“They had it in for us, didn't they? Right from the beginning. Who'd have thought that we were so important..?” “To be told so little – to such an end – and still, finally, to be denied an explanation...” “In our experience, most things end in death.” - 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, Tom Stoppard
It’s something of an absurd question, of course. Absurdism, surely that needs to stay indefinable by definition. We can say it overlaps greatly with Dadaism. But they're not identical.
Dadaism inclined heavily to the political, to shock tactics launched against bourgeois society. Its schtick is to exist permanently in the interchange between nihilism and insurrection, never quite siding with either. While Absurdism is more existential, more likely to reflect a general modern or even human condition. Dadaism is volatile, a corrosive that will try to burn its way out of any container it's put in. Absurdism is weighty. Not in the sense of great literary worth, in the sense of rocks in your backpack.
Absurdism is best seen through the collision term 'passive protagonist'. The term protagonist has a double meaning – the central character, and the advocate or champion. Normally this doesn't trouble us too much, as the two travel so comfortably together. You could pretty much substitute 'hero' for 'protagonist' most of the time, without spannering any of the works.
But the hero brings meaning to his world, his actions ensure good will prevail and all the rest of it. While the Absurdist protagonist looks hopefully for meaning already existent in the world, and comes up confounded. In fact the two probably grew up together, as conjoined twins, each a reaction to the other, at least if the emblematic hero is taken as the purest form of the heroic type.
But… mirror, mirror on the wall… the awkward yet inescapable truth is that we live our lives more as Absurdist protagonists than heroes, we are more Josef K than Flash Gordon.
In Absurdism the protagonist is like a child on their first day in school, like a dreamer in a dream state. Mark Fisher summed it up: “This world was made for me, yet I have no place in it.” The adult often chooses to remember the child state indulgently, as a form of escapism, a break from responsibilities, filled with curious wonder at the beguiling world. But children often feel an all-thumbs frustration with what surrounds them. While it can have its effect on you, you are unable to work any traction upon it. Even objects do not seem obedient to you, while they seem so acquiescent in adult hands. You live in a world that makes no sense to you. And that is its power over you.
And so Absurdism’s passive protagonists are very often children or dreamers. In the case of both Carrol’s Alice and McCay’s Little Nemo they're both. Yet they don't need to be. Josef K from Kafka's ’The Trial’, is perhaps the ultimate passive protagonist. Nobody bothers explaining the rules to him, like the child in a particularly badly run custody case, and he can only surrender to the course of events.
In this way, though they may overlap philosophically, the Existential novels of Sartre and Camus are not Absurd. They take place in ‘real’ words, not just places we have heard of but which conform to recognisable rules. Absurdist works are always ‘unreal’, the most basic facts uncertain, and for that reason bleaker. Existential protagonists may discover agency, usually with great difficulty and at huge cost, but the task is not impossible. In Absurdism, reason is not just absent. The universe actively defies it, and works to repel it should you dare to try to wield it. The laws of physics themselves may decide to turn on you.
If there is an uncertainty to Absurdism, it lies in the humour. Because many Absurdist writers were held to be important, they were taken in deadly earnest by critics. Yet there's accounts of Kafka reading his works aloud to his friends, and all falling into convulsions of laughter. But it's not just that the humour is black. It's that even when you find laughter irresistible, you're never quite sure that's the right response. Is it just a defence mechanism on your part? It's like the adage about a laugh being a scream played at a different speed.
So if Absurdism has to contain humour, does humour have to contain Absurdism? Perhaps ‘have’ is too strong a term, but its common. As Priestley said: “Good clowns never try to be funny, they are eager, hopeful creatures, lost in a hostile world, and with great clowns the very furniture is menacing, never to be trusted.”
A friend, a huge fan of Laurel and Hardy, once told me that as a child he’d found them unbearable to watch. The way events constantly thwarted their plans seemed too much like real life. Which is perhaps why comedies can have ‘bad’ protagonists (Wile E Coyote, Dick Dastardly, Black Adder) whose perpetually failing schemes are dampened from invoking our sympathy.
But nothing can entirely remove the central dilemma. Absurdist fiction can appear like some sort of homeopathic remedy, by recognising the absurdity of the situation in a work of fiction we emerge better prepared to engage the absurdity in our lives. But does this work? Do we make Josef K our whipping boy to console ourselves that we would not become as weighted down as him, that we would fare better if given the role of protagonist?
THE MAGNETIC FIELDS Brighton Dome, Thurs 7th + Fri 8th Sept
Stephen Merritt (aka the Magnetic Fields) is another classic example of someone I’ve always intended to check out, only for them to finally show up in Brighton. Though this isn’t starting in the shallow end. The latest release, ’50 Song Memoir’, is an account of his life to date, delivered at a rate of one song per year. And he takes the bold decision to play the five-disc affair in it’s entirety, split over two nights.
He tells us from the start “autobiography need not be the same thing as truth,” and concludes in a closing song he’s probably remembered it all wrong anyway. And that kind of subjectivity holds sway. Despite numbers being pinned to years, there’s very little pastiching the music of past eras. And when such a thing is done, it’s because such a sound crossed his idiosyncratic path. So, for example, the song about his first band is self-parodically lo-fi simply because that’s how he remembers them. (He plays the same guitar he used for their sessions. Or at least that’s what he remembers.)
In fact, it’s perhaps the first of the four parts which works the best, focusing tightly on his cloistered childhood world. Childhood is always going to lend itself to an idiosyncratic perspective on things, and this is abetted by an eventful upbringing courtesy of a dotty hippy mother. (Including being taken to a Jefferson Airplane concert at five. I got Warwick castle.) One song’s called ’I Think I’ll Make Another World’, a childhood impulse I remember all too well, another starts with the line “My Mother found herself another jerk.”
All of which is emphasised by childhood bedroom built around him on stage, which stays up for the duration. A neat idea with the unfortunate side-effect of blocking out most of the other musicians. (Though the motivation might have been part practical, for Merritt’s hearing has become sensitive.)
This does mean proceedings dip a little as he ups and leaves home. Perhaps subject matter steers closer to standard song fare. But the main obstacle for me was the degree to which New Wave synth-pop intrudes. Which Merritt was much taken with back in the day. While I, despite being much the same age, decidedly wasn’t. (I saw those silly hairstyles and plastic beats on ’Top of the Pops’ and quickly concluded I preferred the old Romantics.)
It should be said this was more to do with genre than quality, so may have been a problem just for me. For a fifty-song album run right through, there’s precious little filler – exquisite melodies replacing one another as if on a conveyor belt. Overall, the music’s baroque chamber pop built around his even baritone voice. There’s a spaciousness to it, quite unlike the tightness of a rock band. And while there’s a signature sound most numbers managed to find their own identity. Musicians swapped instruments quite bewilderingly, quite often mid-song. Instruments sometimes so unusual they were pretty bewildering in and of themselves.
Despite all this chronologising (if there’s such a word), there’s something time-defiant about Merritt’s music. Synth pop aside, it’s a world in which everything in rock music since Elvis just happened in some other room. The matching of urbane lyrics to hummable tunes seems to stem more from the days of Cole Porter. The Dome theatre’s… uh… theatre-like-ness makes for a fitting venue for proceedings, but the ideal one would probably be some old-style Music Hall. (He flashes an image of such a place, from small-town California, up on the screen before one of the songs.)
The anti-spontaneity of the set is underlined if not made a point of principle, with Merritt’s twixt-song talk as polished and prepared as his vocals. Even the interval is precisely delineated, determined to last for precisely seventeen minutes. While the almost remorselessly pointed lyrics are frequently laugh-out-loud funny. (That staple rock theme of surfing is treated with “Boring people go surfing/ In those horrible shorts/ What’s the purpose of surfing?/ I believe there is none.”)
Rock music relies upon songwriting but tends to disguise it, the better to evoke spontaneity. And so songwriting becomes like seams on clothing, a necessity best worn concealed on the inside. Which can make it appealing to hear someone parading the musical equivalent of a fine-cut suit.
Leaving me disregarding one of my own prime pieces of advice – beware projects. In fact Merritt seems to do his thing best when writing to order, even when it’s a matter of him giving orders to himself – a one-man Tin Pan Alley. He’s the guy who wrote the self-describing ’69 Love Songs’ and ’i’, fourteen songs starting with that letter, helpfully arranged in alphabetical order. In fact the rock auteur in poised expectation of genius striking, that’s the sort of thing he’d probably dash off another pithy put-down over.
And that “other jerk” his Mother found? “He clearly hated Neu! and Can.” A line not just delivered as a sure-fire sign of jerkdom, but as he sang it Merritt crossed himself in memory of recently departed Holger Czukay. The gesture of an anti-jerk, if ever there was.
A song about the family cat, from Edinburgh...
LUBOMYR MELNYK Royal Festival Hall, London, Sat 9th Sept
Lubomyr Melnyk is Ukriainian pianist performing as part of the tenth anniversary of Erased Tapes. (A label of which I know almost nothing, save the CDs they cheerily handed to us punters.) He’s often associated with Minimalism, and true enough he does eschew dynamics for the mesmeric force of repeating patterns.
Though to me his music doesn’t have the pulsing quality of Minimalism, and while it’s effect on the listener might have some of it’s serenity it’s more at turns reflective and rhapsodic. His own prefered term is continuous music, having written a treatise under that title which I can’t claim to have read. It would be impossible to hear his music as a series of individual notes, with it’s loops and cascades, and so much sustain it becomes slightly hard to figure when he’s finished playing.
I tend to think of it more as a latter-day form of Romanticism. Where real-world analogues at Minimalism only really work at the extremes of scale, Melnyk’s sound does seem more attuned to water flowing or trees rustling. Though I’m not sure whether he’d appreciate the analogy, as between pieces he was keen to stress the metaphysical nature of music. (However much I liked the muisc, I did find his twixt-song talk rambling and somewhat hippy-dippy. Would that he had Stephen Merritt’s concision!)
The gig started at the somewhat unusual time of half five, which actually proved to be ideal – with the sun just starting to go down, after the bustle of the day was done. It reminded me of the way Indian ragas are written for specific times of day.
From the Lattitude festival…
MARTIN + ELIZA CARTHY The Ropetackle Centre, Shoreham, Fri 15th Sept
Having not only seen Martin and Eliza Carthy separately before, but even at this very venue, I can confirm that the father and daughter combo is the dream ticket.
There are those who think old folk songs need to be spruced up for modern ears. Whereas, rather than ribbons and bows, Martin Carthy wraps his songs up in brown paper and string. By the opening number, he was already singing about only having bread and water to eat, and only a chair as furniture.
It works because of his idiosyncrasies, which not only take time to work on you but could possibly pass you by were you not in the right mood. He’s like a radio station where not only is the signal faint, but the static is part of the process. A family accompaniment amplifies the signal, draws something out, while not losing any of the idiosyncrasies. The points where they sang together sounded extra special, the differences in their voices just accentuating the combination.
Eliza sounded mildly exultant in explaining that one number was a not a genuine folk traditional but a broadside ballad – an early version of Tin Pan Alley, where rush-written songs printed on cheap paper were sold in the street. Chasing the song rather than some chimerical notion of authenticity clearly appealed to her, as well it should.
Songs almost entirely came from the new album ’The Moral of the Elephant’. And if I didn’t like every number equally, they managed to work musical variety into what was a maximum of two voices and two instruments. My favourite moment was the segue between ’Grand Conversation on Napoleon’ and ’Moral of the Elephant’, which closed the first half.
Yes, Colour Out of Space has hit seven!
Self-described as an “international experimental sound and art
festival”, with the alternative guide Eyeball guaranteeing “maximum weird shit”. As ever, it
was a solid three-day festival and what follows is by necessity
sketchy and incomplete...
This year one whole day was given over
to Fylkingen, a Stockholm-based contemporary music collective who've been
operational since (yes really) 1933, with a record label from 1966
and venue from 1971. What was indicative about their group interview
was how insistently up the wrong tree it barked. Again and again it
was asked what they had in common while they continued to insist the
only answer was a negative – they didn't want anything that had
been done before, anything being done elsewhere. And, after seven
years, we can safely say the same is true of the Colour Out of Space
programme.
And so perhaps inevitably, as ever with
COOS, with the Fylkingen folks or over the whole weekend, things went
from the compelling to the excruciating, from acts you willed to be
over to those you never wanted to end. But it's worth taking the
rough with the smooth. For one thing, it's good to deprive yourself
of the fast-forward button. There's much music which I initially
hated, then through slow exposure came to love. Yet these digital
days, when you can so easily just click away, you can forage while
actually stay in your box. Which leaves the live setting as the only
chance music has to get to work on you. Admittedly, there wasn't one
instance of this happening all weekend. (Excluding acts which simply
took a little time to get going.) But still, it's a good habit to
keep up.
To misquote Frank Zappa, does humour
belong in noise? Interviewed for the previous Festival, chief curator Dylan Nyoukis
recalls his Mother attending and asking him if it was okay to laugh.
Which is pretty funny in it's own right. And despite the dour
stereotype some conceive of, many acts come ready-aware of their own
absurdity. But there's also no shortage of outright humourous pieces,
which serve to break up what might otherwise be a relentless
drill-bit intensity – the clowns between the circus acts. Perhaps
accounts of previous years have followed the tortured artists and
skipped over the funny stuff a bit too much.
And what's interesting is that even if
your only aim is to act ridiculous, it can be as hard to cut it as a
clown as a musician. Fylkingen's WOL, despite an
overlong preamble which was really just an extended setting-up,
managed to masterfully twang stretches of sellotape. And by
'masterfully' I mean their ability to perfectly pull the 'pained
concentration' face of the classical pianist, as if stretched tape
was their chosen means of expressing their art. It's never what the
clown does which makes him funny, it's his hopelessly serious intent.
Whereas Anne Pajunen
(also of Fylkingen) seemed to knowingly nudge you in the ribs with
her inverted-commas absurdity. Such performances seem a form of 'safe
space shock'. While Dada aimed to antagonise audiences this feels
aimed at in-the-know hipsters, ready to laugh along, wanting the
self-congratulatory part of outrage while avoiding any actual
outrage.
I wouldn't be sure in what category to
put W Mark Sutherland. Intoning Russian Futurist
poetry in amassed anti-languages, he jumped off stage, traversed the
auditorium and finally passed through the exit door. An usher
confirmed he was still proclaiming the stuff as he left the building.
Perhaps I'll cross paths with him in a couple of weeks, down some
Brighton sidestreet, as he continues to Klang and Zaum.
After I've seen a great impro
performance I'm almost apprehensive over seeing them again. Will the
magic work a second time? So it was with Angharad
Davies, who I last saw surpassing superlatives at Aural Detritus.
She was again playing unamplified
violin, this time in a duo with Lina Lapelyte. I
always take to a good visual corollary for the music in the staging,
and they placed themselves in the centre of the room, back-to-back
and circling one another. In impro music, too often one provides the
click track for the other to extemporise around. But here neither
took on a fixed role, but played continually interwoven lines – a
true collaboration. Their playing went from strident bowing to
ethereally exploring the edge of hearing and back again. Fantastic
stuff!
As said in previous years, acts which
are simply novel means of sound sourcing (such as sticking a contact
mike down your throat), quickly become merely gimmicky. An antidote
of sorts was Fylkingen's Marja-Leena Sillanpaaset -
who set up a power electronics system and simply stepped back,
allowing it to develop without her. It was powered, insofar as I
could tell, by a detuned radio which set up resonances among the rest
of the kit.
The willingness to surrender authorial intent, to trust
to the elements, was Cagean – even if the resultant music sounded
nothing like him. I looked round afterwards to see someone sopping
wet. He'd found it so oppressive he couldn't even stay in the same
building, so had stood it out in the rain. Whereas for me it was
exhilarating...
Phantom Chips was an
act of two halves. The first part reproduced the eternally
multitasking nature of the modern mind, unable to actually settle on
a single thought, like a TV flitting through a thousand channels as
if they all require watching at once. Something usually conveyed by
frenetic skittering beats, a device which only ups the ante while
actually providing a point of continuity. Chips' act was more like a
myriad of sound sources, overlapping without overtyping one another.
And, interestingly, rather than an anti-modern critique it more
conveyed the exhilarating buzz which embracing the electronic flow
can bring on.
Half-way through, she introduced her
patented squeeze-nodule and stretch-string instruments - which she
promptly handed out among the audience. Her infectiously cheery
Aussie character did undo the usual laptop stereotype, the outsider
who never actually steps outside the house. And her choosing a child
to conduct the various players was appealing. But it fell between the
stools of performance and workshop. Overall, I preferred the Phantom
to the Chips.
Another Fylkingen fellow, Mikael
Preys' music-and-film combinations seemed to me like
fractal black holes. The film seemed continually going into greater
and greater close-up as the music grew into greater and greater
intensity, like perpetually crossing over the event horizon with no
handbrake. You were metaphorically and literally drawn in at the same
time.
Cassis Cornuta
played an amassed array of eight Korgi keyboards. So many they just
had to be set up before the start of the evening, then left on stage
awaiting him - like Chekov's gun. Like a jumbo jet it was slow and
rumbling in take off, but once going it soared powerfully.
I wasn't sure whether Daniel
and Marcelvs L Lowenbruck's piece counted as sound art,
instillation or an exercise in crowd psychology. Only when we didn't
get handed questionnaires at the end did I start to rule out the last
one. Let's call in an environmental work, something which needed that
particular setting for it's effect.
In a darkened room they unleashed a
sonic maelstrom, including what sounded like farmyard genocide, while
a strobe randomly fired at us. Intoning performers weaved in and out
of the crowd. Passing in and out of hearing, it sounded like there
might be some 'stage' element you hadn't spotted yet, and people
started to shuffle around in search of it. Whereupon you started to
smell smoke... There should surely be a strong distinction between
jockeying for a view-spot and the flight instinct triggered by fire,
and yet the two did seem to readily combine.
Having endured some of the daftest
excesses of the industrial scene, I'm normally skeptical of 'extreme'
music, figuring extremes are normally where the dead ends are. But
whatever it was the Lownbrucks' did has some gut-level,
reason-bypassing effectiveness, like some old shamanic ritual
designed to scare you out of your old skin. And it's appealing to
come across works which are not photo-ops or YouTubeable. Sometimes
you really have to be there, however out of fashion that is.
Matt Krefting simply
played tapes. Yes, old cassette tapes on a range of old players, and
seemingly mixing them only via the bass and volume dials with which
they came. Given this lowest-of-lo-fi in the devices at his disposal,
I'm unable to explain how he made the sounds he did or how it all
worked so effectively. As far as I could ascertain, each cassette
became an instrument in a minimalist composition, a means by which he
could set up resonances between them. So the effectiveness of the
headline act on Friday night became not how many punters the vinyl DJ
got jumping, but how many bodies the tape player got reclining flat
on the floor. He didn't wish us pleasant dreams, but I'm sure most
had them anyway.
Whereas the Sunday night led to dreams
of a very different nature...
Though I know Romanian spectralist
composer Iancu Dumitrescu more by reputation, what
little I've heard has confirmed his high reputation. As the record shows, I'm an enthusiastic ignoramus where
Spectralism is concerned. So had the programme been him and Coldplay
on bongos, I'd have probably got myself a ticket.
Accompanied by fellow composer,
collaborator and wife Ana-Marie Avram for his
afternoon interview, they proved so gloriously eccentric, so fitting
of the deranged genius composer role, that I half wondered if they
hired character actors to play themselves. Perhaps while remaining
safely ensconced back in Bucharest catching up on soaps. I did manage
to pick up... at least I think I did... that while influenced by
Modernist music they were as equally steeped in the still-strong folk
tradition of Transylvania. (Which remains a part of the world not
overly troubled by modernity.) But they didn't seek to synthesise the
two so much as find their commonalities, re-opening the links where
classical music had driven a wedge. Those folk connections seemed to
lead to them feeling very much of an Eastern tradition, where Bartok
was a star in their sky while Messiaen not.
Looking back over my comments from
previous years, it seems every festival there is a storm to which I
compare one of the acts. Well, this year there was another storm
and... Actually, they sound less like a simple storm than a whole
weather system, an array of elemental forces at work. Playing with
their own Hyperiorn Ensemble, sounds would cluster powerfully
together then as quickly fragment – like violent squalls followed
by eerie calm.
Morton Feldman said the process of
creating music should seem a mystery to the listener. And that's true
here, even though we know a little of how Dumitrescu does it. The
ensemble play with standard classical instruments (a double bass,
timpanis), already pushed to the limits of their sound range and then
electronically treated by the man. My lowbrow comparison would be
that pure electronica can be like CGI in films. Anything can be done,
and then it is. And yet it feels somehow synthetic, removed from our
world. While with Dumitrescu you can never quite fix on a point where
the natural instruments lose their sound, and the resultant
experience is gloriously disorienting. Like Modernist music going
back to Stravinsky, it sounds primal and unearthly at the very same
time.
The middle worked solely featured
Avran's voice (well with a little of Dumitrescu's), so presumably was
one of her compositions. And while it was not as iconoclastically
striking as his, it was possibly even more effective. Her singing
would be multi-tracked and delayed, but every time it built up to a
crescendo it would twist into an entirely new direction. Perhaps
hearing the human voice break the bounds of possibility is more
effective than with classical instruments.
One day I hope to know enough about
Spectralist music to say something coherent about it. Partly so I can
call the piece 'Spectralism is Haunting Europe'.
For now... when caught out by the clock, Dumitrescu promised us he'd
return soon. Let's hope he holds to it.
Alvin Lucier is an American composer of
music and sound instillations, a former member of the Sonic Arts Union, who mixes conventional instruments with
unusual sound sources, and straight scores with process works.
Adam Bushell, doubling as participant
and compere, made for an engaging presence, introducing Lucier
without wrapping him up in over-fancy terminology. Though Lucier's
best-known for his Sixties work, the programme's oldest piece was
from 1980, while three were post-millennial. (Bushell explained this
was largely due to difficulties staging the more instillation-based
pieces.)
The programme ran the range for me,
with some I was waiting to be over almost as soon as they began, and
others... well, let's focus on some of those others.
'I Remember'
featured no less than eight participants who blew an array of objects
to create a drone tone, while in turn reciting memories. (The score
requesting you find and use your own memory.) Unamplified, you mostly
couldn't hear what these personal memories were, they barely rose
above the drone hum. But then I don't think they were the point. The
idea, I'd surmise, was to create an environment where it's made
easier for you to recall your own memories. The drone tones evoke a
sense of timelessness and instil a meditative state, while the
participants' memories merely joggers to make your own recall easier.
Except it was less a mechanism to dig
up memories, than a frame in which to consider memory. It's strange
after all the way we so readily accept our memories aren't neatly
logged like computer files, but weave in and out of reach like a
short wave radio band. And the way the voices arose, but only
semi-arose, from the drone static conveyed that.
'Precious Metals'
created quadrophonic sound by the simple expedient of placing
speakers in the four corers of the room, emitting more drone tones.
Brass players, stationed by each speaker, would break in at
intervals. Rather than have their own lines they'd always play
precisely on top of one another, so their various timbres would
combine. It was as if a single instrument was able to produce some
multi-level sound, like a 3D shape for the ears. It felt
non-durational, like it was some eternal piece which we were only
hearing a random section from.
But my favourite piece was the opening,
and most recent, number - 'Criss Cross'. One
string was permanently held down on two guitars, in fact the same
string for each, providing an even tone. The playing came through
simply altered it's tuning. Like much of Steve Reich's work, the resonances created from this
simple-seeming input became richer and richer as the piece
progressed. It started sounding like no guitars you'd ever heard, and
went stranger from there. Several numbers were 'duets' between sound
sources (for example another featured the human voice and an
oscillator), but of them this was by far the most effective.
It might be some kind of fool's errand
to try and find commonalities between the various pieces. But... if
Lucier's chiefly associated with the Sixties, his music couldn't be
less dramatic or iconoclastic, or sounding like it arose from a
cultural firmament. Instead it's calm, perhaps even sombre. And it
seems less formally experimental (in the “what would happen if..?”
sense) than evocative, interested in what effect it has upon the
listener.
Though I know precisely one Richard
Youngs album, the early 'Advent', my mind has
somehow formed itself into a quite definite notion of what he does. Wikipedia describes him as possessed of “a prolific and diverse output”, but more importantly he has a knack of bringing diverse sources
together and naturalising them. He can slip between folk, drone and
experimental styles like a thing between, what are walls to others
being nothing to him.
At this gig he clips down the guitar
neck, with a device I later learn is called a capo, then strums away.
As he works through the numbers he moves the capo down the neck
through each fret in turn, never forming a single chord with his
fingers. He calls this approach “high concept, low technique”.
With that single-chord strumming going on with the guitar, you might
assume it was being used as a straight man for some more active
vocals. In fact he mostly sings simple, straightforward phrases over
and over until they become like mantras.
Yet rather than being some academic
exercise it’s strangely melodic. You're never quite sure where the
melodies are arising from, but they're there. He's singing songs, of
sorts. He frequently enlists the audience as backing vocalists and
hand clappers, a sure sign of a folk gig. But like many old folk
songs they seem straightforward while at the same time feel slightly
elusive, like you can’t quite catch what’s going on.
And yet at the same time it doesn’t
seem entirely fitting for people to clap each track individually,
that they're really components of a greater whole. (Though I did
appreciate people’s perverse insistence to still applaud when
numbers were only a few seconds long.)
While this capo-driven main set was all
from a forthcoming album, the encore was described ironically as a
“greatest hit”. For the accompaniment this time he had stillless
to do with his guitar – placing it on the floor, he weighted the
strings down and modified the sound only by stamping his foot nearby.
Yet this was the nearest thing to a clear-cut folk song of the whole
set, and somehow felt warming when so much of his music is wintery.
That Wikipedia page also quotes him as
finding life performance “nerve wracking”. But rather than some
sensitive artist type his stage presence is avuncular and very often
genuinely funny. (This being the guy who titled an album 'The
Great Difficult Music Swindle'.) Which initially surprised
me, but I finally found it fitting. There’s an intensity to the
music but also humour, an awareness of it’s own absurdity without
being meta or ironic. Youngs seems capable of doing almost everything
at once, with the barest of materials. High concept, low technique
equals minimal input, maximal output. The guy's an original.
If you wanted a soundbite description
for Complicite's new show – a one-man performance with binaural sound and minimal
staging – try 'Brechtian radio done as theatre'. Simon McBurney
smartly starts this long and often intense performance with an
on-stage announcement to turn off our mobile phones, which segues
into some apparently spontaneous chat which precis many of the
themes. Yet he's up to something else too...
Michael Billington's Guardian review comments “shut your eyes at
any point and you feel... that you are in the Amazonian jungle”.
And McBurney does ask us to do precisely that - but briefly and before
the show's headed off for the Amazon. Precisely, I think, to get it
out of the way and have us open our eyes again.
He demonstrates many of the devices
he'll use, including two microphones – one for his and one for his
protagonists's voice – even though it turns out he doesn't need
them in order to switch. Many of his sound sources are
old-fashionedly direct, from the grand old days of radio, such as
crumpling a bottle of water to convey a water sound or – quite
gloriously reductively - crunching recording tape beneath his feet to
evoke tramping.
All this is foregrounded for two
reasons. First, the soundbite description above does mean “as
theatre”. The bare stage and the demonstrated sound sources keep us
reminded that this is a story we're being told. But at the same time,
if paradoxically, it gives them an element of magic. Electroacoustic
music sometimes verges on the animist, the assumption that not only
do objects possess spirits but have a 'voice' which can be unlocked.
And as we follow his protagonist, the photographer Loren McIntyre as
he gets lost among an Amazonian tribe, we get reacquainted with such
animist ways of thinking.
And like McIntyre get lost is what we
do. A dense work two hours long, with lines sometimes literally laid
over one another, it's quite hard to parse in a single viewing. This
is the best route map I could manage...
It's clear enough that as McIntyre
loses his old Western possessions he goes through a symbolic death
and rebirth, he goes through a shamanic journey. In fact, as he both
joins in a tribal rite and is given his own to embark on (acting
something like the play-within-a-play in 'Hamlet'),
this is fairly literally what happens.
The tribe could be read as externalised
aspects of his psyche, those antagonistic to his presence
representing his own sublimated wish to get back home, and so on.
This is most clearly suggested by the way the Chief, nicknamed
Barnacle, can communicate with him psychically, a voice inside his
head. Just as the binaural headsets are ensuring most of he play
happens inside our heads. Notably, McBurney has described McIntyre's journey as “an inner one”.
It might be telling that Barnacle dies,
yet we're told he is always “with” McIntyre. You can probably see
the problem coming. It suggests he's not really a character in his
own right, and that once he's fulfilled his role of passing on his
validation he can be extinguished. An Amazonian tribe aren't there to
represent another culture but map out the inside of a white
Westerner's head. Barnacle is the South American cousin of the magic negro.
But when McIntyre undergoes that solo
shamanic journey he sees himself as “the crack” in the fabric of
the universe. Barnacle leads the tribe as they enact a ritual,
burning all their belongings to get back to the beginning. The
implication is that we're all lost, we've gone
down the wrong path and need to retrace our steps. Yet McIntyre, who
after getting lost in the forest is there for literally that reason,
cannot commit to the ritual. Steeped in linear time he can only
interpret “the beginning” as death, the extinguishing of
everything as the end. McBurney acts out the destruction in an
onstage rampage, but fails to see it through.
Rather than McIntyre taking back home
some of that good-home-cooking simple tribal wisdom, gleaning new
feelgood phrases to stick beneath his e-mail signature, he disrupts
their lives. The storm that besets them represents his failure to
commit to them, the flood relating to his earlier vision of the crack
“from which our time might flood”. And this then segues into a
Fall story. This is an Eden story in which our narrator discovers too
late the snake is himself.
For all his protestations to not be
like the other whites, the profiteers who come to burn down the
forest, ultimately he's irredeemably from the same world as them. And
if he, a clued-up guy and seasoned traveller to such far-flung
places, is irredeemable then what chance do we have? Complicte make
us complicit.
Perhaps the idea was to set up a more
standard Western-guy-burns-his-sneakers-to-become-tribal-shaman
story, and pull a bait and switch. He just ends up a Western guy
without his sneakers, duh. Yet that feels like a post-hoc
rationalisation. The noble savage stuff is too indulged to just
jettison like that. What actually happened on stage was something
more volatile, vying between the two notions.
And in a way this is played up. Early
on, McBurney played a gag of claiming an old video cassette contained
all the images of his dead Father, only for it to fall and smash on
the floor. And the spool of cassette tape which messily pours out is
an image which recurs later, when McIntyre finds the film from his
camera wrapped danglingly round a tree. This is the messy reality,
the truth against which the cassette box was the tidy mechanism we
use to 'storify' our lives.
Yet neither am I sure the point was for
us to not get the point. Certainly part of the piece was the
necessity of our telling ourselves stories, despite their
fallibility. But much like McIntyre, I was led entranced through two
hours but found myself lost amid the spool of cassette tape on the
floor.
PIKACYU MAKOTO + ADRENA ADRENA
Sticky Mike's Frog Bar,
Brighton, Tues 24th May
Adrena Adrena are a duo of drummer E-Da
from Boredoms and Drum Eyes (both Lucid Frenzy favourites) and “performance
artist” Daisy Dickinson, who plays a laptop live. And if the live
drums/laptop combination sounds unlikely, she frequently provides not
just washes and tones but her own rhythms for the drums to play off
against. The contrast is virtuous, throwing each instrument back on
itself – on what it does best.
The centre of the stage was taken up by
projections which, always simple and often semi-abstract, never stole
the limelight from the music. It was more like watching a trio, just
one at work on different senses to the others. Pretty soon you
weren't taking in the sights and sounds as separate elements at all,
but hand been induced into a kind of synaesthesia.
And if that seems like we're reverting
to Sixties terminology like 'trip' we might as well go with it.... it
felt like a trip (man), like being taken through some other reality
then dumped back in ours at the end.
Not from Brighton but the International
Festival of Projections (and I'm going to pretend I know what that
is)...
Pikacyu Makoto are another of the
near-infinite array of side-projects undertaken by guitarist Kawabata
Makoto, alongside his mothership Acid Mothers Temple. (Lucid Frenzy was lucky enough to catch Mainliner some while ago.) This one's with drummer Pikacyu from another Japanese underground
band, Afrirampo. The two bands previously made a joint album, which
alas I've not heard.
As things kicked off I feared we were
in for the whole 'too many notes' business, common when noise music
overlaps with jazz. But after starting with a burst of 11, they then
turned it down just a notch...
Styles and genres were still rattled
through at breakneck speed, as if music history was sighted from the
window of an express train – including Sixties beat music,
Beefheart, Hendrix and some I probably missed as they hurtled by.
After perhaps the least successful part, where Makoto turned to
squelchy keyboards, they even provided a quite serene mid-section –
Pikacyu providing holding patterns beneath Makoto's sustained tones.
They then ramped back up for a thumping finale, chanted vocals over a
power riff.
After seeing Lightning Bolt last year, I commented they “seem
to stem from the child's love of making noise. Rather than the
nihilism so associated with the genre there's something joyous and
uplifting about the whole thing, even as its rough and abrasive.
Certainly, you can rely on a Lightning Bolt set to put a great grin
on your face.” And that seems even more true of this
duo. And Pikacyu I suspect has a lot to do with that.
She seemed intent to hit every drum and
cymbal in turn, a style common in noise music, but with tumbling
rhythms that created spaces in the sonic onslaught. Overall, its
perhaps her cheerful, childlike and almost poppy vocals which gave
the set it's identity and raised things from the too-common
angstiness of noise music.
It sounds like hippyshit to talk of
some balance between male and female energy, and of course any kind
of gender essentialism is pretty dodgy stuff. But there was something
about Pikacyu's performance that took things beyond the
babblebashbash noise music can sometimes degrade into, like a toddler
endlessly smashing a Tonka toy against a wall.
Forty minutes from London... (Three
days later and it seems an almost entirely different set!)
CAVERN OF ANTI-MATTER
Patterns, Brighton, Thurs 26th May
Truth to tell, I was always a little agnostic over Stereolab. There was something slightly knowing
to their retro-futurist schtick. But Tim Gane's new band Cavern of
Anti-Matter mix Neu!-style Krautrock beats, trancy dance and swooshy
Sixties organ. Plus they referred to 'Doctor Who'
in their track 'Tardis Cymbals' and named
themselves after a Situationist painting. (One large enough to cover a whole gallery
which then got sold by the metre.) I mean, theoretically
they could bring in some reference to Jack Kirby comics and the taste
of pistachio to tick all my boxes, but that's
pretty good going.
There no bassist to their three-man
line up and they specialise in stretched-out instrumentals, two
things I think which go together. It's spacey
music which doesn't want to be grounded in any way. Drummer Joe
Dilworth, also ex-Stereolab, spends as much time on cymbals as drums.
(In fact I'm fairly sure half his kit went untouched.) Listen to them
a little while and I swear you'll start to feel like your feet are
lifting from the ground...
Some bands, such as Moon Duo, achieve
mesmerism by simple repetition until trance states take hold.
(Leading to my review stating “more, please, of this less business”. I
was quite pleased with that one...) While others, like this lot, are
able to achieve a virtuous combination. They harness the power of
repetition while morphing as they move, packing in changes you're not
really aware of happening until after they've happened. They move
and stand still. You can listen or trance out. In
fact, you can listen and trance out.
Reviews tend to focus on the futurism
of the band, but I'm not sure they're picking that up so much as
getting a residue from Stereolab. Unlike the 'Jetsons'-style
soon -everything-will-be-silver futurism of Stereolab, COAM lean more
to the end-of-'2001' cosmic side of SF. The long
numbers, the repetition, the psychedelic visuals – of course it's
all about sending you. You'll be part-way through
a track you were previously just enjoying, and suddenly you'll find
yourself through the looking glass. Sometimes you can spot the
trigger, the point where the music stepped up a notch. But other
times it comes almost arbitrarily, presumably because they were
accumulative – the point where your doors of perception got
cleansed enough for the light to break through.
If their German-sounding name suggests
a Krautrock influence then, much like Cavern of Anti-Matter, there's
a definite Neu! Element to the sound. There's the same extended
rhythmic pieces, stretching to trance-out dimensions. (The CD I
bought fits only four tracks on it.) But they also reminded me of the
point post-punk crossed over with dance music, bands like 23 Skidoo
or A Certain Ratio. If there's not the same uptight agitation, the
David Byrne jerky dancing, there is the straight-faced euphoria.
Vocals, when they appear, are de-emotionalised and intonatory, while
album artwork exudes that post-punk starkness.
If Cavern of Anti-Matter's dominant
movement is up, Follakzoid's is forwards. If Andrena Andrena are like
a trip, Follakzoid are a road trip. Their tracks are driven by
propulsive riffs, other shapes forming alongside them like trees and
hills, some passing by quickly, others remaining a while. Certainly
their tracks are journeys rather than destinations, often ending
rather than finishing – like they're run out of road.
Reviewing one of their releases, the Quietus' Joe Kennedy commented how the motorik beat “can
express both the experience of automated late-industrial modernity
and atavistic impulses towards the cosmic and transcendental.” And
certainly they have not just the tranciness but the sheen
of Neu! In fact one of the surprises of seeing them live is how much
of their sound is made by 'real' instruments.
Yet particularly with those vocals,
which could be either trance-like or robotic, Follakzoid feel like
both experiences at once. But then isn't something like the act of
dancing like that? You repeat ritual gestures until you achieve an
ecstatic state. Kraftwerk unveiled the Man Machine like their
creation, like something they'd devised in their secret laboratory.
But in our era, when Google glass and driverless cars seem imminent,
he's something we just take for granted. Perhaps that's partly why
it's Neu! rather than Kraftwerk that bands today are taking up.
After the theatrical shows 'Lulu' and 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', this was the first time I'd
seen the accordian-driven Brechtian street opera trio the Tiger
Lillies do their actual dark cabaret set in an actual cabaret
setting. And it made for a pretty good setting, laughter drifting
through from the weekend revellers as they regaled us with their
tales of debauchery and woe.
There's supposed to be an art exercise
where you paint a painting from as many different shades of black as
you can, the point being we so rarely come across 'pure' black. And
they make music somewhat like that. They don't stray to the dark side
of the spectrum so much as set up shop there. (Like their lyric of
the woman who “always sees the black and not the gold”.) But they
elbow out a range for themselves regardless. There's black humour. (A
song about inserting hamsters which I won't repeat here gains fulsome
belly laughs.) But there's also stuff that's pretty close to pure
black, and all stations between. (I was reminded of the old Soft Boys
line “And when there's no more tears to cry/There's nothing left to
do but laugh.”)
Musically, they do a similar thing.
Their default line-up may be accordian, double bass and drums. (Is
there such a style as dark klezmer? I guess there is now.) But the
drummer finds the strangest things to drum, while other instruments
include piano, theramin, a “home-made ukelile” (which looks
suspiciously like a chopped-off guitar neck) and a circular saw. And
that last one, though sparingly used, may even be their signature
sound – absurd, strangely melodic, mockingly sentimental and
sinister all at once.
They smartly start the gig with the
semi-diegetic song 'Roll Up' presenting a
freakshow for an eagerly thrill-seeking suburban audience (“our
lives a sideshow attraction, we do our best to please”), which
inevitably frames everything which follows. By not being the subject
of the song, we are somewhat implicated. And then comes another twist
on that...
Though the Brecht and Weill influence
is clear enough, there's none of Bertie's political themes. Their
subject is human folly, people who became addicted to something or to
someone until it finishes them. (Their universe is really a Snakes
and Ladders board without the ladders.) And a song about the folly of
drinking delivered to a roomfull of drinkers gains an edge. We're
voyeurs, yet at any point we could find ourselves projected from out
seats into one of those songs. If the musical saw signifies their
sound, the default response is the uncertain belly laugh.
Not from Brighton... (But then they
rarely are.)
Not sure if a theatre performance and three gigs really go together, but that's how the cookie crumbled...
'LULU: A MUDER BALLAD' BY THE TIGER LILLIES Brighton
Dome, Monday 30th Nov
The “anarchic Brechitan street-opera
trio” the Tiger Lillies last appeared in these parts the Festival
before last, with their take on Coleridge's epic poem 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'.
Now they're back with another theatrical song-show. Lulu was the
protagonist of two expressionist playswritten by Frank Wedekind
between 1895 and 1904.
And many times since. As singer and
main man Martin Jacques states in the programme “today the figure
of Lulu is one of the most widely known characters in fiction... in
many ways Hamlet is perhaps Lulu's closest equivalent, widely
recognised but nevertheless mysterious, the inspiration for countless
re-interpretations, but without a stable or agreed core meaning.”
In other words, neither are fixed
texts. Each iteration of them doesn't re-recite the canon, nor do
changes negate what went before – it just adds on another layer.
Except of course the Prince's story is about having the power to
choose and being paralysed by it. While Lulu's is about being given
no choice at all. Though a figure on stage she never sings or speaks.
All is narrated by Jacques in the character of malevolent lowlife
Shig, her primary pimp and ostensible 'father'.
She first appears pushing flowers at
the unaccepting musicians. If it's reminiscent of flower sellers on
the street, there's also something childlike and innocent about her
movements. For much of the running time she's held between two
projection screens situated behind the band, imprisoned and shown off
like a fish in a tank. She'll dance to one side, then back again. At
one point the struts of a bannister are projected, which come to look
like prison bars. Oddly, I was most reminded of Mark Fisher's quote about Carroll's Alice – this story is
Lulu's, but she has no place in it. She's essentially a sexualised
possession, a flesh sex toy passed from one 'lover' to the next.
In the programme Jacques continues “it
was hard writing the songs for 'Lulu'... you have
to breathe the putrid air.” And it shows. For one thing, the Tiger
Lillies aren't just renowned for their black humour, they celebrate a
tradition which commonly found dark humour in stories of sexual
abuse. That kind of salaciousness is not confined to cabaret of
course, it also appears in blues or rock music, or for that matter
tabloid newspapers. But cabaret is more associated with a 'decadent'
era where such things went on, or at least happened more openly.Which
gave proceedings the unsettling sense of walking a tightrope. I'm a
Tiger Lillies fan largely because I share Jacques' black sense of
humour. And even I found myself willing them not to screw up and slip
into rape gags.
They don't. And yet when they don't,
harsh as it sounds for damning them for doing the right thing, they
lose something of themselves. That black humour has always been the
killer app of the band, the carefree irreverence to offence of songs
like 'Hammering in the Nails'. They're not without
this, they just hold it in check in places. They have to
hold it in check in places. Yet it still feels like they're
performing with one arm tied behind their back.
And without the humour we're left with
just the black. To use Jacques' analogy, theres a whole lot of putrid
air to breathe. It's like hearing the low notes of the piano hammered
over and again for seventy-five minutes. Moreover, the sheer
arbitrariness of the story adds to this sense of inevitability. You
could swap the order of her 'lovers', or cut some out completely, and
lose little. For she's but a flower petal on the wind.
With the suggestion Lulu may not have
been murdered by Jack but a copycat killer, perhaps planning to pass
the blame, its clear that if Lulu stands for our innocence Jack
stands for our corruptibility and hypocrisy. They're both part of us.
Notably, Jack's the only character to have a song addressed directly
to him.
Yet I also overheard a fair few people
emerging afterwards to say they found the message obvious. (“Is
anyone here likely to think its okay to sell a young woman into
prostitution?” and so on.) Which suggests the links between then
and now aren’t being made, as if sexual exploitation is considered
only a subject for history books. Perhaps a better way to challenge
misogyny isn’t to meet it head-on but glove-puppet it and expose it
from within. I’ve never heard Lady Sings It Better but the approach seems interesting – take
the most misogynistic lyrics you can get hold of, and have a group of
women belt them back at you. It also counters the
ludicrous-yet-prevalent notion that 'political correctness' is about
being too namby-pamby to use those illicitly thrilling bad words.
Ultimately, Jacque's schema works not
wisely but too well. In his insistence on the harsh male-dominated
world Lulu finds herself in, in his foregrounding of her silence
within it he perpetuates that silence. At one point she's compared to
a sponge and, rather than a character, she's no more than the
accumulation of what a patriarchal world will do to a woman if given
the chance.
I confess I'm not sure what I'd suggest
to improve proceedings. Perhaps Lulu discovers a voice and gets a
song of her own, only briefly before she is killed. Scenes such as
when Shunning gives her a gun and orders to shoot herself, and she
instead sticks a hole in him, could have been made little moments of
proto-feminist triumph. Some hint somewhere she doesn't have to be a
total victim or hapless innocent. But perhaps the whole project was
intrinsically flawed. After 'Rime of the Ancient
Mariner' was such a full-blown success, I wondered if this
might have been an earlier prototype of a full-length show, now
brought back out from the desk drawer. And while when I checked I
found it's first appearance was 2013, a year after 'Mariner',
that still feels the way it is.
CALVIN JOHNSON
Brighton Railway Club, Mon
23rd Nov
Most gigs, you'll see at some point all
the equipment shunted off stage and the house lights go up.
Yet there aren't too many where that's your signal the main act's
about to come on. But then there's nights when you know to expect the
unexpected.
With the lo-fi DIY indie-punk of Beat
Happening, the deconstructed dance music of Dub Narcotic and the
founding of the influential K records Calvin Johnson has done much to
break the punk mould. If he didn't ship records, he made waves. The
stereotype of angry white kids swearing against the system never
quite withstood him. Kurt Cobain tattooed himself with the K logo,
while Courtney Love namechecked him on 'Olympia'.
(Well, depending on which version you listen to.)
Tonight, alone and entirely
unamplified, he diffidently strums an acoustic guitar like his eyes
might have flicked over a chord book for the first time while
backstage. His baritone voice, the sound of deadpan, is delivered
from a Easter Island impassive face above a tight black sweater. It
has less the air of a punk event than something which might have
happened in a Greenwich Village folk club in 1963. But probably
didn't.
And it was the absolute absence of
anything remotely resembling punk music which came to be the most
punk thing about it. It worked as a projection of the artist's
personality, to which the actual music and words were mere means to
that end. (I'm really not sure that would come over so well on
record.) He exudes a childlike 'Being There'
persona, while displaying a master comedian's gift for timing,
including mutiple meaningful...
...pauses. Entirely unaccompanied, he
recites the nonsense dance lyrics of a Dub Narcotic number like
they're metaphysical poetry. Returing to the neologism I coined for Goat it's bironic – simultaneously
a self-parody and in deadly earnest. You laugh out loud and are
entranced at one and the same time. The bizarre choice of venue, a
place down a residential cul-de-sac which no-one present seemed to
previously know existed, made for the perfect setting.
It perhaps veered too far towards
straight songs at times, at which points my attention did start to
wonder. I wondered if the best numbers had been written for some
different setting, and were now sparking off on the incongruity. As
he encores with a cover of 'Diamonds Are Forever'
you find yourself thinking “this song is actually really stupid”
and “this song is actually a classic” at one and the same time.
Which is probably the whole night in microcosm.
From Manchester. But there was punk
rock floor-sittin' apleanty at Brighton too...
...and from back in the day, D Narcotic
go...
Mentioned in dispatches!
After having previously written about both Jeffrey Lewis and the Cravats, there's not really much I could add. But tehre's
some YouTube clips just to confirm the things happened. The Lewis
clip is not only from elsewhere, but features one of his cartoon
lectures he didn't even perform down here. (He said it might be hard
for people to see given the venue.) While the Cravats clip is
from Brighton but doesn't have much in the way of sound quality. But
then that's what makes it punk innit, y'get me bro?
