JOHN FRANCIS FLYNN/ SOUND PLOTTING (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GO AL FRESCO)

JOHN FRANCIS FLYNN
Rooftop, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-On-Sea
Sat 15th Aug

I confess that the notion of a summer rooftop gig at the De La Warr is what first took my fancy. So, while I had of course checked out Irish folk singer John Francis Flynn on-line before clicking ‘Buy’, I had a less-than-full idea of how he’d be live.

Despite there being no house lights to dim, there was no audience announcement or any other sign the show had started. Instead he eased leisurely into his first number. So small were the beginnings I don’t think many were aware he’s started for some while. Now Flynn looks remarkably like a ’Lord of The Rings’ character. In particular, the one who looks like a warrior prince and, in the second hour of the third film, turns out to be a warrior prince. But rather than some full-throated roar, he sings in an understated, intonatory, gentle-giant fashion, barely moving.

And most of the set, rather than attention-grabbing, was longish numbers which spun a slow magic on you. He plays acoustic guitar, alternating with tin whistle. (Or, as he proudly pointed out, two tin whistles taped together. I expect they call that the Jimmy page tin whistle in the trade.) And was joined by a clarinetist and a droney/ambient keyboardist who doubled on drums. A Dublin base usually means traditional Irish instruments which no English tongue can possibly pronounce. Not here.

The instruments were, at points, looped and treated. But never in an ostentatious, show-off fashion. Had you asked any of the songs whether they were modernised or traditional, I think they’d have shrugged the question off without interest and just carried on. Which always seems the best way.

Then, when you started to think he might have overplayed the slow and mesmeric card, they shifted into a full-voltage rocked-up version of ’My Son Tim’, complete with whoops if not full-throated roars. The clarinetist even swapped to electric guitar, without any shouts of Judas.

My one complaint would be that the drums at times felt mixed too loud, as if they were what we’d come to hear. When they first broke in, I almost jumped!

Support act Iona Zajac had a richly evocative voice, fairly built for folk singing. But her songs only at times lived up to that voice. The best number was a traditional, saved for the finale, where she was accompanied by droney squeeze-box.

Having attended because of the open-air setting, it was something for those surroundings to melt away and be replaced by the world of the songs. There’s the sense with folk music that it’s all still steeped into things, and if we find a way to tune out the workaday world we’ll start to hear it again. I am probably getting carried away now, so had better stop.

A different version of ’My Son Tim’. They got a violin, but we had a rooftop…

Then from one outdoor gig…

SOUND PLOTTING
Stanmer Organics, Falmer, Sussex
Sat 20th Aug

“Set in the verdant sprawling plots of Stanmer Organics”, it says here, “Sound Plotting will be a day of site specific sound art, interactive installations, deep listening, sound walks, improvised music and pop-up performances.” It’s by Lost Property, the collective who previously took over a Napoleonic fort in Newhaven to stage similar shenanigans.

The idea, they confess, first struck them during lockdown when outdoor settings were literally the only show in town. But it’s a good one, which has you running about like a white rabbit, amid a host of other rabbits, dipping your expectant head down a whole bunch of holes. Pretty soon you become almost accustomed to the sight of laptops perched on tree trunks, or speakers hanging from branches. And if not every rabbit hole took you to a Wonderland, then these things are always more than the sum of their parts. Wandering, exploring, is a large part of the fun.

Venturing to see Gagarin in what the programme called ‘the willow dome’ I discovered it to be a dome of willows, which you entered like a teepee. As they swayed in the breeze they created a dappled light show on the ground, nature’s instillation piece. I often contend that ambient electronics work best when you’re not sure whether they’re sourced from natural sounds or not, it seems to create a sweet spot. And the set worked better for me the nearer it got to that sweet spot.

Paul Khimasia Morgan’s set was similarly slow-moving and ambient, but (from what I saw) more based around picking up tones from contact mikes. It’s music which always seems to slightly elude you. The more you try to focus on it, the more it drifts away just past your reach, as if floating on the summer breeze. Which of course only makes it more involving to listen to. (Older readers may remember Morgan put on the Aural Detritus concert series.)

In the midst of all this knob-twiddling and miking-up of things, Jo Burke stood up and sang some a cappella folk songs. And, for that matter, sang them well. Somehow she combined the best elements of professionalism with amateurism, the sense that this stuff is our common property. Much of being a good folk singer may be holding the notes just long enough, so you get the choral-like semi-drone effect without it feeling affected. While at the same time you could feel the old songs doesn’t require reinvention or rejuvenation, that people are simply still singing them, the way they always have.

Baby Hair have a name that sounds like a folk remedy and offered, according to the programme, “minimalist trance pop and ritualistic performance”. They reminded me of the old Marc Bolan adage about pop songs being like spells, as they recited words, struck triangles and blew haunted recorders, until you didn’t know whether to find it charmingly enthralling or sinisterly enchanting. Lyrics were reduced to a few babble phrases, repeated until they became mantras. It took us all somewhere, even if I couldn’t really tell you where.

However, while it’s clearly part of their mission that things have to go on too long, past the three-minute pop-song limit like exceeding the stated dose, they still went on a touch too long. Always leave ‘em wanting more!

So, where will Lost Property be found next? Inexpertly taken photos by me, including the culminating procession by Thee Bald Knobblers.

“THEN HE HEARD IT…”: THE SABRES OF PARADISE’S ’HAUNTED DANCEHALL’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

“It was the trumpet that did it. Nevermind chasing after ethereal angels or earthly skirt . Chase that tune, scour the shacks, pester the sound boy…”

Hitching home for Christmas in (I’d guess) 1994 I snagged a ride, to be quickly taken less by the car than by the music the guy was playing. With little prompting as he drove he keenly elaborated on it. Crossing the South Downs, the car repeatedly climbed from and sunk back into valleys thick with white Winter mist. As whiteness yet again rose to surround us, and with the spectral sounds still playing, he broke off and turned to me. “Actually”, he said, “you died back there, by the roadside, and I’m taking you to Heaven”. It seemed quite convincing at the time.

And that music was ‘Bat out Of Hell’ by Meat Loaf… no, I kid, it was the one up there in the title - ‘Haunted Dancehall’ by Sabres of Paradise. I soon availed myself of my own copy, which I found to be on some new label called Warp. Who knows? Maybe they’ll go on to do other things. I played it to death and would soon propound to anyone that however great Andrew Weatherall’s much-acclaimed production on ’Screamadelica’ was, ’Haunted Dancehall’ was the real deal.

Earlier this week I got home from work to find he had died, despite being barely older than me. I dug the album back out, to find it does a wondrous double thing. It’s hugely evocative of the Nineties, bringing a past world back into being between your ears. And yet it’s not just the memory trigger of a bubblegum pop song, forgettable but fixed to a point in time, it sounds as great as when I first heard it in that mist-sailing car.

Though the album’s instrumental throughout (bar one outbreak of wordless harmonies), one track’s called ‘Ballad of Nicky McGuire’. Though that word has come to signify a slow song, the number cheesy DJs reserve for the end of cheesy evenings, its original meaning was a song with a narrative. And this title combines with the short text excerpts accompanying each track on the sleeve (ostensibly from some larger work which doesn’t actually exist), suggesting this is all part of a broader narrative we’re only getting glimpses of. And if that doesn’t sound a standard thing for dance music to do, we’re just getting started.

For that elliptical sense, of something delivered through hints and suggestions, is as much there in the music. Before House hit, Weatherall had been part of the Post Punk scene. Which had almost universally taken to Dub as a liberating force. And in many ways this is the ‘Metal Box’ of dance music, absorbing what dub did rather than reproducing some of the surface effects. Which, above all, was its sense of space. This wasn’t music which hit you in the chest but passed straight through you, leaving you wondering what had just happened.

Dance music had been all about either venerating or simulating the feeling of being in a club, depending on where you were when you heard it. “Everybody’s in the place, let’s go!” was a typical line. Significantly, with ’Bubble And Slide’ this album starts with someone leaving a club, the pummelling rain mixing with the echoes of beats in his mind. One way to listen to it is as following McGuire’s route home after that club, a psychogeographical journey through the capital’s night-time streets. (Well I did first hear it on a journey.)

The spiritual geezer, the rhyming slang visionary, the character who can have a revelation in a greasy spoon cafe, who was to become such a Nineties figure, perhaps reaches his apogee here. McGuire is as dedicated to his hedonistic lifestyle as a monk is to his chanting. He doesn’t go out to socialise or pull, but to become one with the infinite beat. (“McGuires steps were solid over Battersea Bridge. London bridges at dawn, fuckin’ magic, who needs fuckin’ India or somewhere, no toilet paper and loads of poncey beatnik types.”) And it remains quite a solitary affair. Other characters are alluded to, but the nearest we come to meeting one is a taxi he exits muttering “fascist wanker”.

And this co-existence of the everyday with the spiritual is kept up in the title. On one level, London’s clubs and bars are McGuire’s haunts – in the sense of his hangouts. But it also evokes the way ostensibly everyday places can be suffused with significance. (Imagine for example going back to the street you grew up on, and trying to see it as just a street.)

Some are wont to dismiss dance music as one-note, then go back to listening to Muse with very little sense of irony. Well not here it isn’t. Like the streets of London, there’s little telling what’s coming round the corner. ’Flight Path Estate’ is as spacey as spacey gets, the ’Forbidden Planet’ soundtrack on ganja, while ‘Tow Truck’ is a great lost spy-fi theme tune. But there’s more here than just musical variety.

Much of the enjoyment of rock music comes from the feeling of group cohesiveness, a bunch of people acting as one. I’ve quoted Robert Fripp before: “It has nothing to do with self-expression, it has to do with a group mind.”While much of the enjoyment of electronic music conversely comes from a more literal sense of one-ness. As I said of a Squarepusher gig: “It’s like its finally become possible to go inside someone's head, and finding inside it an infinite space filled with impossibly grand and huge architectural constructs. Like there's no intermediaries between thought and action.” Like taking a fairground ride through someone else’s synapses. From several-into-one to the multifariousness of the singleminded.

These are two quite different paths to take. But incredibly ‘Haunted Dancehall’ can slip from one to the other and back, sometimes within the same track, as if it allows for no such distinction. Though everyone (including me) focuses on Weatherall’s contribution, the Sabres were a trio, also involving Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, which may have allowed them to morph between studio artists and band at will.

I’m old enough to remember the “rock is dead” era, where dance was supposedly set to come along and replace its bloated excess with something more communalising. And of course the dance scene is now stuffed with superstar DJs, often playing the very same arenas as rock stars and for the same amounts of money.

Andrew Weatherall never did that. Restlessly creative, he retained the punk ethos so much more than those who just stuck rigidly to the form, like they’d had one idea their whole lives. His back catalogue is essentially a whole series of side-projects from a day job he always refused to take up. These took unexpected tangents, and ranged from the awesome to the… well, not so awesome. (With some I’m still yet to hear.) Yet he always followed his own inclinations, never tried to create a career for himself. He had the phrase “fail we may, sail we must” tattooed on his arms, the rulebook of rule breaking. He was one of the good guys. He will be missed.

BLANCK MASS/ HAAS: 'HOMMAGE A BRIDGET RILEY' (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

BLANCK MASS
Chalk, Brighton, Thurs 28th Nov

Blanck Mass is the solo project of Benjamin John Power, one half of the inimitable Fuck Buttons. Wikipedia describes his “musical style… as drone music, post-rock, electronic and experimental." While I caught him at the Mutations festival four years ago, this was the first time I’ve been immersed in the full-length gig.

The backdrop filmshow dropped out a couple of minutes in, leaving him looking a little nonplussed. After some backstage shenanigans, it resumed. And proved a perfect complement to the music, flickering rapidly between abstract coloured shapes which may once have been distortions of images, abstract coloured shapes which just looked like abstract coloured shapes, animal scenes and advertising images. (Disclaimer: this list should not be seen as exhaustive.)

Like the filmshow it was often hard to tell where the musical elements came from. There were pure electronic sounds, what sounded like treated samples, distorted voices (sometimes supplied live) and what may have been machine parts. (Disclaimer: this list should not be seen as exhaustive.) All hurtling past your ears at far too fast a rate for you to stop and analyse.

Or, for those who haven’t seen the backdrop filmshow, it also reminded me of the surrealist collages of Eduardo Paolozzi. (In fact the cover art to the most recent release ’Animated Violence Mild’, a bitten and bleeding apple, is itself something of a Surrealist collage.) Mid-set, he went into the most abstract noise, sounding almost like a field recording of continental drift in action. Which he them followed by the most straightforwardly dancey section of the whole thing. But more often he’d overlay such elements, piled teeteringly over one another with cavalier disregard for musical norms. Like Paolozzi, his aim was to bombard you into a point past processing

Also, Paolozzi frequently used commercial advertising images - but not necessarily in an ironic or adversarial way, more like his eye was genuinely drawn to those bright shiny colours. As I said after an exhibition of his: “Instead of elitist disdain, we should revel in the situation, bathe in the cathode ray bombardment.” Similarly, Power can bring in dance tunes… at times quite regular party-time dance tunes, as if he simply loves the way they get people dancing. At the very same time he mixes them in with the most incongruous elements.

Then at other times he’d go into full-on power electronics mode, proving the point that this is the real punk music of today. The set finished in a sheer screamathon. It hadn’t lasted for much more than an hour but felt like two or three hours of music input had been compressed into one. Had it gone on any longer, I think my receptors may well have burnt out. With gigs finishing so early these days, it was bizarre to emerge from so different a reality system and be back on the sofa to watch ’Question Time’.

Right tour, but Madrid not Brighton…



GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS: ‘HOMMAGE A BRIDGET RILEY’
Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London, Thurs 5th Dec

Regular readers of Lucid Frenzy… that gag never gets old… will know I’m a fan of Spectralist music, and in particular the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas. And the programme to this event quotes him to give perhaps the best summation of its twin tenets I’ve heard:

“Twelve tones… per octave are too few for me. I need smaller intervals, finer nuances. And I want to compose expressive, emotional music which moves and takes hold of people.”

After seeing his classic ‘In Vain’ five years back, I commented how his music is often “made up not of individual notes but something closer to sound fields”. Here this proved most true of the strings. A ten-strong string section dominates, playing minimal agitated strokes, with much more variation in the bow-wieding left hand than in the neck-holding right. But even when they all do the same thing they rarely do it at the same time, constantly slipping out of step with one another.

The composite effect is that of a swarm, buzzing like a flurry of disturbed bees. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever heard instruments swarm so much before! This would repeatedly stir itself into motion, grow bigger and more agitated, and then subside. The piano and percussion worked as a kind of counter-weight, much slower, much more assured, possibly even melodic.

I’ve said before that Spectralist music shouldn’t be assumed to be difficult, that it really is expressive, emotional music which takes hold of people. This, however, was perhaps on the more difficult end of the Spectralist spectrum. It lasts only forty minutes, but makes you work for each one of them. It’s formula, something very much like repetition but which isn’t actually repetition, presents something of a challenge to the listener. Do you chew on it, or just let it wash over you? But the results are worth the effort.

As the name might suggest the composition was a tribute to the acclaimed Op artist Bridget Riley, currently on show at the nearby Hayward gallery. (A show, alas, I’m unlikely to make.) After ’In Vain’, I commented how I loved the piece but didn’t think I’d have got the theme (opposition to fascism) unaided. And I’m probably the same here.

But then that’s not really the point. There was a brief pre-concert filmshow which ended on one of her paintings. This led me to briefly fear they’d slideshow her works through the piece. Happily they left comparisons more open and associative, less deterministic.

On the other hand, once you were tipped off it did provide a particular perspective on her. Haas finds the basis of her art not in the repetition or patterning but in the dynamism. As the programme puts it “they are crowding in some direction, cohering in some larger design, impelled by some force.” And this piece portrays her almost as a sorceress, evoking some inexorable force of nature which couldn’t be constrained.

Coming soon (ish)! More Spectralism!
Coming sooner than that! Back to the classic ’Doctor Who’ posts.

TIM HECKER/ ZOUNDS/ TRICKY (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

TIM HECKER
Attenborough Centre For Creative Arts, Falmer, Brighton, Tues 15th Oct

Canadian artist Tim Hecker started out as a techno producer before, more happily for us, dumping those repeat beats to embrace electronica and sound art.

Sounds aren’t played off against one another, like the lines of musicians making up a band, but more stirred in together. It’s almost impossible to trace the set back to its constituent sounds, let alone figure how they were generated. And besides it doesn’t seem the point.

From yonder internet, it seems Hecker likes to work from traditional instruments, however much he then treats and manipulates the sounds. His most recent album, ’Anoyo’, was based on traditional a Japanese orchestra, who he’s sometimes played with live. Tonight, despite that featuring in the publicity, he’s playing solo and there seems little of that. A reliable source of gossip also states that he has a penchant for organ sounds, which seems more similar to this set.

It sounds churchy, if you could imagine that term somehow divorced from any sense of ostentation or doctrine. The music doesn’t develop or or advance so much as amass. It seems in a continual state of ascending, sometimes literally as it builds and swells until it becomes a liturgical version of a launch sequence. But that feeling seems ever-present.

It’s hard to describe without making it sound awfully New Agey. The distinction is that this music can sound simultaneously serene and ecstatic. While New Age pap might be calming but it’s just calming, the sonic equivalent of a pack of frozen peas held to a throbbing head.

Another appealing element was the way he played in almost total darkness, many audience members absorbing it sprawled on the floor rather that fixing their eyes on the stage. I’m not opposed to accompanying visuals, providing they’re neither there just to fill what’s perceived as a gap, nor give too literal an interpretation - which boxes in your responses. But the dark seems to create a deliberate space, born of the willingness to trust your audience to get there by themselves without pointers.

Hecker himself has said “It’s always been my way to not connect the dots for people, because I feel I don’t like prescriptive art; I don’t like fully triangulated meaning systems; I don’t like, you know, pure calligraph of intent. I like things that make you confused and bewildered or could splay off into 15 different meanings depending on who the person is and what their background is.”

My only possible criticism would be that the set was perhaps a little over-long. The mood it induces may be sublime, but it is at the end of the day still one mood.

This clip, from Arizona, features those traditional Japanese players so isn’t much like the gig I saw. Still worth a listen…



ZOUNDS
The Cowley Club, Brighton, Sat 20th Oct

When the band dedicate a song to “anyone who ever lived in a squat”, two things become obvious. First, that the song’s going to be ’Dirty Squatters’. Second, they’ve effectively dedicated it to the whole audience.

Zounds were formed in punk’s year zero, 1977, with Steve Lake as vocalist, chief songwriter and only constant member. They were so connected to the Anarcho-punk scene their first EP came out on Crass records. And of course here they are playing in Brighton’s premiere Anarchist Theme Pub.

But in many way’s that’s misleading. Most Anarcho music is unlistenable now, and frankly was pretty unlistenable then. You can only hear so many Mockney rants about overthrowing the system when half of the audience didn’t even look toilet trained.

Blyth Power’s Joseph Porter, who played in the band during their founding days, later said the shrewdest thing ever uttered of Steve Lake’s songs: “Zounds’ ultimate failure to win over the anarchist punks was partially as a result of Steve’s lyrics, which refused to pander to cliché, and consisted of strange narrative tales of normal people being confounded by their environment. You can’t sell normal people to anarcho-punks. They assume they’re all nazis.”

On that first EP, they were rather production-lined into Anarcho style. But rather than Crass’s mini-me, Zounds soon became effectively punk’s version of the Smiths. Lake himself later commented: “We were complete outsiders. I don't mean in the sense of some Hollywood Rock 'n' Roll leather jacket version of outsider. More in the sense that we had become social cripples, barely able to function and interact with anyone outside of our particular bohemian cesspit.”

They were outsiders who made music about outsiders, for themselves and for other outsiders. They were even outsiders in the Anarcho scene which they inhabited. So ’Dirty Squatters’ was written from the perspective of a bewildered neighbour, peering at them through his net curtains. While the band’s anti-anthem remains ’Did He Jump’, with its chorus “All the world cannot be wrong/ It must be me, I don’t belong.”

Notably, no-one in the band is remotely adhering to any hackneyed kind of punk look. And, in his inter-song chat, Lake is more sardonic than righteous. The one time he starts to go into a state-of-the-nation rant he breaks off, deciding he’d rather eat a crisp.

Also their music (yeah, let’s get to that) was more openly Sixties influenced and… well, musical than those of their peers who thought guitar tuning was somehow counter-revolutionary. For their second ever gig, they supported Daevid Allen. Which meant their music, often incendiary but more agitated than angry, expressed their themes as effectively as their words. Live, the songs do tend to blur together in sound and lose some of their individual character. But you can’t have everything.

’Demystification, from Athens…



TRICKY
Concorde 2, Brighton, Fri 25th Oct

Faulkner famously said that the only thing worth writing about was the human heart in conflict with itself. Tricky later added to the mix one human heart in conflict with another, then effectively blurred the distinction between the two. In his two-decade career, much of his output has consisted of trade-off vocals between himself and a female singer, where you’re never really sure whether they’re on the same side or not.

Somewhat oddly, though very much like his last Brighton appearance, he effectively plays the role of the foil at his own gig. It’s the female singer who effectively dominates. (In the characteristic low lighting, I couldn’t tell you whether it’s the same person as last time.) Unlike the last album, ’Ununiform’, from which the set seems to mostly draw. Typically tracks would start with her singing over melodic if quite tense beats, then segue into him ranting madness mantras. The music under which was so stripped down it was like boiling stew down into sludge.

At one point the band followed him off, leaving a bare stage for a full five minutes. And after their return he appeared not for the next two numbers. (So much weight falling on the co-singer did remind me of those temp jobs where you’d just do the work no-one else wanted to.) And when onstage he was a literally erratic performer, gesticulating so wildly a roadie would patiently reassemble the stage after each number.

It felt something like the latter-day Fall gigs, where you were never really sure whether things were going to plan or not. Giving things an edge which could spark off against the edginess of the music. But at other times just feeling… well, sort of off.

And it’s hard to decide how to feel about that. Music has become too professionalised, too much a branch of showbiz, when it should teeter between genius and chaos. Naturally, you want more of the first one. But sometimes you’re stuck with taking the odd with the smooth.

(This was a two-gig tour, the second not happening till tonight, so none of the normally obligatory YouTube footage.)

KRONOS QUARTET/ NYX ELECTRONIC DRONE CHOIR (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

KRONOS QUARTET + TREVOR PAGLEN: SIGHT MACHINE
Barbican, London, Thurs 11th July

I don’t believe the concept of plot spoilers applies to reviews, so let’s just say something upfront - this didn’t start well, but got a whole lot better. So you won’t have to listen to me grouch the whole way through, okay?

I’m not quite sure how the rule came to be that modern concerts must have a visual element. Maybe someone figured that without one, everyone would just check their phones the whole time. I don’t object to it in itself, good things have been done that way.

This NIGHT ups the ante by co-crediting the artist and describing the thing as “a multimedia performance”. And perhaps not by coincidence the visual elements just seemed intrusive and gimmicky. To the point it was less like something being added and more like something being taken away.

In the early part, they mostly consisted of live-filming then digitally mapping the players. (See the publicity shot, up top.) Which was so unlike the quite traditional acoustic music I figured that had to be the point. And indeed the publicity comments “We live in a data-driven world, but is it really possible to quantify human emotion? This concert puts that question under surveillance.”

It’s true that music, however lyrical or sublime it sounds, always reduces to maths. A ‘number’ is another name for a musical piece, after all. But this was too much like saying “pay more attention to the little man behind the curtain”. Which isn’t how that quote goes.

It seemed to me the music picked up about a third of the way in, but that could have been me getting better at tuning out the visuals. Two pieces perhaps represented the Quartet’s main strands. They went through the first movement of Steve Reich’s classic ’Different Trains’. (Which of course they premiered, way back when.) While I’ve seen it done live before, it’s always a pleasure to hear and for once the film was befitting.

Having made a reworked ’Purple Haze’ their calling card, they also served up another reworked rock number - the Who’s Baba O’Reilly’. (Though of course that was itself influenced by Terry Riley, lines of influence are rarely linear.) But more unusually they covered two actual songs - ’Summertime’ and ’Strange Fruit’ - while keeping the song structure mostly intact.

If I tell you one piece had the refrain “One Earth, one people, one love” you are probably already imagining how it sounded. Quite possibly while being sick into a bucket. Whereas it was actually a highlight. The refrain was intoned flatly by a computer-modulated voice, while the music was slow and sombre. The film, also thankfully befitting, emphasised the circularity of the Earth. So the refrain became less a feelgood New Age mantra, and more a plainly spoken fact around which we’ll one day have to rearrange our lives. (It later proved to be by Terry Riley and titled, inevitably enough, ‘One Earth, One People, One Love’.)

I left with the feeling this had been an entry-level programme, composed of movements or shorter pieces, and with less of the ‘difficult’ compositions some baulk at. Which is absolutely a good thing to do, from time to time. If there had never been boarding points, I wouldn’t be aboard now. But the last thing you should then do is set it to a distracting filmshow.

That Riley number (not live)…



NYX ELECTRONIC DRONE CHOIR
Kings Place, London, Sun 7th July

Fellow punters leaning over and asking if I know much about this act, that’s not uncommon. The person at the bag desk asking the same question, that’s something new. And I had to admit to knowing nothing beyond what was in the programme: “NYX is a collaborative drone choir and otherworldly electric chorus, re-embodying live electronics and extended vocal techniques.” (And, come to think of it, I still don’t know what the acronym stands for.) The night turns out to be a sell-out, so it seems I wasn’t the only one to be intrigued.

The five women in the choir come onstage gradually, one by one, without any fanfare. The stage is all black save a few strip lights, with the singers equally in black. The titular electronics play a part, as do looped samples. But the voices do most of the work. When not singing they tend to fall stock still, as if meditating. It’s the most ritualistic concert I’ve seen since Stockhausen’s ‘Stimmung’.

It’s a reminder that the chanting voice remains one of the eeriest instruments there is, perhaps because it should by any rights sound familiar. Very near the start, one voice holds a tone, lets it fall and repeats. A second voice then breaks in just as it falls. And the effect isn’t to add a new element, so much as amend the first, like watching a line that suddenly goes into a third dimension. From there the voices are forever scattering and regrouping, your ear effectively one step behind.

There’s something spectrally ungraspable about it all, like an audial version of a mirage. Partly because the whole is always more than the sum of its parts, so always seeming to stem from elsewhere.

And they seem to work that. At one point they build to a full-throated screamathon, but just as they reach boiling point they breaks into something else. The way a movie will suddenly cut from a horror scene.

But this was a gig full of unexpected twists. And while the above description holds overall, there were also for example harmonies launched into worthy of any girl band. And they climaxed with a rousing mantra chant, which stayed revolving round your brain long after the night had finished, and you were on your train home.

Not only not the right gig, but a collaboration with singer Hatis Noit so sounds quite different, but gives you some idea. This is closer, but longer.

SALOME/ KRIS DREVER/ DREAM MANDE: BAMANAN DJOUROU (GIG-GOING + BRIGHTON-FESTIVAL-ATTENDING ADVENTURES)

‘SALOME’ (WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK)
The Old Market, Hove, Thurs 23rd May
Part of the Brighton Festival

This 1923 film was based on Oscar Wilde’s play and styled after Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for it. And, as with other films of its era, its theatrical in a positive way. Not just uninterested in affecting naturalism, it positively revels in artificiality and the opportunities that creates. Notably, the film never leaves Herod’s palace, which is treated as a castle in the sky. (Well, a mountaintop, but it comes to the same thing.)

Particularly with its close-ups, film inevitably throws the artificiality into sharper relief than stage. It’s not just that the bizarre wigs and costumes are highlighted (though it’s partly that), it’s the way objects (keys, royal rings) can be enlarged on the screen to the point they become fetishised. And, though described in the Festival guide as a “cornerstone of camp”, it doesn’t have the self-parodying humour of camp. It uses film to stage psychoscapes.

I’ve not read Wilde’s play if I’m honest, but the consensus seems to be his achievement was bending the original Bible story until Salome (previously un-named) emerged as the protagonist. (Herod effectively becomes the lonely businessman emptying his wallet in a lapdancing club.) Interestingly, the actor who played Salome, Alla Nazimova, also produced the film.

Which plays up an interesting tension. Sexuality is here all about dressing up and performance, perhaps most obviously in her dance of the seven veils. Yet in this version her desire for John The Baptist is real. The film takes this as a given. But, with his plain loincloth against all this luxuriousness, this could be taken as her yearning for the real. He’s the one exception to the decadent rule of Herod’s palace, a gender-inverted virtuous maiden who refuses her kisses.

The fact of which is to make the tragedy hers. In seizing on him as a means to escape her world’s addiction to sensory gratification she subjects him to her sensory gratification. In other words, reduces him back into a prisoner of the palace. She’s effectively a prisoner of it herself, even if her cage is more gilded. Title cards were removed from this showing, but one states “She kills the thing she loves; she loves the thing she kills.”

Hayley Fohr of Circuit Des Yeux provides the live soundtrack. The Festival programme played up her baritone vocals, which are rich. But the soundtrack is uneven, and sometimes feels unfocused. At times it’s almost clumsy, transitions in the music not matched by anything on the screen. The electronic sections seemed to be for when the film focused on characters, like personalised mood music, but often felt meandering.

But the circular, sonorous motifs of the violin and double bass provided an earthiness to counterpoint the pie-in-the-sky proceedings. And the instrumentation could be boldly pared down, so each instrument got it’s (in cinema terms) close-up. The drums in particular were held back, then came in with a harsh rattle for the deathly finale, a funereal full stop to proceedings.

Films of this antirealist aesthetic seem most suited to the live soundtrack treatment. As a result, they often get it. And the truth is I’ve heard it all done better. For example Partial Facsimile’s live score for ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ was much more successful, despite arriving without any Festival fanfare. However the weaknesses here could still be worked out. It has the makings of a decent soundtrack, but needs finalising.

None of the soundtrack seems to be on-line, but the film’s public domain so can be seen here.

KRIS DREVER
The Con Club, Lewes, Sat 11th May

Lau-related proceedings so far… After having first seen Martin Green perform his solo project Flit, and then the full folk trio in action in Shoreham last Winter, this was my chance to catch frontman Kris Drever.

The tour was pre-announced with the notice “he will be performing traditional songs and previously unreleased material from one off projects, as well as music from his award winning back catalogue.” And he performed few Lau songs (if, in a welcome unsurprise, finishing with ’Ghosts’), and had only solo CDs on his merch stall.

However, they were similar enough to confirm my working hypothesis that the band start off with Drever’s songs, then subject them to elaborate and inventive arrangements. Certainly Drever’s solo songs seem quite different to Green’s.

He played solo and often quite simply, attaching a capo to his guitar for several numbers. And I found that, as a general rule, the simpler the accompaniment, the less his hands moved on the frets, the better the song seemed to work. Drever’s songwriting seems remarkably akin to his personality, understated yet beguiling and resonant. (Though he had pedals at his feet, so like so often the apparent simplicity may have actually been hard work to convey.)

He keeps his subject matter similarly close, ranging from life on Orkney (where he lived) to life on Shetland (where he lives now), occasionally breaking out as far as Dundee. He joked about “going for the big universal themes”. Yet of course folk is all about finding the universal in the particular. Songs stretch back into ancient history, and up to the present day.

From Cork…

 

DREAM MANDE: BAMANAN DJOUROU
Dome Theatre, Brighton, Sat 18th May
Part of The Brighton Festival

I confess to mildly mixed feelings on Malian singer Rokia Traore becoming guest director of this year’s Brighton Festival. Not because I don’t like African music, I like a lot of what little I know. But because I’m somewhat cynical about the generic applause it generates from the hands of white Western audiences. Applause which simultaneously exoticises black music while awarding yourself politically correct points.

Initially, Traore is one in a chorus of five singers who take turns to sing the lead. Assuming this was the pattern for the proceedings, I figured we were in for a night which was merely okay-ish. I’m somewhat skeptical of the everyone-gets-a-go format, which normally ends up with no-one getting enough time to get a real go.

Traore then spoke of the irony that some of the worst places to hear African music or see African art can be in Africa itself, due to the lack of entertainment infrastructure, and the foundation that had been devised to counter that.

From then on, she sang lead - and the night was much better for it. In fact my personal highlight was the very next number. It was the only song in English, and she seemed to adjust her vocal style to suit the language - a kind of calm, measured anger. Following her talk it seemed concerned with the situation in Africa today, so perhaps coining a new genre - the State of the Continent song.

And my second favourite, ending the main set, was the only choral number. Traore explained it was a “classical’ (presumably traditional), which became a hit record a while ago. The combination of which seems to sum up her attitude to music.

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE FESTIVAL

Various venues, Brighton, 26th-28th April

Just when you thought it was safe to take off those noise cancelling headphones… and two and a half years since the last outbreak of international experimental sound shenanigans in central Brighton… Colour Out Of Space is back! Now for the eighth time!

As said over the previous outing, the three days run the full range “from acts you willed to be over to those you never wanted to end.” And, having willed more than a few things to end this year (some played up quite highly in the programme), I won’t be reliving the memory here. With thirty-five acts in total (excluding talks, workshops, installations and a film show), covering the whole thing is hardly possible anyway. Mostly it’ll be stuff worth mentioning in dispatches which gets mentioned in dispatches.

Well, mostly…

Perhaps a minor gripe, but at times I confess I find this scene’s blanket audience approval a little indulgent. When so much that’s being created is highly experimental or entirely spontaneous, or highly experimental and entirely spontaneous, I can see a need for a supportive audience - one willing for things to work rather than fail. But default approval isn’t the same thing as blanket approval. Trying is good, but succeeding better.

Mostly this music doesn’t feature words, even when it involves vocals. And looking at a couple of misses might explain why that might be. The “I’m alienated me” vocals were the worst part of Wild Rani’s set, to the point you really wished she’d let the music do the talking. While Natalia Beylis’ vocals… well, more of a voiceover… felt kind of normalising, with their all-too-obvious swipes at the self-help-self-actualisation industry. Perhaps vocalisation risks banalisation, when we’re actually dealing with things too basic to be said. There’s a reason, after all, why Munch didn’t paint ‘The Speech’.

While conversely, with the Charles Mitchener duo (above), for one long section the vocals consisted of forcing a simple phrase from a reluctant throat, where the inability to articulate became not a barrier to overcome but the point of the thing. The result was a free jazz set which I actually liked! (If that sounds an odd title for a duo, it’s a team-up of Neil Charles and Elaine Mitchener.)

Then again, Glands of Eternal Secretion’s set didn’t get into gear until the second section. Where he gave up scraping tins with kitchen knives (an action which proved to have diminishing returns), to tell an absurdist narrative, no more reducible to sense than the music it accompanied.

Olivier Brisson didn’t just collage together sounds from a range of sources, including tapes, samples and live sounds. His set seemed to combine different ways of listening, from composite sounds to close listening to - like a movie ranging from cinemascope to microscopic view.

Whereas, though equally composed of samples, Red Brut seemed to smooth them together, blending them into something which always seemed to make some sort of sense. (If one you could never actually describe.) In the distinction between Dadaist collage (rough, juxtapositional, abrasive) and Surrealist (presenting the strangest of things as if somehow credible), she was definitely in the second group. Though apparently she also drums in a No Wave band, this set couldn’t have been any more sublime.

Laptop artists can sit so still on stage you find yourself believing they’re transmitting music by the power of thought alone. Then there’s others who, without touching anything as mainstream as an instrument, couldn’t be any more hands on. The show had the smarts to place Jérôme Noetinger’s (above) tape manipulations in the middle of the auditorium, and I got to sit fairly close.

I always get these details wrong but it appeared to me he was live-recording direct onto tape, while also manipulating its sound with magnets, found objects and so on. (I also watched him set up and, archetypically Gallic, his first action was to uncork, scrutinise the label and sip from a bottle of red before touching the first bit of equipment.)

Though where you’d place Af Ursin in that range I’m not sure. He played bowed strings against metal plates. At least as far as you could tell, as he stood behind the plates, blocking off any view of him above some very rock’n’roll-looking ankles. One hand many have been playing bass and the other treble, but that was about the only concession to standard musicality. The result was spectral if anything ever deserved the word. You’d tune in to the point where relatively small shifts seemed magnified. If was one of those sets which convinces you consensus reality was only ever a hoax, and is now breaking down all around you. At least for their duration.

As a gag, for their booklet photo, the Elks superimposed their heads over a group shot of Metallica (above). Knowing little of Metallica, and generally being happier that way, I knew not of this. (I also believe everything I read on social media.) So, spying slouched figures in ripped jeans, I assumed a noise band.

In fact they hovered at the limits of perceptibility as much as Af Ursin. Two wind players barely breathed down their instruments, accompanied by two electronic know twiddlers. The music happened not by outright statement but by the barest hints and whispers. My over-poetic analogy would be coming across an ancient tablet, the script upon it sand-blown and the strange characters barely discernible, but all the more compellingly mysterious for that.

The show had the smarts to programme two complementary opposite acts for the Saturday night finale. White Death’s set was almost as if broadcast by sonar - warm, fuzzy and resonant. It was the musical equivalent of being read a bedtime story, simultaneously comforting and bracingly adventurous. The performer was notably pregnant, which led to musing how that might have affected her set.

…shortly followed by Bill Nace and Twig Harper (above). Nace produced wave after wave or bowed, treated guitar, while Harper spoke in tongues over the top. Not music which immersed you in it but which struck you powerfully. If White Death took you below the waterline, they were all stormy surface.

As said after the third outing, it shouldn’t be assumed a festival such as this covers the ’edge’ of music, as if inhabiting a narrow margin where only one thing is on offer. It’s the very reverse, demonstrating how closed-up our conception of ‘music’ normally is. You generalise at your peril. But it was noticeable how many sets felt mediumistic, in one way or another. Inaudible voices were in regular supply, often in foreign languages. (Perhaps not to the performers. But we’re going with my subjective reaction here.)

Of course those who hear messages in short wave radio static from their dead Auntie Mable are being hubristic, assuming the universe must be full of decodable messages meant directly for them. But we can apply the principle more generally, where the purpose of tuning into the ether is not to receive some specific thing. but make us more reflective. I believe Huxley’s phrase about cleansing the doors of perception may have already been claimed by some band. But if it hadn’t, it would fit in well around here.

The three days finished with Tomutontto (back from the fourth outing), playing what could only be described as dance music for the faerie folk. To which people responded with yer actual dancing, not always a COOS staple! Yet in another way it was a fitting finale…

For COOS has a somewhat Brigadoon-like existence; vanishing from sight until you believe it will never visit our Earthly shores again, and you probably just imagined the whole thing anyway, then reappearing unexpectedly to circumvent all our common laws and customs. Will there be a ninth? It’s probably like one of those movies ending with the hushed line “will we ever see the like of this again?”

FORT PROCESS/ HUGO TICCIATI'S 'LOOPING TIME' (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

FORT PROCESS
Newhaven Fort, Sat 22nd Sept



So happily, perhaps the only music and sound art festival to be held in a Napoleonic fort got a sequel. (Actually a second sequel, alas I gormlessly missed the first occurrence.) Again it promised to “cover the cornerstones of improv, experiments, dance and noise”. With multiple events going on simultaneously, I can only concentrate on a few highlights here. Someone else’s path might not have crossed mine at all.



Most accounts I read from the last event focused on how brilliantly inappropriate it was for such an event to take over a venue based around war defences. Perhaps “make weirdo music not war” could be its slogan. But as I watched a sound installation emit spectral bleeping from the fort’s ramparts(‘Arpeggi’ by Mike Blow, handily pictured) I think I find it more splendidly appropriate.

Perhaps I just spent too much of my seventies youth watching ’Doctor Who’ and the like. But those were the days when budgets for location shooting stretched no further than Surrey, while the Radiophonic Workshop was at the show’s disposal. So the alien was often conceived of as a sonic aesthetic, strange sounds that required decoding. While the military provided the role of controlling parents, locking the weird away from us, causing us to seek it out. (Perhaps significantly, another of Blow’s installations, ’Arpeggi’, “uses hacked ex-military hardware to create music.”)



Many installations worked interactively, as what Blow called “automatic music”, collaborating with either the audience or the venue. In Adam Bastana’s ’A Room Listening To Itself’ (also handily pictured) microphones were arranged radially, to pick up from speakers. To add some audience involvement I lightly tapped one speaker, to hear a drum roll slowly spread round the room.

At other times it was the other way, the venue seemed to interpret the work for you. The sub lows of Disinformation’s ’National Grid’ were smartly located in the deep Caponier tunnels. So, while the indicia spoke of links between the grid network and the human body, I thought more of the echoes and resonances in caves which are supposed to have stimulated the first human music.

Maria Marzaioli’s ’PWM’ used four audio loops culled from improvisations. With each loop of a different length, new combinations were constantly being created. But, particularly with the use of recognisable instruments, it was almost impossible not to listen to as a ‘real’ quartet. This time the work may have influenced the setting. For I found the sound bleed (particularly between the indoor works), not distracting but enhancing of the overall effect - as if the whole festival became one meta sound art work.

The programme described Ore as the “originator of the truly singular genre Tuba Doom”. Ah, those genre tags always start off as a gag! But give it six months and at a gig you’ll run into some bozo insisting he was into Tuba Doom before anyone else. In fact, he will probably turn out to be me.

Wandering, soaking stuff up, I stumbled upon their set mid-way. A tuba and trombone player were working just slightly out of time with one another, creating an enticingly ‘bent’ effect. Already pretty minimal, that actually proved the dynamic centre of the piece as they shifted into unison for the finale. It seemed forever half-emerging out of drone, as if something shifting into view. Minimalist in the Morton Feldman sense, where the sombre meets with the serene. If music like this doesn’t progress much, it’s because it marinades. Like a fermenting spirit its taste becomes stronger and stronger.

Franco-Finnish trio Ritual Extra were similarly minimal, in fact so slow to start you wondered if they’d resolved to play only for the super-patient. (Compared to these guys, the Necks plunge straight into the deep end.) Luckily, the wait was worth it. The drummer struck his cymbals softly but so rapidly as to produce a shimmering tone. While an acoustic guitar took up a more percussive role, strumming and thwacking, as clear-voiced folk chanting sailed across the both of them.

The absolute absence of any performance element was striking, each person’s movements economically concerned only with playing. The singer sat stock still, gazing into the middle distance, shifting only his mouth.

Alas this time I missed the ending, heading off as I was to see Rhys Chatham. Who marks a different strand of Minimalism again. Having previously worked with La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Glenn Branca, tonight he was playing alongside only himself. In ’Pythagorean Dreams’, he’d switch between guitar, flute and some kind of mini-trumpet, looping down layers of himself as he went. The effect was rather like that game where you keep placing one hand atop another, ceaselessly giving off the effect of building up to some crescendo. Minimalist and musically rich at one and the same time.

I romantically imagined each loop had some in-built half-life, so nothing decayed away but each new element added to the expanding richness of the underlying sonic loam. He was probably just fading them down himself as he went, but that’s what I liked to think.



I’d watched some vidclips of AJA (above) before the day, which at the time I dismissed as “just a performance”. And true, her noise electronica is serviceable but bog-standard beat-bashing. (Certainly nothing to compare with Ewa Justka’s merciless intensity from the last event.) But, when you see it live, you can only conclude - what a performance! This time rather than work with the setting her act burst beyond its confines. Despite playing in a small and crowded room, lacking even the most basic stage, she came on as if she had Iggy Pop in her blood.

Noise music is notoriously for being ‘manpainy’. Think of the characteristic hunched pose under hoodie and over microphone. By way of cheery contrast, AJA sports - and fully inhabits - the most outrageously flamboyant costumes, from which she engages fully with the audience. After Tuba Doom perhaps we’ve hit on another new genre - Glam Noise.

In may day, women would often tell each other the expression “nothing better than having a good cry”. Yet of course there’s something better, and her whole act seems intent on proving the inherent value in having a good scream. So, despite all the volume, or more likely because of it, it’s a wholly uplifting experience to witness. The programme described her act as “cathartic”, not a word they were using in vain. And in this day and age, it’s often appealing to discover something where you do have to be there, which isn’t YouTubeable.

Overall Fort Process is one of those labours of love and (the right kind of) lunacy, put on by afficionados for afficionados, just to see the thing happen. It’s proof corporate crap hasn’t colonised the whole of our lives just yet.

Photo of AJA from the event’s website, other snaps mine. More where they came from here.

Some proper photos from Agata Urbaniak here

Last time I managed to post a video of the previous event. So let’s keep that tradition up…



‘LOOPING TIME’ BY HUGO TICCIATI + O/MODERNT CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Kings Place, London, Fri 21st Sept



This concert, part of the Time Unwrapped season, focused on string-based Minimalist music.

‘Shaker Loops’ (1978) , while an early work of John Adams’, is regarded as something of a classic, and rightly so. It contains many Minimalist elements, including a basis in a pulsing beat and an ability to keep things simple. In the second movement, a double bass plucks at a solitary string at regular intervals.

Yet, perhaps in retrospect, it’s easy to hear how he was already moving into Post-Minimalism. An earlier version in Adams’ own words “crashed and burned”, partly because it restricted itself to a string quartet. Adams responded by ramping up the number of players, first to a septet and (as performed here) a full string orchestra - “thereby adding a sonic mass and the potential for more acoustical power.”

But rather than Post-Minimalist it should be thought of as Just Romantic Enough. The reference to the Shakers, a religious group from the American Pioneer days, already gives the music more of specificity than normally found in Minimalism. What amounts to a violin solo appears midway. It very much builds to a climax, even though it continues from there and ends somewhere much closer to the beginning.

And what could be more Romantic than imitation of nature? Adams has said himself the first movement in particular was inspired by the rippling of water, the surface refracting the sunlight caught by those amassed shimmering strings.

But ultimately, as is typical of him, Adams makes the unlikely combination virtuous. Much like nature, the piece belies our constructed notions of what’s simple and what’s complex and involved.

Angel’s Share by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur, was a UK premiere. As anyone who’s seen the Ken Loach film knows, the title refers to the amount of whiskey which evaporates during distilling.

The piece is full of ideas, and has some great sections. It opens etherially, with the violins and violas creating the most disembodied sounds. Quite late on, it suddenly breaks out into a folk dance rhythm. Yet overall it didn’t hold together. I found it kept slowly losing my interest, then doing something to suddenly grab it back, only to lose it again a short while later.

While the other three composers were still with us, Perotin’s ’Viderunt Omnes’ stems from the Twelfth Century. The ensemble entered from all four corners of the auditorium already playing, and segued surprisingly neatly into Philip Glass’s Third Symphony.

Symphonies may be antithetical to the strictures of high Minimalism, and indeed Glass didn’t embark on any until the Nineties when he was already leaving that behind. (This was composed in 1995.) It does make a good companion piece to ’Shaker Loops’, there’s even a violin lead in the third movement. (The programme uses Classical terms, such as “chaconne”, which I don’t claim to understand.)

But it remains a blend rather than a break, Glass finding a sweet spot where Minimalist mantras combine with rich and resonant melodies. And the Minimalist spirit may be retained most in it’s unhurried pace, creating something stately without any pomp.

OZOMATLI/ QUJAKU/ PHILL NIBLOCK + TIM SHAW (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

OZOMATLI
Concorde 2, Brighton, Thurs 23rd Aug

So I finally catch up with Ozomatli live, even if it took their twentieth anniversary tour for Mr. Tardy here to do it. Describing the band’s actually easy for once, as they’ve done it themselves and it’s even placed upfront on their Wikipedia page. Locating their sound in their native Los Angeles, they say:

’You drive down Sunset Boulevard and turn off your stereo and roll down your windows and all the music that comes out of each and every different car, whether it's salsa, cumbia, merengue, or Hip Hop, funk or whatever, it's that crazy blend that's going on between that cacophony of sound is Ozomatli, y’know?”

As band members ceaselessly swap instruments the shifts and turns in musical style make for a gig that always feels like it’s being propelled forward, while always coming across as organic and arising from the players rather than being self-consciously eclectic.

They have a reputation as a political outfit, initially intending to form (I kid not) a workers’ union. This doesn’t much come over live, bar the occasional quick intro to a song. It does seem a little strange to find that a band best known for their live shows should omit what seems an integral element. But then there is something appealing about music that’s political and good-timey. Given the state of things, there’s plenty to be angry about and of course we have a right to that anger. But we’ve got the right to celebrate resistance as well.

Though it’s quite a different style of music, the gig echoes something I came across when seeing Goat, unrelenting energy levels; “The gig's pretty much at… fever pitch the whole way through. They're quite unrelentingly up.” In fact so irrepressible is the band’s spirit, that when a phantom hum invades the PA they decide what key it’s in, and instantly start jamming around it. Complete with a vocal which plaintively wonders “where could that hum be coming from?” It actually proves a highlight of their set, so maybe they should request hums more often.

For the closer, as I believe is a tradition of their shows, they pick up their gear and relocate to various points in the auditorium. As they moved they’d trail audience members behind then, snaking in a great conga.

A slightly random clip, but a good one of the band on home turf…



QUJAKU
Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, Brighton, Mon 27th Aug

Qujaku are self-described as “Japanese rock band [playing] psychedelic gothic dark shoe gaze [with] post rock vibes”, and are fronted (slightly inexplicably) by a lookalike for late Seventies Bowie.

They seem to wait before starting up, as if channelling something. They then go into a slow, soundscapey intro with a bowed… uh, bowed something and rung bells. Though the thumping riffs then drop, this intro kind of permeates the rest of the gig and gives proceedings a ritual feel.

Riffs are somewhat like houseguests. They’re going to stick around for a while, so you want to be sure not to pick the wrong one. Qujaku display a talent for finding mantra riffs, the sort of riff you want to hear over and over again. Their riff repository is also satisfyingly varied, from the slow and pounding to the agitated.

But they’re also adept at curveballing riffs, first getting them white-hot and then bending them into different shapes. At such points the second guitarist then turns back to the bowing or starts to pound a drum. It’s the upside of heavy riffing married to the upside of post-rock, giving a shot to your reptile and a stimulus to your Cro-Magnon brain.

The Bowie lookalike concludes the noise-fest by blowing a kiss to the assembled throng. Slightly inexplicably. In a good way.

The only real drawback of the set - and I know I always say this - is that there wasn’t enough of it. These aren’t short, snappy songs, the numbers are like potions you need to leave stewing in the cauldron awhile. But, with two support acts, they played for less than an hour. Bands have a natural set length determined by their music, which can’t be reduced to a meaningless mean. Sunn O))) played for two hours, which didn’t seem too long. Qujaku don’t necessarily need that sort of length, but they operate on timescales which take more than an hour.

This vid starts just as the intro section ends…



PHILL NIBLOCK + TIM SHAW
Cafe Oto, London, Fri 31st Aug

So next I was off to see a gig dominated by electronic hums and pulses. If Ozomatli had intruded with their Latino-tuned trumpets, the circle would have been completed. But they must have been busy elsewhere…

To try and explain Tim Shaw by a distinction, he’s quiet different to Cosmo Sheldrake, who assigned samples the respective roles of instruments. In fact Sahw's set did not, I don’t think, include any musical samples. But it did, I think, include organic sounds, albeit heavily treated. The effect become more like coloured shapes on various pieces of transparency paper, being shifted, shuffled and overlaid in different combinations. It produces new shapes and colours, until you’ve forgotten what you started off with.

Shaw’ set wasn’t divided into movements, as in classical music, but passed through distinct sections. While Phill Niblock performed five quite separate pieces, even if he ran them all together. Though there are those who claim this music to be samey, each piece was quite distinct in character. (Some more than others, as we’ll get onto.)

Despite each piece inevitably being shorter, they were much slower to evolve - at times feeling like their evolution was happening in Darwinian time. Duration became part of the experience.

His music’s comprised of murky drones and rumbles he refers to collectively as “tones”. Each one seems straightforward in itself, though blurry at the edges. It’s in the interchange between then at the magic happens, as subtle shifts come to have magnified effects. It all seems poised at the borderline between the liminal and subliminal, where you can’t quite perceive what he’s doing.

Where people go wrong, I think, is assume this is some sonic backdrop, an aural mulch out of which flowers will appear if you wait. But it’s in that ‘backdrop’ where it all happens. The metaphor of stepping into a darkened room, and the initial monotone revealing more and more shades and distinctions the longer you stay, I’ve used that many times by this point. But it’s the best metaphor I can think of, so it’s getting recycled again!

As often with drone-based music, what sounds rough and atonal can tip over into the serene. In fact in his second piece this was given centre stage, and the effect was quite tranquil. The music seemed to shimmer rather than move. Some of those tones may even have started life as notes - yes, actual notes!

But it was the fourth piece which was the densest, and perhaps the most rewarding. Broad rumbles provided perhaps not a backdrop but a surround for sharper sounds. It became like a sandpaper raga.

These four pieces already lasting over an hour, I figured we’d had our lot. Yet Niiblock started a fifth. It commenced with rumbles so low, so faint they could have been coming from the next room. Fifteen minutes later, with the room now mostly empty, I started to wonder whether this was going anywhere after all, and cut my losses. Are those that persevered still there now? We may never know.

Nibloch, who started as a film-maker, normally plays to a film show. Apart from the somewhat eccentric closer, this was the night’s only weak point. Reportage film of what looked like South Sea Islanders was too distinct, too of something to work with the more mysterious, suggestive music. (And yes, with Johanna Bramli I liked the visual but not the music - truly, there’s no fully pleasing me!) Before the show, a series of stills which looked to be from the same source were flashed up. With their merest hints of narrative connection, they may have worked better than a continuous film.

Precisely what makes this music appealing is precisely what makes it challenging to review. If you heard these pieces at different times, you’d not just react differently you’d quite likely actually hear them in a different way. The effect becomes individual and introspective.

Again, a fairly random clip. But again, worth watching…