MICHAEL GIRA + THURSTON MOORE
Barbican, London, Wed 30th March
In an earlier review of Michael Gira's main band, Swans, I compared them to Sonic Youth. Or rather contrasted them, as two bands who
burst from the same New York noise scene but from there travelled in
two different directions. So what could be both stranger and more
opportune to see guys from both bands on the same bill? And, for people most
associated with noisy punk music, both playing solo guitar.
I've always imagine Thurston Moore as
someone working within a band structure, someone to whom music was a
sum of its parts. (Sonic Youth weren't someone's band, in the way Swans are Gira's.) And yet he works surprisingly well as a solo
guiatrist, rather than reducing his tracks into songs he's happy to
drift off into long instrumental sections. (In fact clocking up only
three numbers in a half-hour set.) I didn't know the album the tracks
are from (2013's 'The Best Day' apaprantently) but
I could believe they don't sound vastly different played as a band.
Perhaps that's not altogether surprising, though known for detuned
noise guitar there's always been something serene, something
transcendent about him waiting to be let loose.
If Moore had become a one-man band, by
way of complete contrasts Michael Gira stripped all his usual
accoutrements away until he was only left with himself. Then, as if
not having his usual gang around to back him up was audacious enough,
he then elected to perform with the house lights up. I don't know
well his Nineties/Noughties anti-rock-band outfit Angels of Light,
but had expected the set to naturally gravitate towards then. As
things turned out it was dominated by Swans songs, old and new. He
insistently strummed his guitar, hand moving only minimally on the
fretboard, letting his voice and the songs themselves do the work.
It's not a move to everyone's taste, it
seems, and a small but noticeable section of the audience grumbled
their way towards the door. Maybe it was a Marmite manouvere, because
those of us who remained seemed to take to it. At times Gira's music
has seemed built to invoke the complaint of parents everywhere, “it's
just a noise”. Well now we've heard it without the noise and it
just exposes how well written the songs are. Stripping the band away,
throwing the emphasis on the songs, makes the thing less forceful but
more intense. If Swans were a raging fire this was a white-hot coal.
It may not be the way I'd introduce a newbie to Gira. But it's an
effective way to hear him.
As the reformed Swans have departed
further and further from song structure, perhaps he'd
circumnavigated music and was coming back to it from the other
direction. If so, then oddly it was the newer – as yet unreleased –
songs which worked the least well. One was an account of a sexual
assault based on a real incident. (Which I think you'd have guessed
even if he hadn't announced it as such.) Gira's songs not normally
straying to the sunny side of the street, that might seem standard
subject matter. But Swans have always operated in a less literal way,
their style taking the metaphysical and rendering it visceral.
(Perhaps that could be their strap line, “Rendering the
metaphysical visceral since 1982”.) And some of that is lost.
The songs are so
back he even closes with 'God Damn the Sun', from
an album he's long-repudiated - 'Burning World'.
It's an album I love, even if its own author often disagrees, so was
to hear a track from it live was a rare bonus.
Not from London...
MUGSTAR
Green Door Store, Brighton,
Fri 1st April
Having already given Acid Mothers Temple the soundbite description “the Japanese Hawkwind”, I suppose I now need to tag Liverpool
space rockers Mugstar as “the Scouse Hawkwind”. Whether there's a
Flemish Hawkwind or a Geordie Gong is not as yet a matter of record.
Of course it gets bit catch-all to
lazily label a genre after one of its best-known proponents, and can
override important differences between the bands. (Though Mugstar
were fans enough to release a record of Hawkwind covers, split with
Mudhoney.)
Acid Mothers Temple, who are perhaps
best seen as a collective, do a whole lot of floating in space.
Whereas Mugstar are much more a band, a power trio
pressed into the role of sonic cosmonauts. Which kind of makes sense.
In those days of yore, when they were sailing off for shores unknown,
what's the first thing they did? Get a tight working crew, of course.
And the drummer and bassist, bonding over their facial hair, maintain
an incredibly tight rhythm section. As Krautrocky as they are
Hawkwindy, they'll shift between tribal pounding and laconic riffs
with ease, but rarely go in for free form.
The guitarist, sometimes doubling as
keyboard player and space chanter, supplies more of the transcendent
stuff. Which does at times make him something like the gaffer,
delivering the presentation while others are doing the hard work. But
the guitar solos never last too long, and for the most part the
players pull together.
Though there's CDs for sale, this is at
heart live music. It's three guys taking off and then taking it in
again. The only drawback is the same one as with Acid Mothers Temple,
that modern venues aren't kitted out for this kind of sonic
cosmonautery. It just takes time to reach the stratosphere! Blake
wrote of seeing infinity in the palm of his hand and eternity in an
hour. But he didn't have an hour to write a poem before the club
night started.
THE PHYSICS HOUSE BAND
Patterns, Brighton, Mon 28th March
Remember the Convertacar Professor Pat
Pending used to drive in 'Wacky Races'? The
Physics House Band are a musical version of that. They're able to
segue swiftly within one track, say from a cruisin' saloon car to a
turbo-charged racer. But very often they'll sound like the
Convertacar while it's... well, converting. When
it was a bewildering blur of motion lines, where it seemed it could
transmogrify into anything.
And if I seem to be clutching at old
Sixties cartoons as a means to describe them, then their approach to
music does seem more contemporary than me. They are, I suspect,
another bunch of young shavers who sound the way they do through
their music history being YouTubeable. It's like a kind of
anti-modernism, where rather than the past being past you have it all
on speed dial. And that manifests most strongly not when they change
the chassis but swap what's under the hood. As two of the trio handle
both guitars and keyboards simultanbeously, tracks can be driven
either by riffs or by repetitive beats. There was always a Berlin
wall-like divide between those in my day.
And there's an upside to this. The set
never settles, becomes a sitting target, leaving your mind free to
tune out and check back in later. It's always breaking into something
new. Then, when you've near forgotten about the first thing, going
back to that.
Yet for all the times they segue neatly
from one thing to the next, there's others where something just
crashes in on what's gone before, and it seems less like eclecticism
than channel-hopping. Looking back at what I wrote over when I last saw them, it seems I
said “Smart people, sometimes they're allowed to be smart... Just
don't go making a habit of it.” When they don't, they're
exhilerating. Yet when they do, they're merely clever.
Not from Brighton either...
MICHAEL FAIRFAX + YORGIS SAKELLARIOU
Upper Salon, Caroline of
Brunswick, Brighton, Fri 18th March
Despite previously having found some gems amid Aural Detritus, this
was the first night in their new concert series I've made. I suppose
I really should get out more.
Yorgis Sakellariou took the front of
the room only to announce that he wouldn't be taking to the front of
the room and would be playing with the lights down. He encouraged us
to keep our eyes closed. People sometimes complain about laptop sound
artists being nothing to look at, so giving nothing to look at neatly
circumvates the problem. No singing, no dancing – okay? The result
was like some sonic version of 'Tron', as if we'd
been pulled inside the sound.
He describes his practise as “founded on the digital manipulation of environmental
recordings”, and notably one of his releases is titled 'Mecha
Orga'. There's a recognisability to human sounds that gives
them a warmth, a kind of aura, like when your eyes light on a human
face. By treating and mixing those sounds Sakellariou takes you to
some uncanny valley where everything is defamiliarised. It's similar
to that dream where you go back to somewhere you used to know well,
and yet it seems strangely different. It even became hard to tell the
street noise and pub chatter beneath us from the piece, and I
overheard him confessing afterwards he'd decided early to incorporate
them.
Michael Fairfax, as a day job, makes
sound sculptures out of trees. (Me, I process paperwork.) But he also
makes his own strung-wood instruments, on which he improvises. These
acoustic sounds (albeit amped up) made for a fine contrast with
Sakellariou's electronics. Rather than blending the strange with the
familiar, his sounds were strangely familiar – almost but not quite
like sounds you're used to.
As he swapped instruments and twiddled
knobs his set had a vast sonic range, from 'small' sounds blown up to
some mighty thrumming. It's much like the way a film can close in on
something like a paper clip, but also show a wide-angle shot of a
mountain range. However he confined himself to his guitar-like
instruments, leaving some still-stranger devices untouched, which
restricted the range in timbre more than he might. (He said
afterwards he wasn't sure why he'd done that.)
Avuncular in nature, he finished the
gig by offering us all the chance to try out the instruments for
ourselves. And after a little English reserve, we took him up on it.
You don't get that at the Albert Hall!
Still not from Brighton, Fairfax providing a
live soundtrack to the classic 'Colour of
Pomegranates'...
Coming soon! More gig-going adventures...
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