Komedia Studio Theatre, Brighton
Monday 3rd April
Nina Nastasia is a New York singer-songwriter and longstanding John Peel fave. My previous attempts to see her have not always worked well. She appeared as part of a package tour where she seemed nervous and off. Then I ventured out on a night so freezing I was surprised the gig hadn’t been cancelled. To arrive at an empty bar and the news the gig had been cancelled. This was followed by twelve years of silence.
But now new album ’Riderless Horse’ has led to a new tour. It’s the first release for her to be playing solo. And you can see why, it’s been described as “her barest and most personal work ever.” She’s been open in interview about its origins, so it’s not too tabloidy to mention here. She broke with her manager and long-time partner over obsessive behaviour which became controlling, to find he’d killed himself the very next day. And many songs on the new album are directly addressed to him.
In the circumstances it seemed a somewhat churlish thought, but I wondered if it would repeat my last gig at Komedia, where Emma Ruth Rundle also played solo. Where the intimacy only intensified the intensity, until it became too much of a good thing.
And I always loved her band sound, with the violins which wailed on the edge of songs, like cats refusing to either come in or go out. I tend to think of her lyrics are planspokenly descriptive, with her singing style and musical style throwing the emotional filter over them.
She soon makes a comment about her ill-advised drinking whisky without water on-stage. But the night turns the other way around, and a single voice plus guitar fill the room without overwhelming. Perhaps because the songs were written to be played this way, perhaps because the have some tonal variety to them. ’Go Away’ is about as strong and strident a statement as the title suggests, which ’Blind As Batsies’ is by comparison almost jovial.
I assumed the new album dominated the set list, but checking afterwards it didn’t entirely rule the roost. The old songs slid in quite neatly with the new. Perhaps confirming Laura Snapes’ theory in the Guardian that this poison-laced relationship may have been her rosebud all along. (“This wasn’t foreboding songcraft but often completely literal.”)
So all in all, these songs of loss and despair led to splendid night for all. But my earnest wish remains to see her with a band. Even if I have to wait another twelve years.
From London the next night…
REICH/RICHTER
London Sinfonietta
South Bank Centre, London
Thurs 6th April
Over a decade ago, the Tate staged a Gerhard Richter exhibition. I intended to go, but didn’t. And up till now that’s all I could have told you about his art. In 2106 he made an animation of his art. Though rather than ‘animated art’ the the art’s essentially treated as raw materials for a new work. Starting with horizontal bands of colour, simple yet shifting. Out of which grow mirrored images, sampled sections of his artwork, developing like Mandelbrots. Then it slowly reverts to those strips of colour.
Steve Reich then put a score to it, and as the double headliner suggests we get the combination here. It’s slower-paced and more serene than the standard pulsing Reich, perhaps keeping pace with the film. The feeling is unhurried, late afternoon. Reich is quoted in the programme: “the structure of the music would be tied to the structure of the film”. Initially, when the film’s at its simplest, the score simply duplicates it in sound, then separates later.
Reich's also quoted in the programme on his connection with visual arts, pointing out that in the early days of Minimalism concert venues closed their doors but gallery spaces were more accommodating. And the music’s interest in structure over development proves the truth of this. With both sound and image essentially ‘abstract’ it becomes like a team-up rather than a struggle for dominance, a full-on synaesthesiac experience.
I wondered mid-piece how the sound would work without the visuals, then thought that a silly question to ask when I was getting the visuals. Listening to it afterwards I’d concede Reich has written greater works, but in combination it works very well indeed.
Julia Wolfe contributed what was essentially a modern composer’s version of George Harrison’s ’Only a Northern Song’. Based on a recording she heard of a brass section still very much in learning mode, she wrote ’Tell me everything.’ Which is a rollicking exuberant ride, like a toddler charging across a room, somehow always right in it’s wrongness. She’s quoted in the programme as finding it funny, which it is, but on the laugh-with side of the equation. It seemed to get the thinnest applause of the night, but as the record shows I’m a longstanding fan and was swept up in it.
In tribute to Mira Calix, who died too young last year, the Sinfonietta played ’Nunu’. Which may be her greatest hit, though never was there a more bizarre version of that label. It works its way up from sampled insects sounds, via plucks and taps into a mutated form of melodies. Otherly strange, but beguilingly so, enchanting rather than challenging. Calix’s relentless experimentalism didn’t always pay off, truth be told, but this piece wouldn’t be any more successful.
Julius Eastman was an entirely new name to me. Seems he was on the same New York scene as Arthur Russell, dedicated to eradicating the uptown/downtown demarcation, mostly by exploring the links between Minimalism and pop music.
’Joy Boy’ is a melodic piano pieces augmented by the most minimal contributions from the other instruments, until it’s impossible to hear individual lines apart from the complete work. Though sadly dying aged forty-nine, it seems he was prolific and it would be good to hear more. (Hint, hint, music programmers.)
Anna Clyne’s ’Fractured Time’ perhaps worked the least well for me. It’s agitated flurries seemed to want for something to work against, like a movement from a larger work rather than a piece in and of itself. Though it should be said if this was the weak link, it’s a sign of a pretty strong programme.
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