Looking back at what I wrote after first seeing Chelsea Wolfe, at the Mutations
festival, I find I was much taken by her music. While taking some
exception to her Gothy, too-much-mascara look.
Which in retrospect
seems too much like reviewing a book by the shade of it's cover.
True, I tend to react to the trappings of Goth the way they do to
sunlight. The main problem with it is that too often it's just
the dressing up, just empty theatrics and painted dark. But then your
actual dark is plentiful enough with Wolfe. (Quite literally so. It's
one of the most underlit gigs I've been to in recent years.) Enough
to convince you she's yer actual creature of the night.
There's a cool quote from her on Wikipedia: “"I do have a hard time sticking to one
genre, and honestly I prefer it that way. I'd rather be free to
experiment and make the kind of art I want to make than be easy to
define." It the goes on to list her influences as “doom metal,
drone metal, black metal, gothic rock, folk and dark ambient”.
Bar
folk, none of which are sounds which you associate with songwriting,
yet she seems continually able to pack them into songs. In fact, by
'folk' I suspect people mean that packing - the means by which she binds those
sounds together - rather than any kind of Sandy Denny vibe. (Though at
the same time it can sometimes sound like later, louder Portishead.
Wolfe's tremulous voice in particular can channel Beth Gibbons.)
Guitar lines can be distorted to the
point where there's really only the distortion.
Yet their scrunchy metallic rhythms don't collide with melodies so
much as co-exist. Songs don't progress so much as deepen, like storm
clouds thickening. And the sound is so expansive it's great to hear
in a live setting.
If I say there's something underlyingly
adolescent about it all, I mean it in a positive sense. In the sense
of feeling that immensities are contained within you, which you're
compelled to find a way to release. And in our nostalgist, classic
rock magazine era, we probably need to cling on to the sense that
it's music about stopping you getting old and accepting.
An old-ish clip but a track from the
current album... (And like I say, underlit.)
(The latest in a long line of
art exhibitions reviewed after they close)
“Ensor was a scenographer,
depicting a strange world that was neither tangible nor imaginary,
populated by inscrutable beings”
- Curator Luc Tymans
The Sunless Seaside
I first saw the work of the Belgian
artist James Ensor in an exhibition devoted to Carnival -
'Carnivalesque' at Brighton Museum, back in 2000.
Fittingly enough, for as we'll come onto, Carnival was prevalent in
his work, almost always at least implicit. Now any Carnival buff
knows the festival to be inextricably connected to it's ostensible
opposite - Lent. And so Ensor starts with Lent. Officially that's the
wrong way round, for Carnival was supposed to yield to Lent. But then
he was a somewhat contrary character, so let's follow his lead.
Take for example 'Afternoon in
Ostend' (1881), where figures sit primly at afternoon tea,
or the murky oil of 'The Bourgeois Salon' (1880,
above). The light at the window is able to strike up some white
echoes straight in front of it, but the single figure is determinedly
turned away. And the exteriors were little less oppressive. In
'Large View of Ostend (Rooftops of Ostend)' (1884,
below) those titular rooftops are crammed into the lower fifth of the
canvas, huddled below a tempestuous sky. Not unlike Sickert's Dieppe, there's a sense of unease to Ensor's Ostend, made
stronger for never being quite identifiable.
It's not an approach Ensor ever
entirely abandons. 'Flowers and Vegetables'
(below), dating from 1891, is that rare thing – a still life which
virtually leers out at you. The ruddy reds and lurid greens must make
for the most feral-looking vegetables in art history, as throbbing
with life as any Van Gogh nature scene. Set against that those
delicate blue bits of porcelain, it looks like the crusties have
taken over the garden suburb. You can uproot nature and even fetch
bits of it indoors, but it remains untameable.
But the underlying unease becomes more
palpable and more fantastical as Ensor went on. For in a remarkable
sea change, almost all of the successive works are devoted to what
'The Bourgeois Salon' shutters out. What is
repressed is shown as returning, quite frequently erupting. In
'The Haunted Furniture' (1880), an early example,
spirits rise from the sides of a great heavy wardrobe.
Skeletons At Work and Play
'The Skeleton Painter'
(1896, above) is one of many images using the skull or full skeleton.
The title is most likely some double-edged self-referential joke, the
skeleton who painted skeletons. We don't see the figure's hands, so
can't ascertain whether this is an animate skeleton or just someone
in a skull mask. Skulls and masks are placed around the studio,
suggesting either is possible. Though the eyeballed skull atop the
easel seems more animate than the figure. It's widely seen as a kind
of self-portrait, which would make that easel skull a kind of totem.
(He'd also create the etching 'My Portrait as a
Skeleton', 1889.)
Notably, there's no attempt to give the
skeleton any shock appeal. It's entirely unlike covers to Gothic
novels, with their long bone fingers stretching towards shrieking
maidens. For one thing, sunlight pours in the room. In fact it's the
'natural' 'Bourgeois Salon' which takes place in
the gloom, rather than this 'fantastical' work. And skeletons are
always painted naturalistically, or even casually, like they belong
to their environments. (See for example 'Skeleton Looking at
Chinoiseries', c. 1888/90.) TJ Clarke of the London Review of Books commended Ensor's
“ability to convince us that horror and absurdity are familiar
events, behaviours we all recognise from our daily round…
Garishness and matter-of-factness were faces of the same coin.”
The show suggests a local origin for
this imagery. The ongoing development of Ostend had disinterred mass
graves, the residue of the Eighty Years War, reminding us that the
past is rarely actually past. Remember the old Fall song lyric where
unearthed graves are found to be “disease ridden, dusty, organic -
and psychic”?
But it does also seem to be tapping
into the same themes as Mexican popular art. As I said of the British Museum's 'Revolution on Paper'
exhibition of Mexican prints:
“The skeleton figure acts
paradoxically, throwing emphasis onto the figures’ accoutrements
(bosses’ top hats versus peasant caps), whilst confirming that
these are only accoutrements for almost identical figures….
reducing us to the skeletons we all are underneath.” The face is
just mask for the skull, which less represents death than the
inescapable baseness of life.
Which is possibly most visible in
'Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring' (1891,
above). What's striking isn't the armless war between jaws, like the
figures are squabbling birds. Or even the way their tugging is
emphasised by the angle of the clouds. It's the fine-looking clothes,
the bizarre busby hat perched on the bone head. A human in a hat like
that might even seem deserving of our respect. Whereas a skeleton is
a ghoul, a savage mockery of status.
Masks Alive
Following an an 1908 description of him
by Emile Verhearen, Ensor has become known as “the painter of
masks”. To the degree where the show insists this is too limited a
frame, which needs busting open. Nevertheless, the motif is recurrent
in his work.
As already seen in 'The
Skeleton Painter' Ensor would casually mix his skull and
mask motifs up. And we perhaps shouldn't try too hard to disentangle
them. An artists' work rarely reduces to a neat set of symbols, which
you can come along and fix a key to. Nevertheless, while Ensor is
able to convey different expressions through skulls, the mask
inherently gives greater variety and so becomes a broader symbol.
And as with the skull, the mask had a
local connection for him. Ostend was home to the annual Ball of the Dead Rat, a carnivalesque masked ball. He even grew up, and
later made his studio, above a shop where his mother sold carnival
masks and similar goods.
And what did the mask mean in Carnival?
Not merely the way we see them now, as a form of disguise. The masks
were often associated with characters, and to don one was to
effectively become that character. And if anything Ensor pushes that
concept further. The masks often appears as the embodiments of
spirits, as if they were themselves animate. As Laura Cumming wrote in the Guardian, Ensor's work is “a
theatre where the masks can live their own existence.”
'Intrigue' (1890,
above) is so famous a work it's not just the poster image but has the
show named after it. (The last time I can think of that happening was Fuseli and the Tate's 'Gothic Nightmares' exhibition, back in
2006.) And here the figures seem not just living their own existence
but pressing into ours, massing at the front of the work like they're
about to erupt into our space. In particular the red coated woman
with the baby seems to be projecting out of the frame, while the
black slitted eyes of the main figure seem to be not even looking out
as us but on a point beyond us. The figures are less alive than
charged, animate energy virtually seething with
malevolence. The work almost literally exudes menace.
There's not a sliver of human flesh to
be found, the two hands gloved, the high collars - particularly that
raised black collar on the main figure - obscuring any join at the
neck. It's reminiscent of the trope in films such as 'The
Invisible Man' (1933), in which a figure is unwrapped to
reveal only an absence. Similarly, in 'The Astonishment of
the Mask Wouse' (1889, below) some figures seem to have had
their spirits desert them, leaving inert masks attached to husks of
clothing on the ground. The hand of the main standing figure is
upraised, as if she might magic motion back into them.
‘The Intrigue’can also be traced back to an event in Ensor’s biography, but accurate or not that’s scarcely the point of the work – it’s
source not explanation. Overall, and typically of Ensor, the
painting's neither explicable as a scene nor reducible to a set of
symbols. And that’s kind of the point. It presents a kind of
erupting irrationality, against which we’re like the defensively
doubting rationalist in the horror film, stuttering about some pat
psychological explanation. Ensor himself declared “reason is the enemy of art.”
And this is not just to do with
Carnival but the childhood sense of animism, the feeling every object
in the world is possessed of a spirit unknowable to you. This can
seem charming, as we see children form attachments to inanimate
objects. But at the time, as those thoughts run through your head, it
meant even a domestic scene could seem charged with danger.
The Crowd As Collage
Okay, some social levelling,
masks...what else do you need to create Carnival? Of course, there
has to be a crowd. A party needs invites. And as if by magic Ensor's
other most famous work, 'The Entry of Christ into
Brussels', foregrounds this. (Represented here not by the giant, four-metre plus painting of 1888, but an 1895
etching, above.) Though Christ can be found in there if you search,
the work's more concerned with the figures which surround him.
They're a motley array, a jumble of individual heads – this is
crowd as collage.
The dominant notion has become that
there is something reductive and deindividuating about a crowd, that
being in one somehow makes you less than what you are. Yet when
you’re in a crowd you’re part of it and
yourself, at one and the same time. We all know this from experience.
And this precisely what Ensor depicts. They're not a deindividuated
swarm conjured up by popular phrases such as 'mob mentality', they're
individuals amassed.
And there's a juxtaposition between the
crowd and the neat military line of soldiers behind them. (A device
Ensor re-employs elsewhere, for example in 'The Strike',
1886.) They're like the buckling bottle whose task it is to contain
the frothing, fermenting alcohol. The crowd are shown at a physical
distance. But that's not how the work feels. Ensor
depicts crowds the way some artists do the sea, their teeming feels
like an invitation to dive in. To quote Laura Cumming again: “Ensor
is festive even when devastating or macabre”. The bawdy and the
grotesque are bedfellows.
And if Ensor was the painter of
anything, it wasn't masks but crowds. 'Skeleton
Painter', showing his studio strewn with masks and skulls,
can give rise to the notion he had a hermetic world-view - his
imagery cast no wider than the room about him.
And so he comes to be depicted as some
reclusive outsider artist, such as in Timothy Hyman's description of him as “working alone through
long, silent days in his fifth-floor attic high above the family’s
carnival shop.”
And yet, news though it may be to some,
the art world is not the world. Yes, Ostend insulated Ensor from the
art world, which he found confining and regulating. But that doesn't
mean he hid away from Ostend, like some recluse. Let's remember his
family shop was not selling antiques, but was outfitter to an ongoing
carnival tradition. And you can see that in the work, a love of the
crowd far too visceral to be theoretical.
There may, however, be one or two
elements of truth to this. Ensor is known to have anarchist
sympathies, and he went on to influence political artists, such as
George Grosz. And at times these can come out in the open. (For
example, the full-size version of 'Christ's Entry'
contains a banner proclaiming “Vive La Sociale”.) But he was not
primarily a political artist. He less saw the crowd as an instrument
of social change and more loved it for it's own sake, luxuriating in
it's disreputable tumultuousness. And of course these days we are
more wary of making clear, causal connections between Carnival and
revolt than others have been in the past. (Carnival yields to Lent,
remember?)
Further, Ensor exhibits a paradox
between an artist with a highly personalised cosmology, and one
influenced by folk traditions. And the two often come together in his
style. His compositions are often strangely arbitrary, heads and feet
lopped off by his borders like he ran out of room. Just as some
artists are Just Abstract Enough, perhaps we need a name for artists who are
Just Outside Enough. Artists who, like Ensor, had formal art training
and could draw conventionally when they needed, but didn't feel at
all beholden to it. Timothy Hyman suggests the term “exceptionals”, presumably
drawing on the twin meaning of ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’.
'The Baths at
Ostend'(1890, above), for example, is so crammed with comic
incident it's not entirely dissimilar from children's comic artists
such as Leo Baxendale. (If a more lewd variant.) In fact,
particularly with it's use of coloured pencil, it might even be a
child's drawing. It's noticeable how much emphasis there is on
voyeurism, with gapers down virtually the whole left side and the
monocled figure in the lower centre.
Not Even Past
Try again to find the actual Christ in
'Christ's Entry Into Brussels'. There's a short
cut, you can track him down by his halo, it's yellow an echo of the
sun. This Medieval device, which had long since passed from art's
vocabulary, makes a return. Similarly, 'Adam and Eve
Expelled From Paradise' (1887) uses a local Belgian
landscape for this Biblical fable. It's total uninterest in fidelity
to the Middle East again echoes Medieval art.
And while 'Christ's Entry'
might hide the title star in a crowd, Ensor often focused upon him.
For example in the late 'Christ In Agony' (1931)
or 'The Man of Sorrows' (1891, above) – where
he's painted as if saturated with ruddy reds, to the point where it's
hard to tell head and hair from blood. In fact it wouldn't be too
hard to believe the thing had actually been painted in blood. There's
none of the solemn dignity we're used to seeing given to Jesus, those
harshly over-exaggerated features look more savage than John the
Baptist.
To Ensor as with the Medieval artist
the halo's a transpiring symbol, yet the face and body of Jesus is
very much a real thing. His blood is not a religious thing, it's
thick red stuff. Like many Medieval religious images, it's more
macabre than moral.
All of which seems very much at odds
with our idea of art of this time. Tuymans comments that
Carnivalesque art had originally rebelled against Classicism,
conveying order through it's neat rules of composition. Whereas for
Ensor the dominant culture was Modernism, most of which he volubly
detested. It really comes back to the image of the disinterred
skeleton. Just as reason was a thin skin over the irrational, the
present was a barely coping mechanism for holding back the past. The
bodies just don't stay buried.
It's hard to find a term for the art
history he refers to. I guess the point was less that it was an
integral era, named and scrupulously annotated, and more that his
interest went to the gaps – past-Classical yet pre-Romantic. People
have sometimes seen an inheritance from his geographical forebearers, the Flemish Renaissance. There's Breugel's interest in the
culture of the common folk, and Bosch's phantasmagorias. When people
compare Ensor to Bosch perhaps they’re seeing a similar collision
between the Medieval and the contemporary, for all that the two
artists were working in different eras.
Held in the Academy's upstairs Sackler
gallery, this is a relatively small exhibition, comprising about
eighty works. So it's strange when curator Luc Tuymans sacrifices
space to works by Ensor's contemporaries, a piece by himself and at
one point a pointless fake video where an actor portrays Ensor
perambulating on the seafront. Tuymans is himself an artist,
considered well-known enough for his name to become incorporated into
the show's title. And while it is often artists who understand other
artists best, perhaps this sort of indulgent decision-making comes
with celebrity curators.
Conversely, the show does give space to
Ensor's prints and drawings. Though paintings are often held by
curators to trump other media, Ensor himself saw them as equally
important. In fact he prized his prints the highest, because they
were the easiest disseminated. Overall, while it would have been nice
to see a few more Ensors at this Ensor show, when even today he is so
often overlooked there's never any reason to knock seeing Ensors.
Coming soon! More
art exhibitions reviewed after they have closed. (While stocks last.)
If pressed to name my most favourite
band of all, I don't quite know who I would go for. But legendary
Krautrock band Can would certainly be on the shortlist. And now
they're... well, they're not exactly revived. In fact in the
programme, former keyboardist Irmin Schmidt stated quite firmly “I
hate revivals – revivals mean you reanimate something dead. That's
not what I ever did.” Instead, there's two separate sets – each
with it's own nature.
Which is probably all to the good. Rob
Young, who has just published a book about the band, comments on the accompanying podcast that many have tried to sound
like Can, but no-one has ever managed it. And in fact many of the
best bands where influenced by without being imitative of them, such
as the Fall or early Public Image. So it's the best idea for prior
participants to do something new, but in the spirit of what went
before.
In the first half, former keyboardist
Irmin Schmidt conducted a new orchestral piece, 'Can
Dialog', (co-written with Gregor Schwellenbach). And in
fact formally speaking Can were something of an anomaly in his
career, before their formation he was conduction, and since he's
mostly composed film and TV scores.
The most obvious point of comparison might seem Philip Glass' orchestral versions of Bowie. But rather than a
reworking in a new musical setting it was a whole new composition
which incorporated Can themes along the way. (“Weaving quotations
and motifs”, as the programme put it.) It was similar to the way
classical composers of old would incorporate folk tunes, even if in
Schmidt's case both were his.
The Can contributions mostly appeared
as melodies, floating through the work, often introduced by the wind
instruments. And, for a band best known for maintaining a groove, they
turn out to have quite affecting and memorable melodies. There seemed
to be quite long sections which were Can-free (unless my ears missed
them). But the orchestra would often play rhythmically of it's own
accord, stopping their appearances as feeling merely decorative. It
felt like Schmidt collaborating with himself, able to find harmonious
links between his elder and junior incarnations.
Those many chairs were then cleared
away and the second set given over to a rock band setting. As with This Heat recently, an enlarged ensemble (eight in all)
performed amended and updated versions of Can tracks. In fact both
gigs featured Thurston Moore on guitar. Perhaps he's just moved in
backstage.
If you were to say Can never had to
sound like Can, that might sound like an inevitable truism,
applicable to any band. Yet they weren't really a band for rehearsing
numbers until they were well-drilled enough to perform them. Given
their own dedicated practise space (in a castle), they'd improvise
freely then edit things down for release. And they rarely performed
numbers the same way twice.
Except you can over-emphasise all of
that. In fact the most incredulous element of the story, hanging out
in a castle, is the only unarguably true part. Like the Velvets, a
strong influence in the early days, they mixed free-form jams with
quite strong songs, and that combination is a large part of their
appeal. But it was a way of working which kept their playing organic,
like it was all happening in the moment. They were agile and sinewy,
not musclebound.
With Schmidt not rejoining the band for
the second half, Holger Czukay too ill to travel and the sad death of Jaki Liebezeit in January, original
vocalist Malcolm Mooney was left as the only actual Can member
onstage. Yet ironically he sometimes felt like a weak link, the
Mooney who'd repeat phrases until he'd go off into a trance state not
always present. And it seemed strange to watch him reading lyrics
which at the time had been arbitrarily plucked from thin air. It
worked much better when, rather than providing lead vocals, he'd fall
back in the mix, or when the players would take over entirely.
The twin guitars of Moore and James
Seawards (who plays in Moore's current group) were definitely
hypnotic and powerful. The twin drummers of Steve Shelley and
Valentina Magoletti could work just as well, but were over-utilised
and kept on their dual-powered, double-barelled setting too much. A
track like 'Thief', requires something more
intimate, not to be walked on with hobnail boots.
Were a Can tribute band to exist (and
one probably does), what might they sound like? I imagine they'd
learn the songs ably enough, but only manage a faux approximation of
those trance-out grooves. The most essential element of any band of
course being the most irreproducable – the chemistry between the
players. If anything this band was the opposite, quite ready to take
off and often majestic in flight, but less conversant with the songs.
It was 'Deadly Doris, 'Uphill' and 'You
Doo Right' which came across, rather than 'Thief'
or 'Mary, Mary'. Overall it seemed the
post-Velvets powerhouse Can who were being channelled. And channelled
superbly. But there were so many other faces to Can...
Waiting near me outside the auditorium,
two vikings in black hoodies babbled away to one another in German.
Every so often one would say “Throbbing Gristle”, they'd then
drop back into German. Then, a minute or so later, one would say
“Throbbing Gristle” again. While a sign on the door above them
warned of impending “high level sound levels and dense haze”.
I figured I was in the right place.
This marked my second chance to see legendary drone metal band Sunn 0))), and while they inevitably don't have quite the same impact when not
filling a small seafront club with their sonic force, so powerful as
to be physical, they remain an unmissable live experience.
Vocalist Attila Csuhar opened the gig
with some liturgical chanting, which he'd then mix in with more
guttural tones - part-way to throat singing. This section did, if
truth be told, go on a bit. In fact a fairly sizeable segment of the
audience didn't show up until it was ending, presumably forewarned
and forearmed.
But as that was the gig's only weak
point, let's focus on another aspect. Despite the band's signature
uniform of monk habits and customary banks of dry ice, I don't think
the intent here is really sacrilegious – like the sonic equivalent
of an inverted crucifix. In fact it's nearer to... well
religious, those mixed-chant vocals more intended
to compare than contrast.
Despite the band having arisen from the
black metal scene, despite their almost fearsome reputation as the
heaviest of them all, their sound isn't really oppressive. Like a lot
of religious music, it's actually elevating. Rather than relying on
any kind of shock effect, it's involving and even contemplative. To
the point where even us non-religious types find it takes us out of
ourselves. It induces a kind of aum state without any of the dippy
New Age shit.
For one thing, they don't let that
heavy tag hold them down and are quite happy to break with
expectation. In a lengthy mid-section the wall-of-noise guitars walk
right offstage and a quite plaintive trombone starts up. And if sludge metal has already been made a genre, I suppose there's no reason why we
can't also have sludge jazz.
Also, and more importantly, there's a
solidity – a kind of one-ness - to their sound. It's pretty much
pitched at the point where black metal becomes drone. It's difficult
and at times impossible to pick out individual instruments. Even the
keyboards, which are sometimes prominent, play neither above or along
to the guitars – they more play along to the resonances between
them.
While heavy rock tends to be blues
music with added volume Sun 0))) seem unrooted in rock tradition. In
fact in the programme they complain of how once-normal listening
practices have been undermined in the past forty years, like a
near-half century is just a bump in the road. Most noticeable by it's
absence, with neither bass nor drums there's none of the release of
rock music, none of the sense that music's a means to let it all out.
In fact, despite their strong overlaps
with noise music, they demonstrate how rockist the noise scene can
be. They don't just dress like monks, they're as disciplined as them.
Though the singer stands to the front, neither he nor the others
gives off any impression of individual personality. Even when they
sup a beer on stage, a single bottle is passed between the lot of
them like a sacrament.
Founder member Stephen O’Malley has described their sound as “more raga than … rock. And despite the fact that the walls were
literally shaking from volume, it was actually quite a blissed out,
psychedelic session.” (Though speaking of a particular album.)
While in the programme Csihar compares it to “the music of the
plants, and that's why it's so slow and enormous”. Which seems
reminiscent of Andrew Marvell's old poem “My vegetable love should
grow/ Vaster than empires and more slow”.
Let's jump from Marvell to Elvis
Costello, who once sang “The truth can't hurt you, it's just like
the dark/ It scares you witless, then in time you see things clear
and stark”. He could have been thinking of Sunn 0))). There's a
kind of double trajectory afoot. What might originally hit the
listener as a sonic onslaught slowly transforms itself into something
serene, pummelling fists morphing into massaging hands.
Moreover,
from what I know of the earlier albums, that also fits the history of
the band - they were more abrasive and discordant at the beginning.
Which also fits the history of Earth, enough of an influence for Sunn 0))) to name themselves in a kind of
paralleling tribute. Or the way the doom metal of Sleep transformed into the trance of Om. To get to the light, it seems you need to go
through the dark tunnel.
And that half-transfer, half-dichotomy
is something you often see in art evoking the sublime. What first appears to you as an
overwhelming, pulverising force soon comes to feel like rejoining
where you really belong. Perhaps, were Turner alive today, he'd have
ditched his oils and joined a drone metal band.
SUN RA ARKESTRA
Con Club, Lewes, Wed 29th March
”They say history repeats
itself. But that's his story. My story doesn't repeat itself. Why
should it? My story is endless”
But then of course this is no regular
gig. It's not a matter of public record how Herman Poole Blount's
parents reacted when he told them he'd teleported to Saturn to
commune with the spirits there, and been told to devote himself to
music as a means to solve the problems of the Earth. They most
probably thought it was an elaborate excuse to drop out of college,
which was the first thing he was insisting on doing. But he went
through with it, changing his name to Sun Ra in the process, and
throughout his life stuck to that story and to his guns. (His
discography is this big.) He was more or less to jazz what Lee Perry was to reggae, where there's no point trying to
separate what was genius from what was lunacy.
And if Sun Ra himself ceased having
even a tangential connection to this Earth back in '93, the Arkestra
continues under the direction of Marshall Allan. (Who is himself 92,
having played with the Arkestra for 57 years.) After two successive
sell-outs, they ended up playing a three-night residency, of which I
caught the middle event. Living up to their “my story is endless”
promise they played for over two and a half hours, a completely
different set from the first night, and cheerily announced at the end
the third night would be something different again.
Those freak free impro days now seem
done and dusted, with band members even sporting music stands. The
set most matched Wikipedia's' Philadelphia period, a kind of cosmic jazz to match the
cosmic soul of the times. (The era the classic 'Space is the
Place' album came from.)
And in fact the downside of the gig
wasn't it falling into indigestible squonk but becoming tasteful
enough to have safely ported onto an episode of Jools Holland. There
were, I confess, points where it lost my interest.
But the highlights were... well,
befitting Sun Ra's cosmic aspirations I'd have to say higher than sky
high. Despite their daunting reputation, the Arkestra have a strong
melodic sense and the ability to form into a powerful rhythm section.
For a jazz band, they sure are funky! The brass in particular seemed
able to play along with the line, then each instrument find a way to
veer off into it's own thing while still holding that line aloft.
(And to think I once found Led Zeppelin tight but loose!)
The best tracks, for me at least,
started off with a vocal – somewhere between a repeated spoken
phrase and a chant. These were often cosmic aphorisms which would
probably seem platitudinously New Agey out of context, but in context
were like a foot sliding into a slipper. (And besides, the one quoted
up top does have it's appeal.) The ensemble would then work around
them, in a manner not entirely unlike Steve Reich's penchant for
finding music phrases in the cadences of the spoken word.
Perhaps the main thing is convey is
that it's not chin-stroking music to chew on, it's joyous, exuberant
and energising. If it doesn't quite teleport you to Saturn you can
almost feel your feet lifting from the ground. Space really is
the place.
This was from the first night...
And after seeing Sunn 0))) and Sun Ra, of course I then went to see Sun Kil Moon again. No, actually it was...
YAMATO: THE DRUMMERS OF JAPAN
Brighton Dome, Thurs 30th March
After seeing the Kodo drummers some three years ago, I am it seems becoming something
of a regular for Japanese drum ensembles at the Dome. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, there were many similarities between the two, above
all the same combination of absolute discipline and unleashed frenzy.
And it demonstrates what a timbral range can exist just from
different varieties of drum.
But Kodo's art had been very much a
martial one. You could imagine them arising as one at six AM on their
South Pacific island, and starting their morning practice by twenty
past. They were intent on what they were doing, single-minded to the
point of being cult-like.
Yamato are much more showbizzy,
sporting bright costumes over uniform black vests. There's stage
antics, visual gags, acrobatic playing, ample audience participation
and even individual personalities emerging from the players. At times
it did become so circusy I half expected a guy with a moustache to
come on, and hold a chair up to a mangy old lion.
But we're probably best taking that as
description rather than criticism. Being structured unashamedly like
a show gives things an ever-relentless dynamic. They barely stopped
even for applause. Perhaps they had less musicality than Kodo, but
they so successfully keep you watching you don't particularly notice
at the time.
My favourite moment was when the
drummers were joined by the Japanese banjo. (Which probably has some
special name, which probably isn't “the Japanese banjo”.) It was
an unusual pairing, which they were really able to make work.
This TV appearance is from some while
back, but gives a good flavour for what they do...
