Kings Place, London, Sat 18th Jan,
Being much taken by the trancey, Krautrock-style duo Tomaga after seeing them support Wire, and by Pierre Bastien after he demonstrated his Meccano-style music-making assemblages at the Fort Process festival, I was keen as a keen thing to see what they’d manage in combination.
Bastein didn’t exactly play lead, but as he produced sound from pipes, blown paper and the like Tomaga wove themselves around him. Last time they had matched each other for instruments, like musical symbiotic twins. This time they had more designated roles, Valentina Magaletti on drums and Tom Relleen on bass and keyboards.
As Bastien’s assemblages need to be set up in real time, the extra players keep the momentum up. And, though divided into distinct sections, they ran the set right through. I was particularly impressed by Magaletti’s drumming, circular patterns which marshalled the power of repetition without every sounding mechanical or production-line.
By lucky happenstance, I picked a seat close below Bastien and saw his hands at work. The very opposite of a laptop artist, all his music-making devices are open and upfront. There’s nothing up his right sleeve, nothing up his left. And the way the music is built up from these most basic of components helps to make his creativity feel so accessibly infectious. The only possible drawback to the trio was that the keyboards could at times obscure who was playing what.
Last time I described Tomaga as “simultaneously ceaselessly inventive and astonishingly tight”. And I don’t think I could put it any better. This gig is part of a short tour. But if I didn’t know otherwise I would have assumed the trio had been playing together for years. Only the truly talented can make hard things look so easy.
But don’t take just my word for it…
IANCU DUMITRESCU
Cafe Oto, London, Sun 25th Jan
Iancu Dumitrescu ia a Romanian Spectralist composer last sighted (by me, anyway) at the Colour Out of Space festival of “exploratory sound”. I am often found arguing that this music isn’t as inaccessible as some claim, that it’s less about acquiring arcane knowledge and more to do with Yoda-like unlearning of popular music conventions. Well, in Dumitrescu’s case I suspect he is somewhat challenging, is not the most obvious jumping-on point for newbies and is unlikely to be introduced by Jools Holland in the foreseeable future. If you still want to hear more, stick around…
The UK version of the Hyperion Ensemble (effectively the band to his bandleader) played without notation, eyes affixed to the man. Which gave rise to the strange sense they were playing by interpreting his wild gestures alone. A sense intensified by him throwing in vocal commands, including at one point “no melody please!”
And afterwards I realised the venue blurb promised a night “consisting of some of the UK’s finest improvising musicians… conducted by Dumitrescu.” What’s more, “there is a kind of presence of the musician in this music that is both different from, and connected to, the presence of the musician within an improvising group.” So perhaps that thought had some basis.
Pieces are brief by composer standards, but intense. It’s like a zip file of sound, a whole barrage of musical information being compressed together. Dynamic range is vast but quick to progress. At times it feels almost like watching a film composed of inter-cut still shots, at others like one of those spiking graphs that show up on monitors in hospital dramas. There’s quieter sections, but even they are imbued with ominous tension. It was quite definitely more out there than the majority of noise rock gigs in its remorseless disregard of anything approaching musical convention.
The night had started with an explanation that his music’s made up of live instruments, processed sounds and pure electronics. Indeed, Dumitrescu jumped between conducting and laptop activity during the performance. The point, I’d surmise, is to take you to the point where you stop hearing those elements as separate things. Much classical… your actual, back-in-the-day classical music was at once too imitative of nature, too keep to capture and duplicate specific sounds, and too unable to capture its overwhelming strength. It was always grasping at trees and missing the wood.
There was a brief Q+A, literally one question. And while impeded by imperfect English, his argument seemed to be “whole galaxies are born and die. We are not among the cosmos’ concerns.” In contemporary conceptions of the unstable universe nothing, from atoms to stars, is a truly solid object you could plant your feet on. Dumitrescu’s pieces can feel like that universe in miniature, constellations forming and then as quickly breaking apart, chaotic in the moment and yet suggesting at a structure beyond our senses’ scope.
As if to emphasise this point, the night began with a piece by Ensemble member Tim Hodgkinson named after the Tuvan word for universe. Though mostly ‘Dumitrescu-like’, it had no electronics and felt primarily percussive. The Hyperion come readymade with two drummers, but that was found insufficient and the double bassists slapped their instruments as much as their strings while, conversely, the pianist took directlyto his strings. It was a cascade of shards of sound, music not built from blocks but still marshalled into a powerful force.
The second night of the residency this non-Metropolitan type was unable to make. Naturally that’s the night all the YouTube clips are of. It included a rare occasion of the man himself playing a solo cello, but I prefer these three double basses…
…and this, from Paris and nine years earlier, is a little closer to what I saw…
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