would actually be the most recent – Feldman's 'For Samuel Beckett'. Even if Bryars is much more melodious than Feldman's austerity, there's the same combination of the sombre with the rapturous. However, as commented last time and a point taken up by Bryars in the talk, he is much more of an English composer. If there's a quietness and simplicity to Feldman, there's also an austere epicness to him. With Bryars there's the word he used in the quote above - an inherent understatedness. And this places him, in every sense, in tune with an old man singing with a frail voice. It's the combination of that understatedness with indeterminacy that earns the piece's title – a softly spoken power which never stops.

'Jesus' Blood' was the only Seventies work of the programme and, with one other exception, all else was post-millennial. Bryars has kept that keen melodic sense over the years, and the more recent works incorporated subtle shifts. Alas, however, in that time he's also become more conventional. 'Jesus' Blood' left me thinking “genuinely hymnal”. While with the other pieces my thoughts were more along the lines of “very tasteful, very sophisticated”. Bryars spoke of how he has extended the length of 'Jesus' Blood' as technology has allowed, from LP-side to CD length. And at times I found myself wishing they'd sacrificed some of the other pieces and chosen something longer than the half-hour they gave it here.

It may be the paradox of 'Jesus' Blood' has become a trade-off. Some of his other Seventies works were much closer to Cage's Dada iconoclasm, much more anti-music. With his signature works, the balance was struck just right. While now that side is almost absent.

My favourites among these tended towards the smaller ensembles, perhaps best retaining that understatedness. 'The Flower of Friendship' in particular seemed to justify its title with some mutually supportive playing. It also epitomised Bryars' singular use of the electric guitar. If it looked strangely incongruous among the other 'classical' instruments on stage, it was played in so un rock-and-roll way it could almost be a brand new instrument. Its timbre was somewhere between a steel guitar and an electric piano, with a radiating rather than a strident sound.

And from one bass player to another...

(We don't just throw this show together, you know.)

SHOBALEADER ONE (aka SQUAREPUSHER)

Concorde 2, Brighton, Fri 23rd October

Only six months after seeing Squarepusher's solo set, he's here again with a live band. This is apparently their first live outing, despite releasing an album five years ago.

Both are deranged, freak-out dance music. But its remarkable how different the two things are. Less polar opposites than chalk and cheese, two things you couldn't get close enough together to compare.

With bands, its normally not a matter of how well they're playing but how well they're playing together. That's why the concept of a supergroup, where you just place the best bassist next to the best drummer and so on, was always such a bozo notion. If you want a visual image to pin it to, at the recent Melvins gig the twin drummers played on a conjoined kit. But of course that was just a microcosm of the conjoined way the whole band played, as if they'd become one entity. And seeing a whole band in Jenkinson's patented fencing masks, never one speaking to the audience, that seemed to similarly enhance the feeling of groupthink.

Whereas if you want a visual image of the Squarepusher solo gig... well the move 'Inside Out' might be close. Its like its finally become possible to go inside someone's head, and finding inside it an infinite space filled with impossibly grand and huge architectural constructs. Like there's no intermediaries between thought and action.

The live set picked up and discarded genres like it had music history on speed dial, opening with roots reggae but within minutes morphing away from it. The predominant style was probably muscly Seventies funk shot through with frenetic jazz, bass lines skittering around the number rather than just lying in place. The best track, perhaps strangely for so noted a bass player was led by a hauntingly ambient guitar line.

And as a band they work very well indeed. Had this been my first experience of Squarepusher's music, I would have been very much impressed. But compared to the solo set it felt more rooted, more regular, easier to relate to music you'd heard before. It was like Jenkinson trying to channel his mind through group consensus involved taking on a standard language, which stopped his thoughts being so singular. Maybe not all kids play better with others. It was also a strangely short set, perhaps about fifty minutes – leading to some audience disbelief.

Should anyone reading this know more about Squarepusher's back catalogue than me, what was the set mainly composed of? I listened to a few tracks from the one album on-line, which didn't sound so much like the gig. (More song-like than groove-based.) But many tracks seemed to get instant audience recognition, so I'd guess it was mostly old solo stuff reworked.

From London...

Mentioned in dispatches! Having previously enthused over Acid Mothers Temple not once but twice, Hey Colossus and the Melvins I don't really have much to add from seeing them again. Apart from an hour being too short a time for AMT's immersive psychedelic soundscapes, to the point where I thought the audience might collectively refuse to go home. But instead of overlooking such good gigs altogether, let's at least celebrate them with some YouTube clips. (The first two, usually enough, actually from Brighton.)

Coming soon! More of this sort of thing...

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY GETS THE NEEDLES...

Okay, that's a mash-up of "gets the needle" and "gets to the Needles". It's still the best gag you're getting today. Latest Isle of Wight pics up take us to the South coast - Ventnor Botanic Gardens, Alum beach and the iconic Needles. Full set, as ever, over on Flickr. More to come as we head up that West coast…

THE WOODENTOPS/ MORTON FELDMAN (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

THE WOODENTOPS

Prince Albert, Brighton, Mon 12th Oct

It was strangely fitting for the Woodentops to reappear midway through BBC4's 'Story of Indie' series, even if they weren't featured in any of it. Because, let's face it, how many times in the last quarter-century has someone said to you “I've discovered this great new indie band”? So perhaps we need reminding of the golden times when the word meant the Smiths or the Cocteau Twins.

Not to reduce those years to a formula, but it often took post-punk's low-fi squattage industry aesthetic and combined it with tuneful pop cheer. Post-punk had been great, of course. But it was something of a relief to no longer have to look dour and disdainful all the time, and finally admit you had heard of the Sixties after all. Guitars, so long expected to sound awkward and angular, could even jingle if they chose. And the Woodentops' early singles were classic examples of all this, a shotgun marriage between melody and cacophony, so rambunctious and exuberant that the shuffling beats and skittering drums seemed mid-way to a skiffle revival.

Back in the day, I remember a housemate convulsing with laughter at a Pseud's Corner entry in 'Private Eye'. Some music journo had told a tale of Jack Kerouac thrusting his dick into a hole in the ground, and asserting “the same primal energies drive the Woodentops!” I said, “but the thing is, they do!” and he looked at me like he often did and went into another room. They seemed a band who existed for the sheer love of playing, who had (in the name of one track) a 'Love Affair With Everyday Living'. Which must surely make them the polar opposite to Gang of Four.

Alas, indie proved as short-lived as post-punk. 'The Story of Indie' picked Aztec Camera is their example of indie having its lo-fi edge sanded smooth until it sounded just like more Eighties music. After all, how could you keep your quirky charm in an industry designed around packaging you? But the Woodentop's first album 'Giant' took the same mis-step, swapping the home-made for the shop-bought. Finding myself a disappointed purchaser, and being in those days rather rigid of mind, I swiftly decided they'd “gone commercial” (a lesser sin than “turned Nazi”, but not by much) and lost all interest in them.

Perhaps consequently, this was a gig I wondered whether I'd take to or not. Concern which only mounted when on the day I discovered they'd be playing 'Giant' in its entirety. A practice I've never been keen on, over an album I never liked first time round. But with my ticket was already trousered, along I went...

And it was a storming set! Its not often you catch up with a band thirty years later, and find they're performing the tracks much better than the album you have at home. Perhaps their home was always the live stage, and they merely had the misfortune to fall into the gravity of Eighties production. Proceedings suggest an album where the rough should really have run with the smooth. 'Good Thing', even here, is perhaps too polished to leave much of an after-taste. But 'Love Train' was surely always meant to sound this way, put together more with spit than polish, served up by a band so fresh you'd imagine they were just starting out.

Frontman Rolo is so avuncular and engaging a character, he seems to be making the whole thing up even when reading lyrics off a sheet. Indeed, seeing them on the opening night might have even been the Goldilocks moment, when the set isn't yet learnt by rote, when everything was still part up in the air.

The emphasis on 'Giant' did mean there was less time for those classic early singles. My personal favourite, 'Well Well Well', was bypassed, as were the B-sides which delved into more intense, frenzied post-Velvets territory. But as they close on an extended version of 'Move Me', spirits undampened by the decades, its hard to hold a single negative thought in your head.

(Digression time: Another feature of 'Story of Indie' was how, in those days of 12” sleeves, the look and design of a record became as integrated part of the picture as the sound. Which it did. All Cocteau Twins sleeves had in common with Smiths or with New Order covers was their uniqueness and recognisability, while almost never containing pictures of the bands. And the Woodentops belong with the above, artist Panni Bharti gouging, nailing and glueing naïve and iconic images from the most basic of art materials. They're collected on the band's website here.)

That encore of 'Move Me'...

… and from back in the day...

FELDMAN: 'FOR SAMUEL BECKETT'

London Sinfonietta

St John's, Smith Square, London, Sat 10th Oct

Before we get to that title piece, let's start with what in less salubrious surroundings would be called the support acts. Both of which, I'll have you know, were world premieres.

Laurence' Crane's 'Chamber Symphony No. 2, The Australian' I confess to struggling with, mostly due to its structure. It ceaselessly chopped and changed between a jaunty brass-driven section and something quieter and more sombre, centred on the double bass and piano. Each just seemed to arrive to interrupt the other, while either might have sufficed in its own right.

Marisol Jimenez's 'Memoriam Vivire', conversely, was something of a discovery. She used found instruments (plucked wires and so on), but rather than juxtaposing them with the sound of conventional instruments combined the two - as though to her ears they were equally new. Brass, for example, was often little more than amplified breath. It became like listening to the rudiments of music, like the whole thing was being rearranged from the bottom up. The music seemed to be almost auto-assembling, sounds combining without the obvious presence of a composer's hand. The sense that all this was somehow just happening made it all the more compelling.

The programme is next visiting Jimenez's native Mexico, and she briefly spoke to explain she'd composed the piece in support of ongoing protests there. (Though unfortunately the speakers were poorly miked and it was hard to pick out most of her words.) There doesn't seem much of her work online as yet but this piece is very much worth a listen.

An associate of John Cage, Morton Feldman is most associated with indeterminate composition and minimalism. The latter was a label he always decried, and certainly he's quite unlike the extended arpeggiating of Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Their music is active and in its own way rich, for all that its uninterested in conventional development. While Thomas Patteson defines Feldman's approach as “less is less”. Wikipedia says that in his early years he was influenced by Webern, and his music has music of serialism's sense of stasis. (A stasis which I can find unendurable in its 'pure' serialised forms.)

While the Sinfonietta seem commendably keen to broaden the appeal of this music, I've previously had misgivings about their running through indeterminate works a little too quickly, as if concerned not to scare the horses. Thankfully they allowed this piece to run for almost an hour. (Though other pieces of his last up to six.) And, in another difference to Glass and Reich, it isn't divided neatly into movements or sections but ceaselessly reiterates one main theme.

The same span as an average TV episode might not seem lengthy, but when combined with so stripped-back musical input that time does start to stretch. A little like Riley's 'In C' its built around a heartbeat supplied by a single instrument, here a two-stroke pluck on something which sounds like a harp without looking much like one. Other instruments do nothing singly but cluster re-cluster, like simple shapes shifting and recombining.

Its variation rather than progression, but once your ear's tuned into it the effect is literally hypnotic. Not in the sports commentator sense, it genuinely has a hypnotic effect upon you. As Alex Ross comments Feldman used “vast forms” because “he wanted listeners to stop thinking about form altogether and lose themselves in the harmonic material”. Your ear simply gives up on duration as something beyond it, and listens more closely to what's happening right now.

Were the piece not dedicated to Beckett I don't think I'd have ever thought to associate it with him. Rather than his bleak absurdism, its character is to be simultaneously unearthly and serene. It feels like being on some hillside some early morning, watching waves of mist cross the landscape, taking parts of the world away then putting them back. It has the terrible yet compelling grandeur of the sublime without the usual triggers of Romanticism, without evoking the shapes or sounds of mountains and waterfalls and all the rest of it.

Reading a little about the piece afterwards, I discovered i) every proper commentator seems to disagree with me about Beckett (Ross wrote “the connection to Beckett's austere, depopulated landscapes was easily grasped”), and ii) Feldman composed the piece shortly before his death in 1987. And if the first of those bewilders me, the second seems to make perfect sense. Rather than the standard business of your life flashing through your eyes, like a photo album on fast-flip, its more like arbitrary demarcation lines dissolving you're able to get some glimpse of the eternity beyond. Its like Blake's line “every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite”.

Thomas Patteson wisely noted “all music can be understood as a kind of commentary on the passage of time. Most music constructs time in ways analogous to our everyday experience: from the clockwork regularity of the Baroque orchestra to the thumping heartbeat of dancefloor electronica, music builds on and reinforces our natural perception of time. Feldman’s music seems to negate this. In its non-metric, floating quality, it challenges our comfortable sense of chronological proportion. And yet, the unfolding of musical events is not random. There is a 'flow' to Feldman’s music, as undeniable as it is impossible to pin down.”

Let's leave the last word to the man himself: “I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it … except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life … if you're into it.”

The evening's being broadcast on Radio Three's 'Hear and Now' sometime in November, so you'll be able to judge for yourself.

'SICKERT IN DIEPPE: THE ART OF MODERN LIFE'

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

(Yep, another art exhibiton reviewed after it closes!)

For Foreign Shores

An accessible destination even in Sickert's day, Dieppe was once a fashionable resort – a mecca for holiday-makers and a haven for expats. The artist first visited it as a child, made it his honeymoon destination in 1885 and lived there from 1895. But more, the show boldly claims that “it was in Dieppe that Sickert formulated some of his most important painterly techniques and pictorial strategies”. As if it was as much a rosebud to him as Tahiti was for Gauguin.

His initial influence, however, was Whistler – to whom he was even apprenticed. An artist who, in all honesty, I know even less than usual about. The show cites 'La Plag, Dieppe' (c. 1885, below) as one of these early works. The sea, very often, is simply a setting for a painting – a backdrop for the actual subject, or at least we see human figures in interaction with it. Check out for example Monet's 'Jardin a Sainte-Addresse'. Human figures fill the foreground, the sea but one section of the perspective, and even then is shown busy with boats. Sickert, we're told, mixed with the fishermen and even learnt their local dialect. But the subject of his sea paintings is very much the sea itself. All else arranges around it, both boats and human figures pushed to its periphery. The different shades of the sea become the work, in a painting only one step away from a tone poem. (Our pal Wikipedia cites Whistler as a proponent of Tonalism.)

The story picks up as we're told “it was in Dieppe that Sickert became affiliated with French Impressionism”. Which makes sense. At that time Impressionist art didn't just feel frightfully modern and continentally chic. Fidelity to subject, then a new notion for an artist, tied their art to French soil. A French way of looking at things combined with a way of looking at France.

Meeting Degas in 1883, he fell under his influence and began to turn to “direct painting” of more naturalistic settings. (Perhaps remarkable in itself, for Degas was notorious for being truculent and reclusive.) 'Dieppe Harbour' (c. 1902, below) is perhaps a good example. The sea is no longer a central colour field but a murky depth lying beneath a deep harbour wall - at the base of a tall painting. It's no longer vivid and shimmering but built up by thick dabs of grey and deep green. The whole painting characteristically displays what the show calls a “low tonal key”. His palette seems simultaneously deep and muted – frequently returning to ruddy browns, burnt oranges and cold greys. Whistler's disinterest in human figures is retained, however - we see the hotel on harbour-front but the figures before it are dwarfed.

A Nation At Unease With Itself

Let's take the next two pictures together...

'The Fair At Night' (1902/03, below) has the recognised Impressionist sense of verite. We're not outside the picture plane dispassionately peering in, we're made to feel we're there on that street with that bustling crowd. The awning and buildings are angled and cropped, giving a sense of immediacy rather than a detached and calm composition. And yet at the same time the crowd's collective back is to us - we've no way of joining it. This is a paradox which will come back again and again in Sickert's work.

While 'L'Hotel Royal Dieppe' (1894, up top) has the strangest of colour schemes. Beneath an eerily pink-purple sky sits a strangely green-hued hotel, in front of which flags hang rather than flutter. The figures on the lawn, as a contrast to the barely individuated crowd above, stand isolated. The two most foregrounded, in nearly the only use of white in the painting, look almost ghostly. This was painted before Sickert was living in Dieppe. But still it has a haunting, end-of-season feeling. The viewer's mind travels from the end of a day, the point where objects seem to radiate luminosity rather than have solidity, to the end of the season. And quite possibly the end of an era.

Its worth considering how unlike the popular image of Impressionism these works are. They're some way from the verdant gardens or promenading dandies depicted in bright, vibrant colours. How much of this is accurate and how much it's merely a popular stereotype will have to wait for later. (And we should remember Degas did not necessarily fit the model, to the point where he took umbrage at being described as an Impressionist at all.) But its this popular view of the school against which Sickert's works would have been seen. And had he stuck to a more orthodox take, held to its themes and tone, he would have most likely been a mere copyist. Perhaps an accomplished one, but still a footnote in art history.

We should remember Impressionism had arisen thirty years earlier, and society had not stood still in that time. The show makes much of Sickert's associating with 'decadent' artists, including during his stay in Dieppe - such as Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. As curator Katy Norris puts it in the Pallant House magazine: “His strange and unsettling imagery was paralleled in the work of decadent writers and illustrators that typified the fatalistic attitude of the fin de siecle”.

As a catch-all name for a social trend rather than a movement which emerged clutching a densely worded manifesto, the fin de siecle isn't something that could be precisely defined. The Tate, however, call it “an umbrella term” which “expresses an apocalyptic sense of the end of a phase of civilisation.”

Society had been transformed in the previous decades to a then-unparalleled degree. It had been possible to witness and believe in uninterrupted linear progress. Now people were starting to ask, perhaps too late, where we were being taken. And many feared that social harmony had been left behind, that we had made ourselves degenerate. A rootless cosmopolitanism and a disconnected sense of self-absorption seemed to go together in making up the modern mind, a sense of being everywhere and noplace.

And bohemian artists, with their introspection, with their dangerously new ways of looking at things, were perhaps the lightning rod for this trend. Wikipedia cites Munch's 'The Scream' as “a prominent cultural symbol of the fin de siecle era”. Though there are two other (semi-silhouetted) figures in his picture they're distant, removed from the screamer. It's not a painting conveying what the screamer might be screaming about, its subject is given in its title – the scream, the subjective experience of the artist. Sickert takes up similar themes but essentially faces the other way - he paints not the outsider artist but society in the act of not cohering. To misquote John Major, a nation at unease with itself. So,with 'The Fair At Night', we're there with the crowd on the street, yet at the same time removed from them.

We should remember that at this point, England still regarded Impressionism as dangerously modern. (France in general was seen as the centre of the wild and the scandalous.) So works such as these would have seemed both commentaries on and examples of this 'decadence', records of their own condition. (Disclaimer: Sickert was also exhibited in France at this time. Whether he'd have been seen in a similar way in the home of Impressionism will have to stay an open question.)

Back to Churches

Perhaps counter-intuitively for a 'decadent' artist one of Sickert's main subjects was the churches of Dieppe. He returned to paint them again and again, at different times of day and under different lighting conditions. Once more this shows an Impressionist influence, for Monet had repeatedly painted Rouen Cathedral in a similar fashion. (Though Sickert's motives here may have been part financial, he called Dieppe his “only goldmine”.)

In 'La Rue Piquet' (1900, above) the angle of the view part-obscures the Church while the long shadows suggest a particular time of day. The indistinct, suggested figures may well have originated from sketch, where he started filling in the horse and cart only to see them driven away. However his decision to then keep them in (while moving them off-centre from the original drawing) gives the work a ghostly sense, as if they are fleeting and impermanent against the solid stone. The sky's confinement to a small snatch of grey at the upper left adds to the architecture's imposing dominance.

In 'Rue de la Boucherie with St. Jacques' (c. 1902, above) the colourful shop awnings suggest at human life. Yet the square before them is devoid of activity, its literally in the shade of the Church. The expanse of browns is as uninhabited, as much a space in it's own right, as the sea in 'La Plag, Dieppe'. In these works, it's the Impressionist sense of verite which is both present and contrasted. The light and shadows fix the works to a distinct time of day, yet there's also a sense of timelessness. The result is quite Gothic. The churches are never isolated from the town, as if they're being made the subject of study. Yet at the same time they dominate the town, often towering over it.

The show describes these works as “a conversation between the mysterious and the commonplace”. Yet is it more of an awkward silence? One way of reading them would be to see the human activity as forever milling around the churches, but never finding their way in. They’re almost akin to the way Paul Nash and others painted megaliths, something irrefutably present on the landscape yet at the same time inscrutably strange.

Not all of Sickert's town studies are in this style, however. For example 'The Basket Shop, Rue St. Jean, Dieppe' (1911/2, above) shows the Impressionist luminosity in full force, and is almost a bookend to 'La Rue Piquet' - its street running in the opposite direction. There's even another cart. And this time the street does not run up against an imposing church but opens to a bright skyscape, with a telegraph pole pointing upwards. The feeling is one of forward motion, as if we're being pulled into the painting., Human figures, however, are still de-emphasised. Similarly, in 'Une Dieppoise' (1900) the titular figure is foregrounded but then sheathed in shadow to the point she's almost silhouetted.

New Horizons

If there was any doubt over the show's main theme, that Dieppe was Sickert's muse, it's confirmed by the next section. For its not set in Dieppe at all and is by some margin the weakest in the show. In 1912 he bought a house in Envermeu, some miles inland and took to landscapes. Mostly these show how social subjects were his forte. The best of them is 'Dieppe Races' (1920/6, below).

While the horses are an active blur, one caught by the edge of the frame, they're kept to the lower quarter of the composition. The audience are not raked but placed directly behind them, visible only in the gaps between the racers. Over half of the picture becomes graduations of skyscape, similar to the seascape of 'La Plage'. Nature takes the place of the churches in the earlier pictures, with human activity a blurry and transient presence before it.

The Twilight Life (Company Loves Misery)

Following the death of his wife in 1920, Sickert was back in Dieppe. Though he only spent a further two years in the town before returning to London, its this brief period which may well yield the best material in the show. The nearest comparison from the already-seen works would be 'The Fair At Night'. However, Sickert retreated not just to Dieppe but from expansive landscapes to interiors.

In 'Chez Varnet' (1925, above) the three foreground figures are all in profile, the one furthest left unceremoniously half-chopped by the edge of the frame. They look neither at us nor one another but off, to something we can't see. While they look present, there in front of us, its almost impossible to actually focus on them. Sickert seems more interested in gesture and placement than what they might actually look like.

Like his mentor Degas, Sickert is less contrasting the mysterious with the everyday than finding the mysterious in the everyday. He paints not grand events but 'normal' scenes. Yet by virtue of them being paintings, we expect his paintings to be explicable, poses and objects arranged in such as way as to convey a meaning. When they don't the normal becomes compelling inscrutable. Every now and again, you may be in a pub or cafe and suddenly become fixated on people on another table – trying to discern their relationships from what little you see of their interactions. 'Chez Varnet' gives this sense. The exhibition notes find an insightful quote from Virginia Wolfe: “The figures are motionless, of course, but each has been seized in a moment of crisis; it is difficult to look at them and not to invent a plot, to hear what they are saying.”

The bright light through the windows, however, makes this an unusual work for the period. To the interior he normally adds the nocturnal. Take for example the artificial light of Baccarat – The Fur Cape' (1920, above). It's suggested Sickert was obliged not to show the gamblers' faces by their unwillingness to be witnessed, engaging as they were in so twilight an activity. If so, he made a less a virtue of necessity than made it the subject of the painting. With the great block of the back of the chair, the titular cape and wide-brimmed hat, Sickert mixes verite with anonymity. While there's little open space the image is less claustrophobic than entangled. The lines of composition close in on one another, leaving no room for the viewer. It's a table without a place for us.

'Au Cafe Concert, Vernet's Dance Hall' (1920, above) does centre it's composition on the singer, and shows her addressing the crowd open-armed. But the line of tables that lead to her are cluttered with the night's detritus to the point they make a veritable obstacle course. Not least amongst this is the jutting elbow of a slouched figure, who manages to have his back to us while paying no attention to her. Night life is not only shown as something seedy but strangely isolating, the promise to get out of yourself and meet people unfulfilled, everyone trapped in their own reverie.

Wikipedia is unusually eloquent on the theme: “For his music hall subjects, Sickert often chose complex and ambiguous points of view, so that the spatial relationship between the audience, performer and orchestra becomes confused, as figures gesture into space and others are reflected in mirrors. The isolated rhetorical gestures of singers and actors seem to reach out to no-one in particular, and audience members are portrayed stretching and peering to see things that lie beyond the visible space. This theme of confused or failed communication between people appears frequently in his art.” Again in the Pallant House magazine, Katy Norris suggests mourning for his wife acting as Sickert's spur for these works. There seems some evidence, however, the earliest of them were planned before this.

'L'Amoire A Glace' (1921/4, above) translates similar themes to a domestic setting. The woman is placed beside, not in front of, a mirror. Hands clasped in her lap, she looks almost like an attendant. Her face is towards us but, almost in shadow, is indistinct and barely delineated. This cropping allows the mirror to dominate the frame, even suggests the room is arranged around it, yet neither do we really see it reflect anything. After thousands of paintings of a woman looking into a mirror, Sickert paints us a mirror.

We saw earlier that a recurring theme, both of Sickert’s art and his era, was self-absorption. And, in a scene boiled down to a woman and a mirror, we have the theme in its purest form. But it’s a thwarted self-absorption, someone not connecting even with themself. The central yet removed mirror is an echo of the imposing church walls we saw earlier. (And if there seems a detectable taste of misogyny to all this women-and-mirrors business, then you ain't seen nothing yet.)

An attentive disciple of Degas, Sickert was adept at something we don't commonly associate with Impressionism - but probably should. He could create apparently straightforward-looking works which have an indefinable, beguiling quality to them. He took this further by playing elements against one another. This gives many of this works a strangely unsettling quality. We're invited into them at the same time we can't feel at home within them. And this quality is intensified by the difficulty the viewer has in figuring out just how they feel that way. You’re not even completely sure that something is wrong, you just can’t shake the nagging sense that all might be not quite right.

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY IS STILL ON THE ISLE OF WIGHT...

…walking down the East coast to be precise. As ever with the photos, full set on Flickr.

Coming Soon! Back to the visual art (probably)...