NINA NASTASIA/ REICH RICHTER (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

NINA NASTASIA
Komedia Studio Theatre, Brighton
Monday 3rd April

Nina Nastasia is a New York singer-songwriter and longstanding John Peel fave. My previous attempts to see her have not always worked well. She appeared as part of a package tour where she seemed nervous and off. Then I ventured out on a night so freezing I was surprised the gig hadn’t been cancelled. To arrive at an empty bar and the news the gig had been cancelled. This was followed by twelve years of silence.

But now new album ’Riderless Horse’ has led to a new tour. It’s the first release for her to be playing solo. And you can see why, it’s been described as “her barest and most personal work ever.” She’s been open in interview about its origins, so it’s not too tabloidy to mention here. She broke with her manager and long-time partner over obsessive behaviour which became controlling, to find he’d killed himself the very next day. And many songs on the new album are directly addressed to him.

In the circumstances it seemed a somewhat churlish thought, but I wondered if it would repeat my last gig at Komedia, where Emma Ruth Rundle also played solo. Where the intimacy only intensified the intensity, until it became too much of a good thing.

And I always loved her band sound, with the violins which wailed on the edge of songs, like cats refusing to either come in or go out. I tend to think of her lyrics are planspokenly descriptive, with her singing style and musical style throwing the emotional filter over them.

She soon makes a comment about her ill-advised drinking whisky without water on-stage. But the night turns the other way around, and a single voice plus guitar fill the room without overwhelming. Perhaps because the songs were written to be played this way, perhaps because the have some tonal variety to them. ’Go Away’ is about as strong and strident a statement as the title suggests, which ’Blind As Batsies’ is by comparison almost jovial.

I assumed the new album dominated the set list, but checking afterwards it didn’t entirely rule the roost. The old songs slid in quite neatly with the new. Perhaps confirming Laura Snapes’ theory in the Guardian that this poison-laced relationship may have been her rosebud all along. (“This wasn’t foreboding songcraft but often completely literal.”)

So all in all, these songs of loss and despair led to splendid night for all. But my earnest wish remains to see her with a band. Even if I have to wait another twelve years.

From London the next night…

REICH/RICHTER
London Sinfonietta
South Bank Centre, London
Thurs 6th April

Over a decade ago, the Tate staged a Gerhard Richter exhibition. I intended to go, but didn’t. And up till now that’s all I could have told you about his art. In 2106 he made an animation of his art. Though rather than ‘animated art’ the the art’s essentially treated as raw materials for a new work. Starting with horizontal bands of colour, simple yet shifting. Out of which grow mirrored images, sampled sections of his artwork, developing like Mandelbrots. Then it slowly reverts to those strips of colour.

Steve Reich then put a score to it, and as the double headliner suggests we get the combination here. It’s slower-paced and more serene than the standard pulsing Reich, perhaps keeping pace with the film. The feeling is unhurried, late afternoon. Reich is quoted in the programme: “the structure of the music would be tied to the structure of the film”. Initially, when the film’s at its simplest, the score simply duplicates it in sound, then separates later.

Reich's also quoted in the programme on his connection with visual arts, pointing out that in the early days of Minimalism concert venues closed their doors but gallery spaces were more accommodating. And the music’s interest in structure over development proves the truth of this. With both sound and image essentially ‘abstract’ it becomes like a team-up rather than a struggle for dominance, a full-on synaesthesiac experience.

I wondered mid-piece how the sound would work without the visuals, then thought that a silly question to ask when I was getting the visuals. Listening to it afterwards I’d concede Reich has written greater works, but in combination it works very well indeed.

Julia Wolfe contributed what was essentially a modern composer’s version of George Harrison’s ’Only a Northern Song’. Based on a recording she heard of a brass section still very much in learning mode, she wrote ’Tell me everything.’ Which is a rollicking exuberant ride, like a toddler charging across a room, somehow always right in it’s wrongness. She’s quoted in the programme as finding it funny, which it is, but on the laugh-with side of the equation. It seemed to get the thinnest applause of the night, but as the record shows I’m a longstanding fan and was swept up in it.

In tribute to Mira Calix, who died too young last year, the Sinfonietta played ’Nunu’. Which may be her greatest hit, though never was there a more bizarre version of that label. It works its way up from sampled insects sounds, via plucks and taps into a mutated form of melodies. Otherly strange, but beguilingly so, enchanting rather than challenging. Calix’s relentless experimentalism didn’t always pay off, truth be told, but this piece wouldn’t be any more successful.

Julius Eastman was an entirely new name to me. Seems he was on the same New York scene as Arthur Russell, dedicated to eradicating the uptown/downtown demarcation, mostly by exploring the links between Minimalism and pop music.

’Joy Boy’ is a melodic piano pieces augmented by the most minimal contributions from the other instruments, until it’s impossible to hear individual lines apart from the complete work. Though sadly dying aged forty-nine, it seems he was prolific and it would be good to hear more. (Hint, hint, music programmers.)

Anna Clyne’s ’Fractured Time’ perhaps worked the least well for me. It’s agitated flurries seemed to want for something to work against, like a movement from a larger work rather than a piece in and of itself. Though it should be said if this was the weak link, it’s a sign of a pretty strong programme.

THE DELGADOS/ BEAUTIFUL WORLD (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

THE DELGADOS
Concorde 2, Brighton
Fri 20th Jan

“Where you been?” someone shouts as they take the stage. He gets back a deadpan answer about road miles from Glasgow. But we all know. This isn’t just the first night of the tour, but the first Delgados appearance since 2005. (Before I started this blog, which I believe officially places it in pre-history.) 

Which of course raises the question of which Delgados we have back. Their indie credentials included being John Peel faves and launching the Chemikal Underground label, but musically they’d throw in the changes. (I made a hamfisted attempt to span their eras here.) When string players assemble on stage, it seems a give-away. This is going to be the time of ’The Great Eastern’, where such things augmented their sound.

In fact they pretty much play through everything, even their sparky power-pop origins. (When, in their own description, “two of us couldn’t play very well and two couldn’t play at all.”) They concentrate on their middle three albums, true, but that’s as it should be.

As the night goes on, we discover two things about those strings. First, appealingly, it’s the very same players as back then. Also, they’re used as sparingly as they were back then. It’s like the way only certain letters require accents, they embellish precisely where the music needs it and no more. Too disciplined to come in just because they’re there, they just sit quiet much of the time. Then and now a band credo seems to be “only do something where something needs doing.”

I don’t seem the only soul glad to see them back. The venue’s sold out, and pretty much every number gets only a few notes in before being met by applause. One comes to an emergency stop when a lead gets yanked, only to meet a bigger round of applause the second time. Quieter sections reveal pretty much everyone is listening, no-one talking. All of which makes of a pretty good start to a years’ gig-going.

Have they changed much in the interim? Not a whole lot. Songs so precision-engineered don’t lend themselves to radical reworkings. Alun Woodward’s fey, indie voice seems almost uncannily unaltered, but Emma Pollock’s, who was perhaps a little more rock even then, has gone more that way. Which can change the overall sound. ’Accused Of Stealing’ (always a personal favourite) probably isn’t played all that differently, but comes to sound more like the Velvets covering the song. Which is not at all a bad thing.

Someone else shouts if there’s any new songs. “Not yet”, they respond, a little teasingly. You never know your luck…

‘The Light Before You Land’…

‘BEAUTIFUL WORLD’
Brighton Philharmonic
Brighton Dome, Sat 21st Jan 

This programme was designed as a “Winter journey… exploring Arctic landscapes”. But more importantly, in a sign Brighton Philharmonic may be becoming more adventurous, every work was by a contemporary composer - all born within the last century, all bar one still living and one younger than me.

The opening ’Twine’ by Rolf Wallin, for marimba and xylophone, I confess did little for me. But the accompanying visual, by Kathy Hinde, a semi-abstract collage of river sediment and algae, was splendid. Hinde’s visuals continued throughout the night. And if they peaked at that point, they were all pretty darn good. Always inscribing themselves on your eyeballs, but never dominating over the music, more instillation pieces than mini-films.

It’s a peculiarity of life that Johny Greenwood is the guitarist of the risible Radiohead, yet can make music worth hearing when left to his own devices. This was a suite from his soundtrack to ’There Will Be Blood’. Six short movements were fitted inside sixteen minutes, of widely varying style and - it should be said - quality. Some did just sound like film music, when that’s the last thing film music should ever do. But others were way more inventive. Two successive movements I mentally dubbed ’Slide’ and ’Pluck’ after their dominant style of playing, with ’Slide’ seeming to shimmer in from somewhere else.

Philip Glass’ ’Glassworks’ from 1981 was described in the programme as “an immediate hit” which “introduced… minimalism to a huge public”. Which of course means it’s really post-minimalist. You listen to individual lines rather than a composite, and at points a particular player leads. Glass himself has confirmed he deliberately wrote something more cross-over, and the title has more than a little of the calling card about it.

Does that matter, when the music itself sounds this enthralling? (Partly because Glass can write so exquisitely for solo piano.) Only that, when minimalism when post-minimalist, a lot of the sense of nature left it. Those churning, flurrying wind instruments sound more like a machine. A serene machine, neither Victorian heavy industry nor malfunctioning Microsoft software, but still a machine. I think I tend to picture some dashing adventurer/ eccentric inventor sweeping along in some gleaming limousine, possibly powered by elegance alone. (Akin to the way Neu! can evoke the machine sense.) While his earlier works were more like mini-ecosystems. Notably, Hinde’s visuals shift away from nature scenes, to city squares and similar.

Of the two John Luther Adams pieces, ’Drums of Winter’ worked the best. Unlike anything I’ve heard from him before it was short and punchy, the polyrhythms of four pounding drummers. It could have been played to a rock audience and got a similarly euphoric reception.

While ’songbird songs’ did seem a regressive step in imitating birdsong. Nature can be an endless source of inspiration to art, but art imitative of nature is always going to be merely constrained. Some did work better than others, particularly ’mouring dove’ with its eerie Ocarinas.

’Cantus Articus: Concerto For Birds and Orchestra’, by Einjuham Rautavaara completed the night. As all that might suggest, the composer’s from Cleethorpes. Only kidding, its Finland. It tackled the bird song question more elegantly by playing back recordings over the music. Which confirmed the sheer strangeness of them, perhaps emphasised by being out of context. 

Musically, it was the most ‘classical’ work of the programme. I suspect when people used that word they really mean Romantic. And I was to read afterwards Rautavaara has been described as Neo-Romantic. At times my somewhat inexpert ears were reminded of Stravinski. But it had the sublime sense of the otherworldly that the best Romantic music has. There were points where the bird song enveloped the music, like a flock of feathers had somehow blown in the venue, and others where the two essentially met in the middle.

Psst! Brighton Philharmonic! Still three more seasons to go!

BANG ON!

Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London, Fri 28th Feb

The prolific composer Julia Wolfe of Bang On a Can, long-term Lucid Frenzy favourite, has come up with another new work. And if this is the UK debut of ‘Flower Power’, the world premiere was only last month

Sixties nostalgia is normally pretty trite stuff, of course. And inn truth that title doesn’t bode well. But Wolfe, interviewed in the programme, was insistent she wasn’t reminiscing about tie-dye clothing but recalling the sense that the times were a-changeable. (“There was a sense that a better world was possible… a time of new ideas and hope.”)

Back then rock music was still young enough to be unburdened by its own history, doing something new just seemed its natural state. Literally and metaphorically, it was where the energy was. And Wolfe’s aim seems to reawaken that sense of musical invention in the hope it also reawakens the political invention.

It’s also true that psychedelic fondness for distorting sound came to overlap with contemporary music’s dissonance. Perhaps best symbolised in the famous (if actually very brief) meeting between Paul McCartney and Luciano Berio. And here the Bang Ona Can All-Stars share the stage with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

True, when the bands tried to literally cohabit with the orchestras things didn’t always turn out well, and they effectively danced over each other’s feet. (Have you listened to Deep Purple’s ‘Concerto For Group and Orchestra’, lately? Thought not.) But Wolfe, and Bang On a Can in general, have an almost magic ability to pass between genres.

It opens with a long series of overlapping held tones, against which the swings start to swell. It was enticingly suggestive, like the rough rock from which forms would later be carved. But, just as I was thinking it did sound like a very long intro to a psychedelic track, the beat kicked in with a vengeance. And even as this was full of forward momentum, the strings gave it a lift, advancing and rising at the same time.

The work didn’t resolve neatly into movements but perpetually morphed and shifted. The defining point might be the guitar playing alongside the string section, working in unison rather than one as backing track to the other. Only towards the end did the work start to become elegiac, confetti twisting from the ceiling like Autumn leaves. But the much Sixties music was itself eligiac!

Though the ensemble and the orchestra didn’t share the stage again, two of the other pieces were well chosen. One genre I simply can’t take to is opera, so as much as I love John Adams as soon as the singing starts I’m off. But I was soon to discover ‘The Chairman Dances’ has no voices, and is affect a non-album single from ‘Nixon In China’

The conceit seems to be that Mao’s missus (represented by the music) not only persuades the great leader to dance but entices a painting of him come to life. It’s the tropes confined of the statue summoned to life and the dictator re-finding his carefree youth, the painting presumably standing for the fixidity of ideology. As you’d expect from this description, it’s exuberant and boisterous, elegance combined with abandon like a big band number of old - essentially an invitation to dance.

I’d seen the All-Stars perform Martland’s ‘Horses of Instruction’ only a year ago, so might have wished for something fresher. But it’s not a work you’d easily get tired off, and there was no doubting it’s place here. As I said last time: “It somehow found the perfect balance of contemporary composition with the rambunctious involving feeling of beat music, Blake’s smart horses and blazing tigers combined into one creature.”

The final work seemed like the wild card of the programme - Philip Glass’s Third Symphony. Minimalism may live in the interchange between rock and contemporary music, but it belongs to neither camp. If rock music is (jn Wolfe’s phrase) “electric energy”, Minimalism sounds more elegant, less a roaring jet-plane and more a solar-powered glider. Not as outwardly powerful but with an effortless perpetualness about it.

Interviewed for Radio Three, conductor Bramwell Tovey was asked whether he considered this a “proper symphony” - and said no. His reasoning seemed to be the four sections weren’t distinct enough, didn’t contain enough of their own themes, to be characterised as movements. But I don’t think he intended that as a criticism, not should it be.

Glass, after all, starts by restricting his sound palette to the sixteen string players of the orchestra. While written in ’95, some way after the era of High Minimalism, his earlier allegiences aren’t abandoned. He still intends to do more with less, the same themes being reworked in different forms and combinations as the piece turns. But its melodic lines are rich and, at least by Minimalist standards, extended.

You can hear the whole thing on Radio Three until the end of March…

THE PHILP GLASS ENSEMBLE/ DEEP MINIMALISM 2.0/ MOON DUO (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

THE PHILIP GLASS ENSEMBLE
Barbican, London, Wednesday 30th Oct



Glass’s Ensemble were in town to perform the classic Minimalist work ’Music With Changing Parts’, from 1970. (You can tell it’s an early work from the flatly descriptive title. I’m expecting to hit upon ’Music For Musicians’ any day now.) In an appealing anecdote it was through attending an early British performance of this that Bowie and Eno discovered Glass.

Glass himself, now in his Eighties, proved too ill to participate. Which was a disappointment, but not a deal-breaker. For one thing, I’d seen him perform the epic ’Music In Twelve Parts’ in the Brighton Festival nine years ago. For another, it was hearing his own Ensemble which was the key thing. Minimalist music is often taken up by musicians the way Brechtian drama is by actors, which is to say badly. It works against all their basic assumptions, such as their desire to stamp their own personality on the work. The Philip Glass Ensemble is more likely to get Glass right.

In the programme Glass admitted the Ensemble hadn’t played the piece since ’81, and he regarded it as a “transitional work” supplanted by later works pieces as ’Music In Twelve Parts’, until newer groups picked up on it and caused him to reassess. He added “I found that by enlarging on the original score with a brass and a vocal ensemble, I was able to bring the music to a fuller and more definite expression…. A more satisfying completing of the original idea.”

A sentence which did give me pause. (Perhaps still smarting from the debacle that was ‘Lodger’.) In their early days, both Glass and Reich worked with small groups. The original recording of this had eight musicians, the first performance possibly less. This was out of economic necessity, but was virtuous. It generated a discipline, you couldn’t go ornate with it if you wanted to.

A larger Ensemble (seventeen players, not counting the chorus) presents opportunity to tinker with the original, to throw in bells and whistles. Doing things because you can. It even necessitated two conductors, one a demonstrating keyboard player who stood facing the others and the other a more traditional gesticulating type for the brass and choir.

As things turned out, the lengthy opening confined itself entirely to the keyboards. They struck up a rhythmic pulse, to which the smallest and most subtle modulations soon became enthralling. Only gradually and incrementally did the brass and chorus work their way in, and mostly they served to amplify rather than add. It was more like blowing a sketch up to wall size, and less like dumping extra detail lines upon it.

Not being there in ’81 I didn’t know the original piece. But it seemed to me Glass went on to do something smarter still. At first rarely used together, the brass and chorus became more and more powerful as the piece went on. By the end it had built up to a mighty crescendo, hardly what you expect from a Minimalist work but made into a welcome surprise. It became like a ship powered by steam and by sail simultaneously, the rhythmic pulses still driving below decks as the chorus became the bright and open wind.

The original un-expanded version, albeit not by the Ensemble themselves…



DEEP MINIMALISM 2.0
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, Sun 3rd Nov



This marked the return of the festival “dedicated to mediative listening and deep concentration”. As before, this non-Metropolitan type could only make one of the days. Which had relocated from St. Johns in Smith Square to the South Bank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Not of an elitist disposition, I love the way Reich and Glass have moved from the fringes to win popular appeal. But it was also good to know that as well as blossoming branches this music has tough, sinewy roots, and see those roots are getting watered. So as the record shows I was a big fan of Deep Minimalism 1.0, commenting how it felt “like a living, breathing scene. There was a laid-back, by-fans-for-fans atmosphere to the day which made it involving, made it more than the mere sum of its parts…. it simply felt like someone had said ‘back to mine to listen to cool music’ to a few hundred people.”

Laura Cannell played “medieval violin” and “double pipes”, which turned out to mean blowing two recorders at once. She used the raw, open-tuned sound of traditional instruments to collapse the distinction between folk and minimalist music. For this isn’t some strange artsy-fartsy style at all, in fact in many ways Minimalism is music coming home. However, while all the pieces she played were effective they were perhaps a little samey. She seemed to need to alternate between violin and pipes to find variety.

Morton Feldman’s solo piano work ’Triadic Memories’ proved the centrepiece around which the rest of the day had to arrange itself. The blurb promised “the flow of piano tones becomes an unspoken mantra to infinity.” Deep Minimalism has notably made the infinity symbol into a motif, an alternative to the otherwise ubiquitous time signature, a sign we’re passing beyond standard notions of musical time. And never more appropriately than here. At an hour and a half of very slow piano music, sometimes going down to single finger playing, it could feel like we were being taken to infinity and beyond.

By comparison, my previous live experience of Feldman was a jaunt. But if challenges exist to such a work they’re there for a reason. As the man himself said of his penchant for duration: “Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it's scale. Form is easy: just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter.” If something is too vast to take in all at once, you give up trying and instead listen from moment to moment.

True, the word ‘Memories’ is there in the title. Yet this, I’m guessing, refers to the way elements recur, but without any overall structure in which to place them. So they transpire as a hazy half-recollection, something akin to a folk memory. It’s “somehow I know this” rather than “this recalls a motif from the second movement, now transferred to the strings”. And despite its sombre mood the piece is in its own way melodic, in the way a Puritan church might not contain a lot to look at but still has its own sense of simple harmoniousness. There is something hymnal about Feldman.

So the challenges dissolve once you get to hear the pieces from the inside. Though admittedly that’s easier said than done. As the piece went on (you couldn’t say progressed) I kept going back and forth between the two senses of interminable. One where I was in an eternal present and time something that just happened to other people. And the other, more… um, familiar use of the term. The piece notably had an attrition rate among the audience.

The second half seemed almost the opposite to the first. While every earlier piece had been by a soloist, suddenly sixteen celloists were on-stage and playing along to Malibu’s electronics. And how do you spoil the sound of sixteen cellos? As it turns out, by smothering them in crashing wave sounds, la-la vocals and general New Age mush. It’s the musical equivalent of platitudes, of being told “there, there, never mind” on an an endless loop.

I had resolved to only mention the memorable works, but truth to tell Malibu had such a high processed sugar content that it became memorable - just for the wrong reasons.

John Luther Adams then used the same sixteen cellos, for ’Canticles of the Sky’,, though to distinctly better effect. I might have preferred the other Adams piece I’ve seen live, ‘Become Ocean’, but only on points - this was still an effective and affecting work.

There is perhaps a link between Adams and Feldman, even though they don’t sound remotely alike. The most common weakness of Romanticism was to anthropomorphise its interest in nature, and in so doing diminish it. A mountain range become merely a looking glass for the artist. Adams and Feldman are more able to channel nature’s mighty strangeness, in both senses of the term.

Last time I was quite successfully seduced. This time, at least judging by the day I saw, Deep Minimalism just didn’t seem to be getting as deep. Just as the other venue had a more informal feel, this was closer to a standard business-as-usual concert.

Moreover, there seemed a polarisation at work, as if Feldman and Malibu were battling for the event’s identity. With the majority seeming to favour Malibu. John Lewis’ Guardian review found her “groundbreaking but physically compelling” whereas Feldman was dismissed as “rambling and interminable”. Perhaps we now need our alternative to the alternative, Still Deeper Minimalism 1.0. We could even form rival gangs and get into very slow knife fights.

Rather than a YouTube clip, which doesn’t sound exactly conducive to deep concentration, let’s link to the playlist the curators provided…



MOON DUO
St. Bartholomews Church,Brighton, Mon 4th Nov



There’s music which is too complex to get your head round, but that’s just befuddled aggravation. Then there’s much that’s too simple to get your head round, a far more potent force. Which is what Moon Duo trade in. It’s the sensory derangement of psychedelia combined with the hypnotic force and ecstatic states of dance music, which soon convinces you that you must have drunk the Kool-Aid. And though there’s the intensity of garage rock at the heart of the storm there’s a kind of serenity.

The keyboards are the engine here, like a Terminator whose mission is to lead the dance, often with pulses so pared down they’re a short step away from drones. And it’s the guitar which fills the normal keyboard rolls, providing fills and flourishes like a kind of punctuation, or solos which glide over the top of the sound.

Last time I caught them, some four years ago, I commented:“Moon Duo sound like… well, moonlight, silver-cold and slightly spectral. Hairy West Coast hippies they may be, but the ideal gig for them wouldn’t be on some sun-baked beach, but in a forest clearing with the glowing white orb at its fullest.”

In the intervening four years their sound has filled out somewhat, even developed from black-and-white into splashes of bright colour. It might not sound a good idea on paper, when audacious sparseness was always part of their trance-out appeal. But they make it work.

And the fullness is emphasised by the new light show. The band are surrounded by screens on which projections appear. The visuals aren’t the standard shifting lava lamp forms of psychedelia but geometric patterns. Which meshes perfectly with the sound. But perhaps the best thing is the way the display includes silhouettes of the three players, so the visuals never come to override the music. (It helps that each has such a distinct silhouette. Keyboardist Sanae Yamada should definitely not grow herself a beard.)

And it all works quite splendidly in the salubrious expanse of St. Bartholomews Church. (The highest-roofed Church in Britain, I would have you know.) Combine all of this and everything is lifted beyond a regular gig, into special event territory. People who weren’t here will later be claiming they were.

Alas all this doesn’t make it onto record. A sticker on the latest CD, ‘Stars Are The Light’, promises “their most melodic and hooks-driven album yet” Suggesting the idea is for a cross-over album, which lets newbies in gently. Everything sounds back where it should be, the vocals up top on the mix and the keyboards relegated to accompanying them. Many album tracks sound like the regular standards which the live versions stretch and distort beyond recognition. It’s like it was recorded in captivity, whereas live is where they can go wild. True it does break free more the more it goes on, though it never really reaches their live sound.

From London, light show a-go-go…

MONO/ KING OF GHOSTS/ GLASS'S BOWIE SYMPHONIES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

MONO
The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 4th April

Mono’s monicker may be intended ironically, as they go in for expansive instrumentals ofter described as “post-rock”. (Though the band themselves have responded “music is communicating the incommunicable; that means a term like post-rock doesn't mean much to us”.) Based in Japan, they’re now celebrating their twentieth anniversary and tenth album. Wikipedia notes “the band's live performances are noted for their intensity” (without anyone adding ‘citation required’).

They’re as uninterested in rock’n’roll theatrics as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, playing backlit so as to be become virtual silhouettes, heads bowed in classic shoegaze pose. There’s precisely one track with vocals, possibly the only one of their career, which is sung (I kid not) from behind a pillar. And they speak precisely once, on coming back for the encore to remind us of that twentieth anniversary. Maybe they won’t speak again till the next one.

There may be musical similarities to Godspeed, such as the shimmering guitar sound. But they’re probably best described by Mark Radcliffe’s classic comment about Television, “the nearest rock record to a string quartet”. Though they’re more like this description than they are like Television. In fact they may be more like the description than Television are! Perhaps notably, tracks on the most recent release feature both strings and wind players.

There is perhaps a formula of sorts. Several tracks start off with a slow, measured melody line. Counter-melodies them get added gradually, until the whole thing hits a crescendo. (Often underlined by an abrupt change in lighting.) It’s like watching an abstract painting being composed, first a coloured line being drawn across the canvas, then different shapes forming, before the colours all finally run together.

But if it’s a formula it’s a good formula! Each section seems the thing when you’re inside it, the melody lines involving in their own right, nothing just a bridge to move the track along. In fact it was the track least bound to this, the one with the vocals (‘Breathe’) which seemed the weakest. Mono’s life performances are, it seems, to be noted for their intensity.

From Belgrade…



'KING OF GHOSTS' (SOUMIK DATTA + THE CITY OF LONDON SINFONIETTA)
The Dome, Brighton, Wed 8th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

In which Soumik Datta provided live soundtracks to two Indian films on the sarod, a kind of cousin to the sitar which I am now going to pretend I previously knew existed.

For the first half he played in a trio to ’Around India With a Movie Camera’, an assemblage of imperial-era footage. The film provoked some titters at the crassness of Raj attitudes, not least a speech where the King harped on the virtues of being in a “free Empire”. (Yo wot, your majesty?) Alas the music wasn’t particularly effective, with the East-meets-West combination of instruments serving up a very mild curry indeed.

The problem may have been that the source material was by its nature snippets, like flipping through a book of postcards. And the music seemed to need longer stretches to work up a head of steam, so was always stalling.

Things picked up for the second half with ’King Of Ghosts’. This was a “reimagined” version of Satajit Ray’s ’Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’ (1968) which, like no other Ray film I’ve ever seen, was a fantastical adventure featuring magic shoes, dancing demons, wizards in sunglasses and the King of the Ghosts. It seemed more ’Monkey’ than ’The Chess Players’. (And yes, I do know ’Monkey’ wasn’t Indian.)

For this Datta got his longer breaks to stretch out into. Plus he was joined by the City of London Sinfonia. Their contribution was often to create a musical mood for the scene, a task they took to with some alacrity and little regard for the conventions of musicality. For example, in an early scene the title character wanders into a wood. To which their rustling and whispering straight away evoked the sense this was something supernatural we were going into. In short, they made the film more like it was than it had been already.

From London...



PHILP GLASS: THE BOWIE SYMPHONIES
Royal Festival Hall, London, Thurs 9th May

The occasion was the European premiere of ’Lodger’, the final album of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy and last to be made a symphony by Philip Glass. (Though nigh-on a quarter-century after its predecessor.) Tonight all three were performed in succession.

In a pre-concert talk Glass said that he’d gone furthest from the original in content as well as chronology, and in fact had only used Bowie’s words. Which was slightly strange to hear, for no-one has ever suggested the Berlin trilogy was primarily about the words. In fact Bowie may well have written them in rebellion against the notion of ‘meaningful’ lyrics.

Then again, the decision arguably exposes the essential arbitrariness of the “Berlin trilogy” concept, for ’Lodger’ has as much in common with the album after it as the album before. With ’Low’ Glass used the second all-instrumental side. (In the programme he mentally reversed the sides, imagining that came first.) And ’Heroes’,though it departs further from its source, only incorporates two vocal numbers. Whereas Lodger’ has not a single instrumental.

’Low’ is known as Bowie’s “blue’ album, and if it had a colour scheme it would be nocturnal blues, greys and blacks. While in Glass’s hands those colours become oranges and yellows. The programme compares it to Debussy and Raphael.

Only the final movement, ’Warzawa’, has anything that might conceivably be called low, and even there the deep, mournful notes yield to something bright. Driving through the winter to hear it in Bexhill seemed appropriate, like walking through the dark evenings to hit Christmas. As said at the time, the result is “pretty much win-win-win… as tuneful as pop music, as hypnotic as minimalism and as dynamic as classical music.”

If the talk had focused on ’Lodger’s vocals, what hit immediately was another new element - the organ. The venue’s recently refurbished organ, with prodigious pipes, was played by James McVinnie. (Last seen playing solo Glass pieces in Falmer.) This quite literally added a new dynamic, making the music much more propulsive, turning like an elegant machine. The programme points out “here the orchestra is enormous and lush.”

Unfortunately, a few seconds into the first vocal starting your reaction was “uh-oh”. They seemed performed as if singer Angelique Kidjo had just been handed the lyrics, with no indication of style or melody, and so was just proclaiming them. Rather than sparking any kind of creative dissonance they just sounded double-booked with the music. In a completely inverse effect to the organ, they acted as a drag on everything. I found myself trying to tune them out, like a loud audience member who for some reason couldn’t be shushed.

The one time, the solo time, they seemed to work was at the end of ’African Night Flight’. A section which I’ve no idea is in a foreign language or simply scatting, but comes to the same thing - there the vocals weren’t about the words.

It seems clear enough that Glass wrote a symphony but then decided to shoehorn in his vaguely made promise to complete this trilogy. (Though, and before anyone asks, he had started composing before Bowie’s death.) I foresee much future debate, between purists of authorial intent who insist it must be played as written and the rest of us.

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?”

TERRY + GYAN RILEY/ RAKTA + DEAF KIDS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

TERRY & GYAN RILEY
The Old Market, Hove, Sun 14th Apr

The man with a greater claim than any other to be called the Godfather of Minimalism now performs in a duo with his son, Gyan. While Gyan sticks to guitar, Terry shifts between different keyboards. The pieces are, I’d guess, semi-structured improvisations.

Though he’d often with instruments mid-piece, the best tracks for me were the one where Terry took to either the electric piano or melodica. Those seemed the moments where what you think of Riley came most to the fore, dervish chanting or some other form of eastern influence. At such moments Gyan’s regular usage of pedals and switches would become more abundant than the notes he was playing.

For the penultimate number, clearly unafraid of learning new tricks, he played some kind of iPad software. The results were quite different to everything else in the set - ambient, floating and free-form. And, to me, the highlight.

Unfortunately, at least for me, he mostly played the grand piano, And the traditional instruments seemed to rub off on the music. There was nothing wrong with it, it was just overly familiar. I found myself thinking more of Django Reinhardt than John Cale, Prandit Prau Nath or others from his actual list of collaborators. The result was a gig which, whenever it seemed to be taking off, would return to taxi-ing up and down the runway.

I’ve now seen Riley twice, and felt a little let down both times. I’d imagined part of the problem last time was the large ensemble, but was now little more impressed with a duo. Perhaps, after having transformed music at quite a fundamental level, we should leave him to doing whatever he wants in his later years. (He’s now eighty-three, let’s not forget.) But perhaps what he wants is not a thing for me.

From Paris, with melodica…



RAKTA/ DEAF KIDS

The Hope + Ruin, Brighton, Mon 22nd Apr

The name Rakta means passion or energy in Hindi. The group are a psyche band hailing from Sao Paolo in Brazil. Though a trio involving guitar and drums, it’s the keyboardist and singer who takes the lead. They can rely quite heavily on looping, but instead of layering sound they lay down a bass track to perform atop of. (I thought at the time the looping was effectively replacing the bass, though it seems they sometimes perform as a four-piece.) Vocals are distorted cries, chants and screams, past all intelligibility.

With the keyboards so dominant and the emphasis on full-on repetition there’s time where the sound borders on dance music. It takes the ceaseless insistency, but instead of evoking euphoria it instead goes for derangement. They seem ever-able to ramp tracks up midway, just when you though they’d reached peak psychosis they’ll surpass it. They run one track into the next, joining them together with more spacey interludes, which adds to the sense of urgency.

Perhaps the only drawback with them is, with everyone behind an instrument, there’s effectively no front-person. They smartly downplay any audience engagement, not speaking on stage and performing in semi-darkness. But it might gain an extra impact with an abstract filmshow, or similar.

Deaf Kids are also a trio from Sao Paolo, also run their set right through, also use distorted vocals and also marshall the power of repetition. Except where Rakta were spectral they got decidedly heavy,

They may have drawn the short straw going on second. When they couldn’t quite match Rakta it gave them a slight taint of ‘not as good as the support band’, though we should probably see this night as a double headliner. When, after a more archetypally average band, they’d have shone brighter.

They don’t just use riffs but the most pared down of riffs, as if broken fragments of longer musical pieces. The effect is similar to hearing just a few words from a sentence, you instinctively wait for the thing to be resolved, giving it a sense of anticipation.

And when not riffing, rather than retreat into something more conventionally ‘musical’, they’d assault their effects pedals directly - unleashing free noise. Like much modern music, the dispensing with conventional song structures is like getting to the birthday cake without having to chew your way through all the sandwiches. If Rakta were like some id-version of dance music, their clattering and echoey noise at times evoked industrial dub.

Both from Manchester, Rakta…



…and Deaf Kids…

TOTAL IMMERSION: LIGETI (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

Barbican, London, Sat 2nd March

The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti… you’ve probably heard his music even if you don’t know the daunting-sounding name. For Stanley Kubrick was wont to use it in his films, principally ‘2001’. And his influence remains strong enough for the Barbican to stage a day-long series of concerts, of which I was only able to catch the evening.

Though he was composing earlier, the Sixties saw him hit on his mature style. He’s quoted in the programme as saying “I have always been looking for an alternative to the 12-note temperament”. And he became interested in what we’d now call World music, not to imitate or incorporate it but to find life outside the conventions of Western harmony. Imagine if visual art had not been confined just to subject matter but to colour, with three agreed shades or green and purple unheard of.

Instead, in the pioneering ’Atmospheres’ (1961), he used ‘sound masses’ where instruments cluster together rather than contribute individual lines, producing ‘adjacent’ sounds to one another which need to be heard in combination. Imagine the difference between ballet, where figures dance in synchronisation but stay separate, to circus acrobats climbing and jumping all over each other. And the piece is exhilarating to listen to to this day, particularly to witness regular classical instruments emitting such unearthly sounds.

His mention of “12-note” refers to then fashionable Serialism. And it’s notable that, quite unlike Serialism, the piece has great dynamics. It just achieves them without the normal standards of musical progression. It’s been described by Harold Kaufman as "a magma of evolving sound”.

The next piece, at least chronologically, was ’Clocks and Clouds’ (1972/3). In a nice anecdote, the programme explains the title comes from a Karl Popper lecture he attended. The then-standard notion of physics was that the sub-atomic world, with its quirky quarks and other weirdly behaving particles, was one thing and the clockwork order of the stars and the planets another. Whereas Popper insisted on a continuity between order and chaos, between clocks and clouds.

I’ve often compared contemporary music of this era to experiencing a weather front. And by extension of Popper’s metaphor, much of the appeal comes from perceiving an order to the music which you can’t quite discern. It’s like receiving an alien radio signal which is compelling for hovering on the periphery of decipherability. The voices in ’Clocks and Clouds’ particularly suggest this. And, possibly by co-incidence, as Ligeti grew up in the Eastern block, he first heard contemporary music by illegally tuning into German radio stations.

The programme also included ’San Francisco Polyphony’ (1973/4) and two much later pieces, after Ligeti had returned from a break from composing. In the intervening time his sonic cosmonaut adventures had fallen more into earth’s orbit. As suggested by the tiles of both ’Piano Concerto’ (1985/8) and ’Violin Concerto’ (1989/93) their return to convention even extends to having a lead instrument. There’s quotes from the man to suggest that, once the unexpected is expected from you, the thing to do becomes the expected.

It’s true that ’Atmospheres’ packs more in it’s nine dense minutes than ’Violin Concerto’ does in twenty-eight. And the concertos might have worked better programmed alongside one another, despite their greater length. But their most interesting feature was their lack of interest in, to use a current political term, ‘centrism’. Instead of making their prridge meh they span the dial all the way from the most regular clocks to the most ungraspable clouds. The programme describes ’Violin Concerto’ as “a labyrinth in which some paths were familiar, some weirdly unfamiliar, and one could never guess when the music might flip from one to another.”

And ’Violin Concerto’ in particular is interesting for a return to folk influences of his younger years. At times the lead violin seems to be echoed in a distorting mirror of the ensemble, where they’d mangle his melodies and hand them back to him. Yet at others they’d provide melodies of their own.

Though Liegti knew Stockhausen, one of the other great contemporary composers of the era, he only very briefly dallied with electronic sounds. In fact, though the music’s quite different, there’s more of a parallel in approach to the American Minimalists. Both saw World music as an escape from an impasse Western composition had mired itself in, and so stuck to ‘standard’ instruments. Both eschewed a hierarchy of instruments and musical progression. Both later decided that their own rules now risked becoming restrictions, and tried to reconcile themselves with the Western tradition.

Depending on your whereabouts and whenabouts, you may be able to hear this concert on the BBC iPlayer.

And you’ll know this…

BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS/ JULIA WOLFE’S ‘ANTHRACITE FIELDS’ (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS
The Dome, Brighton, Tues 15th Jan

One facet of Bang on a Can, the All-Stars describe themselves as: “freely crossing the boundaries between classical, jazz, rock, world and experimental music, this six-member amplified ensemble has consistently forged a distinct category-defying identity, taking music into uncharted territories.”

Last time I saw the All-Stars themselves (rather than extended family members), the programme was built around a concept - samples and field recordings. Hewing consistently to the concept led to a night which was intriguing but inconsistent musically. This time the programme was bound to no theme, and no piece was less than fully involving.

Two numbers might get classed under the general tag ‘ambient’ - Philip Glass’s ’Opening’ (from ’Glassworks’) and Brian Eno’s ’Music For Airports 1’. As a big Glass fan, and someone who mostly finds Eno’s ambient works only formally interesting, I expected to find myself favouring the first option. Added to which Eno’s work wasn’t written to be performed but constructed from tape loops. Had I been asked beforehand about the wisdom of transposing it to live musicians, I’d doubtless have said no.

Which is another reason to be glad that no-one listens to me. However much I enjoyed the Glass, the Eno most won me over. It gave off a sense of slo-mo dynamics, of suggesting it was slowly but surely building to a climax which never came. The sense of ceaseless anticipation made the piece compelling.

But, beholden to no other task, the set maxed out on variety. The closer was the invigorating’Horses of Instruction’, by British composer Steve Martland. It somehow found the perfect balance of contemporary composition with the rambunctious involving feeling of beat music, Blake’s smart horses and blazing tigers combined into one creature. The jazzy syncopated funk workout, complete with honking sax, transformed the body language of the players. As they swung and swayed along, an ensemble became a band before your eyes.

Some local stalwarts refer to ‘Old Brighton’, a bohemian spirit the town had before it was overrun with hipsters and everything became monetised. Formed in ’92, Bang On a Can seem similarly ‘old New York’, before the “Disneyland for the rich” thing, when a wide variety of people were crammed together into a few islands. The music of your neighbours would inevitably seep into your apartment, and so the natural thing to do was mix it all up.

They carry with them the all-important understanding that great music doesn’t stem from the brows of lone geniuses, in ivory tower isolation, but from collaboration and cultural cross-fertilisation. They’re not just good, they’re exemplary.

From the sublime (‘Music For Airports’ performed in an airport, with announcements added ambience…



… to the spirited! ’Horses of Instruction’, also not from Brighton…



JULIA WOLFE’S ‘ANTHRACITE FIELDS’
Bang On a Can with the BBC Singers
Kings Place, London, Sat 19th Jan

Though this new composition was by Bang On a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe and cited the All-Stars first, it’s based around the chorus. (The programme explains it was commissioned by an American choral group.) The All-Stars do nothing, or contribute quite minimally, for long periods. Not previously realising I had any preconceptions, I soon found I had to switch them off.

Like Wolfe’s earlier ‘Steel Hammer’, the work has to do with American labour history. However unlike either ‘Steel Hammer’ or ‘Cruel Sister’, it wasn’t based on folk songs but something more buried. In both senses of the word.

Anthracite was best-quality coal. Which didn’t necessarily translate into best working conditions for the guys who dug it. In the programme Wolfe explains she grew up in Pennsylvania near the mines. Yet the family car almost always turned in the opposite direction to them. Neither modern composers nor their central London audiences tend to be ex-miners, which is part of the point.

For example, the movement ’Breaker Boys’ is based on recollections ex-miner Shorty Slick gave to a documentary. My initial response was concern that transposing his words onto a choir might run a little close to speaking for someone. Why not just do the Steve Reich thing, I thought, and just run a recording of the voice? Especially when Wolfe often uses Reich’s trick of using the cadences of speech for rhythms.

But in fact, just as Slicks’s job was to sort rock from coal, the reciting chorus sorts out his feelings and leaves us with the brute facts. For example how soon you’d lose your fingernails to the work. And much of the texts used are just that - texts. Dry information, often provided in a list format. The opening movement, ’Foundation’, recites names from an index of mining accident. As Wolfe notes in the programme, “the list is sadly long”. But supplying that sadness falls to you.

And you can see how this works all the better from the time the piece does the opposite. ’Speech’ comes, as you might expect, from a speech. Given by a Miner’s Union president, on paper its involving and effective. (“If we must grind up human flesh and bones in the industrial machine that we call modern America…” is its start.) 

But as performed the words are sung not by the choir but solo, in an emotive rock/folk style, which serves to rob them of their effect through over-enunciation. When an artist merely lays an idea before you, leaving you to pick it up, you’ll feel it more solidly in your hand.

Overall the work’s eclectic, inventive and compelling, ranging between ominous drone, scatting jazz and polyphonic choral music, It’s so densely packed it feels longer than its hour duration. (In, you know, a good way.) But the upside is simultaneously the downside, and it feels more uneven than ’Steel Hammer’. Mostly because of ’Speech’, but also in parts of the final movement ’Appliances’.

A short documentary on its creation…

Coming soon! More gig-going adventures...

JAMES MCVINNIE PLAYS PHILP GLASS/ THE GODFATHERS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

JAMES MCVINNIE PLAYS PHILIP GLASS

Minimalist music seems to be most associated with strings. But the organ is actually a great instrument to hear it on, because it straight away dispels so many misconceptions. This is music which is mistakenly assumed to be stark and austere, made for people who demonstrate their wealth by having precisely one piece of furniture in their entire house. While the sound of the organ is warm and resonant. It’s impossible to reduce it’s flows and surges back into individual notes. And it fits Glass’ music like a glove.

Glass may well be the popular face of Minimalism. Still, McVinnie started things off with a short talk, which seemed based on the idea that while the world’s got used to later Glass the earlier years still take some easing into. He used 1976’s ‘Einstein on the Beach’ as the switching point from l’enfant terrible to  star guest of the Brighton Festival.

And it was bizarre (in a good way to watch McVinnie at the organ for 1969’s 'Music In Fifths’, his hands occupying such a small area of those amassed ranks of keys. But, as ever, you don’t need signposting so much as the willingness to give the work a little time to… you know… work. As ever, what initially seems reductively simple soon beguiles you, until you can no longer tell simple and complex apart. They start to become just different ways of looking at something. Which is in fact the way we do look at things.

McVinne then smartly went into the Finale from ’Satyagraha’ (1979), a richly melodic work. And he closed proceedings with the classic ’Mad Rush’ (1989), a rival to Pruitt Igoe’ as his ‘hit’ and fully deserving of its reputation.

Yet the highlight for me was the opening ’Music In Similar Motion’, also from 1969. Interestingly, this work wasn’t composed for the organ or even a solo instrument. In Glass’s words, it had “an open score which can be performed by any group of instruments”. And in fact it works by building up line atop line, like acrobats forming a human pyramid. In other words, an ensemble piece. Yet that turns out to be precisely what makes it effective for the organ, as it builds up layers of sound all by itself.

The organ works were interspersed with piano pieces. Which mostly felt like the bread in the sandwich. Perhaps the piano is simply a more familiar solo instrument, or fares badly when one-on-one against the fuller organ sound. Yet many of Glass’s works are scored for either piano or organ, and in general I’m a fan of his piano pieces. The best-known version of ’Mad Rush’, for example, is on piano.

So it may be the piano pieces in themselves just weren’t great. In particular the two ’Etudes’, from 2014, weren’t post-Minimalist so much as non-Minimalist and sounded no more than some bloke plonking about on the piano.They suggest, alas, a degeneration in Glass’ composing to the point he now just sounds like everybody else. Had I heard them blind, I don’t think I’d have guessed they were by him.

Truth to tell, I didn’t have particularly high expectations of this event, which I thought might be too much of a ‘proper’ recital. For quite a long period, Glass forbade performances of his compositions not by his own Ensemble. Though there may have been a financial element to this, I’d suspect that also he didn’t trust classically trained musicians to be in sympathy with his work. Perhaps not as extremely as when the BBC Symphony Orchestra would ‘interpret’ popular hits of the day, but along similar lines. My mind may have also been influenced by not enjoying so much a previous performance of McVinnie’s, though there the problem lay in the Squarepusher piece. (And, when I go back and read my own blog post, I’m reminded that he finished that set off with some Glass then.) So, despite a couple of weaker works, my overall response was very pleasant surprise.

Not from the night but a piece McVinnie played (even if I hopelessly don’t mention it anywhere else)…

>

THE GODFATHERS
The Hope and Ruin, Brighton, Thurs 11th Oct

If I say you could learn everything you need to know about the Godfathers’ from their song names, I mean it in a good way. We are, after all, talking about titles such as ‘This Damn Nation’, ‘I Want Everything’ and ‘I’m Unsatisfied’. Articulating the sense of how it feels to be young may be the default form of rock music, which might make it sound like trodden ground. Yet the Godfathers excelled in articulating the inarticulation.

Their sound combined punk energy with Mod sharpness, all amphetamine attitude with guitar lines slicing like Stanley knives. They even affected a sharp-suited image, very different to the charity-shop apparel of indie then all around. (I’d assume the clobber led to the band name.)

Which seems strange in retrospect. Seventies Punk was itself about returning to the live-wire energy of the mid-Sixties even while it pretended it wasn’t. Yet going on to make that connection overt still seemed to make a huge difference. Mark Deming may resolve this when he says: “they gave their music a level of craft and polish that made them accessible without blunting the rage.”

Yet their greatness also proved their limitation. I was initially excited to discover them, yet without my making any conscious decision they soon dropped from my frame of vision.

But then the adolescent mind really only has four settings - “it’s all about me”, “I pronounce this world wanting”, “I am extremely angry about about a thing” and “sex is great (from what I hear.)” All of which you can fit on a three-minute single quite comfortably. Perhaps their attempt to take things back to the mid-Sixties was too successful, making their natural habitat the single in a world now based around albums. (Denning comments how their album sales never matched their singles.)

Alternately, perhaps they hit a problem normally thought to beset later bands like the Strokes. They needed to hit the ground with all cylinders firing, to get everyone’s attention. But as they’d already mastered what they wanted to do there was nowhere for them to go.

Yet, at my age, that sense of how it feels to be a raging adolescent seems something to rekindle. So lucky for me, they’re back. (Since 2008, as it happens. Nobody tells me anything.) In fact only frontman Peter Coyne remains from the first time. But they’re as sharp as they ever were, new songs fitting in easily with the old. ‘Defibrillator’ in particular was enough to shake your fillings loose. They still want everything, they still want it now. They are, truth be told, in exactly the same style as the old. But if a thing’s working, why not keep working it?

The only downside was that they didn’t play their two cover versions, Lennon’s ’Cold Turkey’ and - compellingly if improbably - Rolf Harris’ ’Sun Arise’. But they promised to be back, so you never know your luck…

’Everything’, from Edinburgh (he said alliteratively)…



…plus my first ever sighting of the band, under their original name The Sid Presley Experience, from ’The Tube’ in 1985…