WILL GREGORY MOOG ENSEMBLE/ WRECKLESS ERIC/ EMMYLOU HARRIS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

WILL GREGORY MOOG ENSEMBLE

All Saints Church, Hove, Thurs 15th May

Part of the Brighton Festival

As the record shows, we the undersigned were much taken with Will Gregory's co-authored live score to the classic movie 'The Passion of Joan of Arc', three Festivals back. And now here he is again, in a performance which promised eight Moog synthesisters a-beeping, “to create new sounds and reinvent old ones”.

Let's take those two declarations in reverse order.

They started the first half with a synthesised rendition of Handel and an excerpt from 1968's 'Switched On Bach'. As the man said, meh. Synthesising the classical always feels to me like string quartets trying to approximate rock tracks, something trying to be something it's not. With a predictable neither/nor result. The appeal of classic instruments lies largely in their rich timbres. Synthesisers are neither well-equipt to emulate that, nor are they exploring things they can uniquely do themselves. This was made all the more galling by the salubrious Church setting, and the silent presence of huge yet unused organ pipes rising up above the folks hunched over tiny boxes.

Gregory seemed to take such criticisms head-on, insisting more than one they were “poor relations to real things”. Leading me to imagine they weren't doing what they were doing badly, it was just something in which I had little interest.

I suspect that, while my eyes sezied on the word “synth” in the Festival brochure, the key term to them was “Moog”. They seemed keen to explore the Moog's deficiencies over its possibilities, it's retro appeal. To them it was a piece of Seventies culture, like sideburns, bottles of Blue Nun or rickets. Gregory compared one model to a Ford Escort. Yet to me, it's tinny efforts aren't really 'off' enough to be humorous or strange.

And if acoustic instruments are like sailboats, there to take you to foreign shores, synths are like space rockets, able to reach much more distant destinations – new worlds and new civilizations. (My first hearing electronic music in the context of SF soundtracks may of course have had some effect here.)

While this first half was highly eclectic, taking in both Bach and Bacharach, they seemed most at home during the 'Escape From New York' soundtrack. And, true, there is something to that era. Of course it was spurred by film studios realizing a geek with a keyboard came up with a score much more cheaply than an orchestra full of Musician's Union members. The result was usually gravitas on the cheap.

But, as ever, restrictions enable. Something like Moroder's classic 'Clockwork Orange' soundtrack creatively exploits the distinction between a Beethoven-blasting orchestra and the hollow grandeur of the synths. It conjurs up a dystopian future, simultaneously opulent and barren. I'm just not sure any of that made it into a set more concerned with novelty sideburns.

The second half, the promised section of “new sounds”, was given over to a Gregory composition, a live score to the film 'The Service of Tim Henman'. Some might claim this was as Eighties as 'Escape From New York', and it sounded at times like New Order with a higher staffing level.

But, you know, I like New Order. And it was in its own way more adventurous and successful. The pieces were essentially composed of overlaid rhythm tracks, formally at least following the conventions of beat music. Yet that's a restrictive, bean-counting way to listen to music, too fixated on formal innovation. The magic lies more in the detail. By dispensing with a lot of the traditional aural 'handholds' of instruments, such as pitch, the dish is something more richly rewarding than the recipe might suggest. Us old folks remember the days of LPs and turntables, and the warped sounds that emerged if you got the play speed wrong. Whereas with this music the tempo never sounds quite right. Its like it could be speeded or slowed quite considerably, and rather than going wrong it would just become something new.

Despite my SF analogies of earlier, when I listen to this music my mind's eye doesn't picture the de rigeur starfields. The music's more like a geometric abstract by, say, Malevich somehow rendered into sound, a landscape of shapes floating above and around one another.

But if visuals too closely match the music they become superfluous, reiterating what's already going on, they bring nothing to the party. The super-slo-mo film of Henman racket-raising worked much better by initially appearing unexpected, but soon becoming fitting. It took something we think we know, and defamiliarised it to the point where a whole new space opened up. And if like me you're a nerdy non-sports fan, who has probably never previously concentrated on the tennis, that just added to the effect.

Let's chalk it up as another example of slow being the new fast. Disruptions to timescale work in a similar fashion to disruptions in spatial scale. When what's 'normal' to us is taken away, the human eye can have trouble differentiating an aerial view across a vast landscape from a vastly magnified close-up. It only takes in the vastness. Similarly, the human brain associates the stretching of a short sequence with time lapse photography – of flowers blooming in Spring and the like. If it's not the entirely new, its the familiar from an unfamiliar angle.

All in all, perhaps not quite the hoped-for evening of life not as we know it. But after an uninspiring start it came to feature life not as we normally see it. Which, I think you'll agree, is pretty cool.

There now follows a short instructional video...

WRECKLESS ERIC + BAND

The Prince Albert, Brighton, Wed 14th May

There are three things to note about this gig by punk 'survivor' Wreckless Eric...

Firstly, he tells us with some glee they're starting off by playing the whole of an album no-one liked much when it came out, which he describes as “the musical equivalent of a comb-over”. (Well this is the guy who found he was “too maverick for punk”.)

Not being as acquainted with the Wreckless oeuvre as I should be, it's not an album I know. I'm not even entirely sure I previously knew it existed.

Also, his personal and musical partner Ann Rigby follows up by describing them as “the budget Paul and Linda McCartney”. And indeed 'Le Beat Group Electrique' is an album of a Sixties stripe.

Thirdly, the drummer plays a cardboard box which some suspect covered a real drum beneath. And wasn't the whole of punk like that? Its poorly concealed secret was that beneath the “no Beatles, no Stones” rhetoric it marked a return to the stripped-down beat music of the Sixties. And woe betide anyone who admitted any of that at the time. Eric however was initially part of the Stiff records scene, a slightly later growth less fixated on combing over those roots and happier to admit that songwriting was going on. And here he is with music which very much revels in the drum under the box. (Yeah, okay, in actuality they kept the box. Just go with the metaphor, will you?)

The essence of Sixties beat music was to blend the raucous with the melodic. Which is why it always needed two bands to headline it, the Beatles and the Stones. In fact songs here pretty much split evenly between Beatles-like and Stonesy, neat-haircut harmonies alternating with slurry drawling. (Bassist Andre Barreau was in fact a founder of the Bootleg Beatles.) A structure which may get a little schematic, when the point was more to mix the two things up. And while the jury remains permanently out on that whole Beatles vs. Stones thing overall, here it's definitely the Stonesy songs which win out. They sound spirited, while the Beatles-like can stray towards the pastichy.

A bit like the phrase 'just gay enough', in some ways it feels 'just post-modern enough'. It's neither an ape-like Oasis mimicking, nor some smartarse deconstruction. It's a knowing and witty take, while still tearing into the music with gusto. It's perhaps best summed up by the lyric “I'm a boy, of course/And you're a girl” - the two words “of course” giving the thing a slight twist. Plus there's the extra level of us listening to this now, to songs of long-gone hot summers.

The later part of the set was, stylistically at least, more familiar. Of the three times I've seen him, it may be the first where he actually played his hit 'Whole Wide World'. I'd enjoyed the last time I'd seen him playing alongside Rigby, their musical styles complementing one another. So it was perhaps a shame she only got one song here. He comments, amused but apparently seriously, they he recently got a record contract but she didn't.

And while we're on the subject of the Bootleg Beatles, I was never quite sure how all that worked. Did they start their sets in collar-less suits, then take psychedelic drugs in the interval and come back on with tuning-up symphony orchestras? And wouldn't they have to grow their hair during the interval, too? Perhaps they had some Getafix-style potion...

Footage from London a few days later. For the attentive, subtle clues are scattered as to Eric's age. (His birthday was actually the day after, but close enough.) And they're playing... oh, you guessed...

EMMYLOU HARRIS

Brighton Dome, Fri 23rd May

Part of the Brighton Festival

Emmylou Harris' status as a great of country music was cemented, at least in my mind, by her inclusion in Gillian Welch's 'I Dream A Highway', a song which (among many other things) sets out a subjective alternative history of country. “You be Emmylou and I'll be Gram” refers to her early duets with Gram Parsons, the first in an almost stellar list of collaborations which took in Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Most probably, and like many people, I chiefly know her through those collaborations. But it's never too late and now here she is in town...

Of course, she's in possession of one of the great characterful voices of country, simultaneously tremulous and sinewy. It's a little like the distinction between a good-looking face and a merely pretty one, pleasing in its blandness. Harris has one of the great good-looking voices.

And her voice is chiefly known for harmonising, something I'm never sure I've really got to the bottom of. Strong voices are usually like malt whiskies, best served neat. But here it's often when set against the backing vocals that her voice is set off the strongest.

Perhaps deriving from that voice, the key word for the set might be 'organic'. You can't imagine these songs being composed, annotated or arranged. They just seem to appear, in the moment, tumbling out one after another. Even as you exalt in how good they are, you half-imagine they're simply making them up on the spot.

It seems to me people can have a strange blind spot over country music. I'm often asked if this-or-that piece of music would appeal to those who don't normally go for country. I honestly don't know what they're talking about. But, before I'm asked, I really can't imagine a music lover not taking to this gig. If I wasn't one of the amassed hardened fans eagerly clapping the start of each number, I was joining in with them at the end.

For the second time in two weeks, the bulk of the set's given over to a track-list-order recital – this time of 'Wrecking Ball', now one year shy of its twentieth anniversary. And it sounds a pretty fine album indeed. Though that didn't stop one audience member briefly halting proceedings by protesting this. (Harris responded with her best Southern manners, but notably without budging an inch.) Now it may be a little late in the day to protest a set-list once the gig's already underway. It kind of presumes bands show up with a back-up plan, in case their first option gets voted down. And as in neither case did I know the albums beforehand, over-familiarity was scarcely likely to bother me. But overall it's not a fashion I'm keen on, even if I don't choose to shout about it in crowded rooms. It leads to, as Harris said herself, “no surprises”. And I can get no surprises without even leaving the flat.

But rather than ending on that flatter note, let's go out with a demonstration of how good the gig really was. After telling you two things about the gig, that it was all songs off one album, and that Harris exels most when harmonising, here's 'Pancho and Lefty' - which exhibits neither of those things. It's still a great clip. It goes a bit 'director's cut' in the middle, but the sound quality is good. So much of it is in the bittersweet way she sings “it was a kindness, I suppose”...

THE MELVINS/ SUNN 0))) (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GET HEAVY)

The Melvins and Sunn 0))) were two of many cult bands I have always intended to get obsessed by, without ever quite getting round to it. But more than that, their sounds seemed to have something of an overlap – not just slow is the new fast, but also heavy is the new loud. So bliss it was in that dawn, for everyone and everything except for eardrums, when they played Brighton within a couple of weeks of each other. (Actually Earth, who played earlier in the year, made something of a trilogy of it, but I couldn't wait to write something about them.)

THE MELVINS

Concorde 2, Mon 28th May

“What's the most horrible way to die?”

“To have a nail banged through the back of my neck. Slowly.”

That quote, from Lindsey Anderson's 'If', sums up the sound of the Melvins better than anything I could imagine. Often described as Black Flag meeting Black Sabbath, they've been at their distillation of hardcore punk and pounding metal for nearly three decades now. Which is more than long enough to get good at this.

The twin drummers don't just keep time, like an onstage click track, but make up much of the body of the sound. You feel the set as much as you hear it. The room vibrates. People headbang. Not just nod merrily along, but proper actual headbanging. I can't remember when I last saw that at a gig!

There's a virtuous combination to them. With their Simpsons-style look, they seem like four crazy guys found in some nearby alley were thrust on stage after the actual band failed to show. But they also put on the smartest, tightest, kick-ass show you will ever see. They push one riff to the very limit of endurance, then seamlessly break off into something else. Though (whatever naysayers claim) you can perfectly easy tell their tracks apart, they pretty much run them together live, sensing their sound's about relentless intensity. We cram in cheering when we can, like an upstaged understudy.

There's a clear 'take it or leave it' attitude from the band, like they're long-used to polarising audiences and there's precious use talking about it. But let's make some attempt...

Actually, there's a double virtuous combination to them. They don't have a fusion sound, stirring elements of hardcore and metal into a concoction, they fuse them together into a single sonic assault. They're a malt not a blend! They unceremoniously jettison the downside of metal, the uber-theatrical stageyness, the chest-puffing frontman, the overlong screechy guitar solos. But they also play the same trick on hardcore...

The best hardcore bands (Bad Brains, Fugazi, the Minutemen) were wild but disciplined, with a surprising but distinct undertone of restraint. The worst hardcore bands were wild and undisciplined; listening to them was like thumbing a lift with an inexperienced joyrider, one big jolt and it was all over. The Melvins took Bad Brains' discipline and combined it with the lumbering force of metal.

The worst hardcore bands were like one of those latter-day zombies who move fast, they'd constantly jump up only to get dispatched. The Melvins are like the true, original zombies. They're slow, but you just know they're going to get you.

Music histories, when they mention the band at all, pair them with Flipper as an influence on grunge. Which is an influence that can't be denied. First drummer (they now have two) Dale Crover played on Nirvana's 'Bleach' while their original bassist, Matt Lukin, formed Mudhoney. But this rather limits their influence to a single direction. The doom drone band Boris named themselves after a Melvins song, while there's an obvious overlap between their sound and noise rock bands such as Live Skull. Wikipedia claims they pioneered a whole genre of 'sludge metal.' (No, I've not heard of any of the bands either.)

But beyond that pairing them with Flipper blunts the unique appeal of both bands. There's no real metal element to Flipper's sound. Unusually for a West Coast hardcore band, their music was made by bohemians - languid, arch and disdainful. A huge part of their appeal was the combination of overwhelming force with the sense they could barely be bothered to play. Perhaps relatedly they were a volatile element, which burnt brightly but briefly. No wonder they weren't heavy metal, they were actually something more sparky - maybe magnesium.

The Melvins are much more like a bluecollar band, they play a gig like they're working it. 'The Water Glass' is almost their anthem, their equivalent to the Ramones' 'Blitzkrieg Bop', or perhaps even the Seven Dwarves 'Heigh Ho': “Here we go/Everyday/Here we go/All the way/In the groove/On the move... Pain!/In my head/Pain!/In my back/We don't care/We like it there.”

But worse this influence business makes the band a mere linking device, a component, not a thing in their own right. If they were a huge influence on others, that's hardly their story spent. There were many bands in that era who were influential without being particularly good. (Have you listened much to MDC in recent years?) Yet I saw Mudhoney in this self-same venue a couple of years ago, and as the record shows I thought them awesome. But the Melvins were better still - more out there, more relentless, more doing their own thing.

They're are a classic band who's stayed cultish, filling the venue with a clearly devoted following but without a 'Nevermind' to their name. We might wonder why not. Perhaps the greater success of Mudhoney, let alone Nirvana, stems not just from them sounding more accessible but also being more personalised. See them live and Mark Arm comes out at you, confrontational and engaging. The two drummers and two guitarists of the Melvins are arranged symmetrically, with a distinct centre-stage gap where Arm had stood. Vocals sit inside the general mix, rather than riding on the top. Audience banter is not prevalent. (Disclaimer: they made two albums with Jello Biafra, one of the great frontmen of punk if not of music. But that's the exception, not the rule.)

But if the game is getting down to the essence of rock and roll, isn't this nearer to it? Adolescence isn't challenging and articulate, it's sullen and noisily introspective, disdainful of communication. This sound channels the black cloud of adolescence much better.

Before the gig, I get drawn into a conversation on how it took American bands to marry metal to punk. On first sight it's odd. People argue about who pioneered heavy riffing (early Kinks or Black Sabbath), but either way it's a British band. And at the height of British punk came the perfect crossover invite, Motorhead, a metal band loved by punks to a man. Why no British punk band who completed the circle by appealing to the metal heads? (The one exception to this rule, Discharge, I confess have never appealed to me as much as to others.)

Perhaps coming from Britain was the very problem. Only when seen from outside did it become clear how well the pieces could join together. And in Britain music was notoriously tribal. In America, Talking Heads could play bills with the Ramones without comment. In fact, greater geographical distances instead made for city tribalism within music scenes, as evidenced by the notoriously titled Boston hardcore compilation 'This is Boston Not LA.' Joining sounds was easier, joining people was harder.

As I suspect you need to hear a few tracks to get the band, I'm posting longer links than usual. If you like this (the first of two twelve-minute clips from Brighton)...

...then I think you'll love this. (Over an hour live at Hellfest, from last year. Sit back. Enjoy.)

My Spotify playlist for American hardcore and punk...

This Is America (80s/90s Punk +HC)

SUNN O)))

Brighton Coalition, Sun 10th June

You could probably spend all night playing compare and contrast between the Melvins and doom drone outfit Sunn 0))). Both do slow/heavy like you've never heard it before. But against those double drummers Sunn 0))) have little if any percussion. And if the Melvins eschew metal's theatricality, this lot actively play it up. They poured so much dry ice over us I swear at times I had trouble seeing the person standing next to me. Combined with the feedback, reverb and delay which characterises their sound, there were times where the band could have left the stage ten minutes ago and we would be yet to notice. When a passing break in the clouds allows you to see the band, they're cowelled like monks. They go in for upraised fists and held-aloft guitars.

It helps that we're in a venue hollowed out from the seafront arches, which is essentially a cave. But that image of monks with guitars before a wall of speakers, like some Seventies SF-on-drugs film, will stay with me a while. Yes it was ritualised. But in the good sense of the word. What might sound gimmicky or just plain daft, works so well with the music you wouldn't wish it any other way.

If with the Melvins you felt the music almost as much as you heard it, here you hear it almost as much as you feel it. It wasn't (no small boast) just one of the loudest gigs I've attended. The music was omnipotent and all-embracing, as if it was a physical object, filling the room as much as the dry ice. You don't stand outside listening to it, like the audial equivalent of looking at a picture, you're in it.

...which means the way you need to hear them is live. The Melvins may be primarily a live band, but Sunn O))) are a live experience. There's recordings of them in the same way there's fuzzy photos of the Loch Ness Monster, that's just after-the-fact documentation.

It's certainly an approach that splits reaction. As soon as you agree some music has to be loud, some get dismissive. Just like your parents used to cluelessly complain, they repeat the mantra “it's just a noise.” But it's like saying the pyramids have to be big. That doesn't mean they're just big, just that the bigness is an essential component. And if they seem to sound like thrash slooooooowed doooooooown, you're not the first to say that. And besides, that's a good thing.

And being somewhere where you had to be there, having an experience that isn't YouTubeable in our streaming, twittering age... that's appealing in and of itself. (I don't bother reading YouTube comments much, but it's notable how negative a reaction Sunn O))) clips tend to invoke. One clip poster was driven to mention “Drone metal, if you don't like it, don't listen to it.”)

...which isn't to say that the band have assembled some cross between a wind tunnel and a travelling fairground ride. At first their resounding drone sound hits you so hard it might appear merely a sound. But as it progresses and your ears become more accustomed to it, more and more variety within it opens up. The gig posters and tickets were in sheer black, which on closer inspection turned out to be slightly different shades of off-black. (Leading me to wonder if there had been a brisk trade in counterfeit tickets cut from black card.) Which seems a pretty good metaphor for their music. It's like going into a dark room where all seems indistinguishable, but the longer you stay there the more objects take form. (Disclaimer, I did previously use this metaphor for Mechanical Children. But if the shoe fits...)

In fact, conversely to such expectations, the whole set was one long piece which seemed closer in structure to classical music than to rock songs - not just composed of movements but reliant on you discerning the overall shape of it.

Andrew Rilstone (aka World's Smartest Fan) once said of fantasy fans: “This is the key to why Tolkien became so very important to me... What I wanted was the idea-of-elves, the idea-of-orcs, the idea-of-caves and the idea-of-dwarves. I read Tolkien because it was the only place I knew where I could get them... If you could find a way of separating the archetypes from the boring business of having to read then that would do the trick.”

It seems to me there's something very similar for us out-there music fans, except with us we found a way to make it happen. Take a classic rock song like the Stones''Satisfaction.' The words are sharp, witty and at times eminently quotable. But they're entirely secondary. Their job is to hang out with the music, complementing it where necessary. It's the music that lets us plug into that yearning, burning feeling.

Haven't you at some point found yourself obsessively playing one track over and over? By ceaselessly pressing the replay button you can almost put it on a loop. But what you really want is to dispense with the intro, the guitar solo in the middle, the verse/chorus structure, all the intrusive paraphernalia that turn the track into a song. You want the audial equivalent of an art installation, something you can step inside and stay there as long as you want.

Not that adolescent angst of 'Satisfaction' is necessarily the emotional experience on offer here. In a music scene dogged by accusations of Satanism since the Black Sabbath days, all that religious imagery may seem a hostage to fortune. (Though 'Satanism' strikes me as tedious rather than threatening, quite frankly.) But, having only recently questioned the quasi-religious iconography of 'Live_Transmission', this time I found it the thing to do. (Perhaps partly because it wasn't focused on an individual.) The amps as altars, the guitars as crucifixes... they're intended not to wind up Moral Majority types so much as celebrate the transforming power of sound.

That name conveys our solar system's most powerful force, the band's preferred supplier of amps and a pictogram of the waves of force emanating from both. (You're not expected, incidentally, to try and pronounce the 0))) part.) One day I will post something which just lists the axioms of Lucid Frenzy. (We had “beware all projects” only recently.) This time let's go with the one about art being at root a shamanic process, a ritual event aimed at inducing altered states of consciousness. It feels entirely appropriate for Sunn 0))) to be playing on a Sunday. It really does.

The assembled crowd are part of the sense of the event but, especially when the dry ice settles around you, the experience is very individualised. If headbanging was the audience response of choice to the Melvins, many in the crowd here keep their eyes closed. You're aware of the mass of people, but the focus is the effect upon you. It's individualised and collective. You couldn't get more shamanic than that.

Only recently I was arguing that folk music combines a sense of the strange with one of the strangely familiar. Something similar seems true of this seemingly quite different style of music. Just as it initially appears an overwhelming monolithic force which later reveals subtleties, similarly the sonic assault appears dark and menacing but inexplicably shifts into something warm and even peaceful. As one (unusually articulate) YouTube poster puts it, “it sounds like heaven and hell have just come together, that's the only way I can explain this song.” And yes. Yes it does.

Seeing gigs... even good gigs... starts out as a thrillingly unpredictable venture but becomes like seeing films after a while. It stops feeling like a physical, interactive experience, it becomes safe and measured. You know what time you'll be in and out, and pretty much what will happen inbetween. Then sometimes you go to a gig which seems so strange and other-worldly, it's like you need a whole new set of words to describe it.

Go and see Sunn O))) if you ever get the chance. It's beyond description. It really is.

After telling you the whole thing was non-YouTubeable, I am inevitably about to post a YouTube clip. Particularly with a set that's one long track this snippet is woefully inadequacy, but might serve to give you some flavour...

There's plenty other tracks and live clips on YouTube (if bugger all on Spotify), but this one was my favourite, 'Orthodox Caveman' playing (in a stroke of genius) over a video of the critical point of water.

My YouTube playlist for 'Slow is the New Fast' (Suggestions for additions gratefully received.)

EARTH/ BANG ON A CAN/ THE WATERBOYS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

EARTH

The Haunt, Brighton, 12th March

Lately we at Lucid Frenzy have been insistent that slow is the new fast, and there’s no better poster band for that philosophy than Earth. At one point main man Dylan Carson announces a track to be “the fastest and the shortest we’ll ever do”, and it still lumbers along for over ten minutes, single bass notes seemingly lasting longer than some powerpop numbers.

The band took their name from an early version of Black Sabbath, and appropriately so. Significantly, much of the imagery that surrounds them (in titles and artwork) portrays them as a force of nature. But while pop songs fritter with birds and flowers, Earth are about what’s underneath all that. Earth tracks are pretty much that – tracks. Like winding country tracks, you may have to follow the dirt road a while before you get to the mountain views. But once you reach the views, you know the walk’s been worth it.

However, the Sabbath reference has led to a few misconceptions about the band’s sound. Others have taken the Sabbath template and launched themselves into the outer limits. But Earth remain quite rooted in rock – just the substructure of rock, the rhythm tracks usually buried under something else, played out until they can be played no more. A number of tracks seem hewn from country rock, only slowed down, stretched and bent into a less rigid shape. There’s melodic lines aplenty inside the soundscapes, like the sap in a tree branch. They sound heavy, certainly, but there’s nothing oppressive or ponderous about them – it’s more warm and comforting. They sound, come to think of it, something like the earth.

They’re like the anti-Napalm Death, in the sense of opposite but complementary. One band’s tracks are wound tight like coiled springs, then fired out over the audience. The others are stretched to infinity and beyond. But both have pursued their sound to devotion. (Earth formed in 1989, with this very gig the occasion of Carlson’s Fiftieth birthday.) And in a sense you want them to keep going forever. Earth are like a rolling river you know of. Every so often you want to trek there, dive in and immerse yourself. You may not need to do that every day. But you want to think the river is rolling every day.

A few souls expressed some disappointment with this gig. (And Alexis Petrdis’ Guardian review is correct to say it should have been louder.) But theirs is a sound which doesn’t come out at you so much as draw you in. Don’t expect slo-mo stage diving and plectrums thrown into the audience. As Petridis goes on to say of Carlson, “his rules clearly different to anyone else.” I’d have followed him to the ends of the pier.

BANG ON A CAN PLAYS FIELD RECORDINGS

Barbican Hall, London, 20th March

“Hip-hop culture democratised sampling, popular music today is a form of music concrete, the voices and rhythms of the past mixing with the sound of machinery and electronics.”

...so runs part of the manifesto for this contemporary music ensemble’s night of Field Recordings. Which is a cool concept for a number of reasons. For one thing, we live in a very sight-based culture, blithely using expressions like “I see what you mean”. While we’re triggered to spot sights, when sound doesn’t contain speech we assume it lacks information and take it in only subliminally. This makes it more of a Proustian cake. Show us a photo of a place we’ve been and we peer into it. Play us the sounds of it and we’re back there.

Hence guest star Mira Calix played some recordings of flight announcements in a plane cabin (in French to dispel any language familiarity). Something about their cadence and echoey sound was indeed evocative. Yet I’m not sure what they had to do with the music which followed. Indeed I might well have preferred the recordings to the ensuing playing, something which would recur for other pieces.

At other times it was like both sides were talking at once, like an irresolvable argument. Christian Marclay, another guest star, provided ’Fade to Slide’, a collage of ‘sound points’ from film clips (carrots being chopped, clogs on the ground etc), “which the musicians use as a structure for their performance.” The musicians filling in for silent visual clues might have worked, or the soundtrack playing alone. (As was done at Marclay’s solo exhibition, at the Barbican a few years ago.) As it was I was reminded of Tom Waits’ adage “if two people are doing the same thing, one of them is unnecessary.”

As I found myself often favouring the concrete over the music, I wondered if they’d had more confidence in the recordings they would have let them speak more. I would have liked to have heard many of the recordings unadorned, preferably in darkness, and in sensurround so each came at you from a different direction. (I was probably getting carried away at this point.)

Perhaps inevitably (if mildly disappointingly), the pieces worked better if the recording was itself more musical. These tended to then use the recording as a backing track or as a ghosted lead vocal. (For example Evan Ziporyn’s ’Wargasari’ with it’s Balinese singer.) Pieces often developed in complexity as they went along, a quite reasonable (if standard) thing for a piece of music to do, but it did seem a way of leaving the recording behind.

Let us concede that other pieces gained mileage out of mimicry. Florant Ghys’ ’An Open Cage’ utilised the Steve Reich trick of taking the cadences of speech as musical rhythms. (From John Cage’s readings, hence the title.) And Tyondai Braxton’s ’Casino Trem’ composed around slot machine sounds until it was hard to hear the join. (I am not quite sure whether I enjoyed this piece or not. But it was arresting and original enough that I enjoyed not knowing.)

I have felt before that reviewing things can spoil them for you in some Heisenbergian sort of way, where you try to pin it to an angle rather than surrender yourself to it. But concept-driven nights can do that to themselves, they become like art projects, casting rigid parameters across everything while music is surely somewhere you want to traverse with instinct as your guide.

So in my best Obi-Wan Kenobi voice, I told myself “ditch the concept... go with the flow!” And once I’d resolved to let go of the hand-holds, the better it all seemed to work. In an endearingly eclectic programme, you weren’t going to like everything. (Nick Zammuto’s ’Real Beauty Turns’ seemed a skit on beauty ads, a pointlessly easy target with it’s irritating jingles copied rather too closely.) However, even then the highpoints seemed furthest from the concept.

Take for example ’Gene Takes a Drink’ by Michael Gordon. (One of the ensemble’s founders, though not here tonight.) That made the juncture not with the recording but between the musicians, a rolling clarinet set against a pulsing minimalist beat. (Perhaps the accompanying film clip was intended as the field recording.)

And my favourite piece of the night was the encore, by definition not part of the concept at all. ’Stroking Music’ a Thursten Moore composition especially for the group, sounded what the Velvet Underground might have been if a contemporary ensemble instead of a rock band. A ticking guitar pulse built slowly and steadily into a thumping metronomic riff, before plunging down the other side into skittering freeform jazz. (A little too much of the latter, but you can’t have everything.)

Such pieces are, for us fey arty types, the equivalent of extreme sports – the rush of a race track or a particularly vertiginous snowboard slope, a white-kunckle ride to clear out the system.

In short, a fantastic concept and (at times) some absolutely excellent music. And at points the two even met somewhere in the middle.

Neither from the Barbican show but two for your money, Ziporyn’s ’Wargasari’ followed by Moore’s ’Stroking Music.’ (You will wonder what my criticisms could possibly have been on hearing these, but they are highlights.)

Had I seen this next lot straight after Earth I could have made some clever-sounding elemental segue...

AN APPOINTMENT WITH THE WATERBOYS

Brighton Dome, 27th March

It’s funny the way you can lose touch with bands the way you can friends. For most of the Eighties the music Mike Scott made with the Waterboys was something I held in the highest regard. And to this day I insist ’This is the Sea’ to be one of the finest albums ever. (Yes, up there with the first Velvets, ’Horses’, ‘Astral Weeks’, ‘Harvest’, ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ ‘Metal Box’ and all the rest of them.) Then they released one album I didn’t like so much, ’Room to Roam’, and somehow we parted company.

I had heard on the grapevine that at least some of the subsequent releases were better but somehow never rekindled the relationship. The recent news that a whole new album would be dedicated to Yeat’s poetry, ’An Appointment with Mr. Yeats’, led me to imagine something like the older track ’The Stolen Child’ - in which the poem is delivered quite languidly over some Celtic ambience. A good enough track, but not the sort of thing that needed promoting to LP length. Okay, it meant Scott was still holding to it, following his muse and not playing ’Whole of the Moon’ to an Eighties nostalgia night before Bananarama came on. But really, a bit of an art project. The sort of thing everyone dutifully applauds but no-one actually likes.

Then I saw this performance on the Jools Holland show...

..and, suffice to say, I was primed to purloin my ticket for this show.

The first half of the set is devoted to “vintage Waterboys”, which mostly means the first two albums. The band made a good fist out of them, which unfortunately became a problem. Were I to tell you the playing was forceful, that might even sound a good thing. There are bands you’d want to sound that way. But from the first these guys danced to a different jig. Though they came after and in a sense replaced post-punk’s ‘anti-rockist’ ethos, in his own way Smith was just as keen to break down the “factory rhythm” of rock. Their music didn’t march, it swung and soared and shimmered and flew. Of course it was well-composed and well-rehearsed, but it always sounded spontaneous and flowing, like it was somehow just being unfurled. Their sound came to be dubbed the Big Music, after an early single, which I always took to mean ‘vast’ or ‘ascending’. Not bashing ahead at full tilt.

Moreover, Scott’s singing turned in places to the declammatory. Which, if you’re singing “all we’ve got to do is surrender,” suggests the real meaning is “all you’ve got to do is surrender.” His words are allusive and rich with imagery, so don’t really gain from being underlined by the singer’s intonation. Like the works of a colourful painter, they’re best displayed on more of a flat canvas.

Though these were songs from the early days they were not the recorded versions, powered by Anthony Thistlethwaite’s sax, but the later live versions, where the band came to be held aloft by Steve Wickham’s fiddle playing. (Perhaps because Mr. Wickham is here present, and Mr. Thistethwaite not.) The celebrated sax opening of ’Don’t Bang The Drum’ was even a recording, played over the PA as the band reassembled. Which, being the era I love the most, should suit me. But it’s perhaps when they were furthest from being a regular rock band.

The fewer more recent songs (little of which I knew) seemed to survive this treatment better. The hit ’Glastonbury Song’, the only track of theirs I’ve previously found risible, actually became something of a highpoint! I reasoned that the old songs might not be the new bands forte, or this finesse-free first half was down to stage nerves, and the Yeats stuff in the main section would work better.

...which it pretty much did. Rather than some well-meaning attempt to graft poems onto rock tracks, it’s a tribute that for much of the time you could cheerfully forget such origins. (Until Scott back-announced ’An Irish Airman Forsees His Death’, or similar.) But there was also a surprising variety to the sound, not just Celtic-tinged folk rock but blues piano or even the sung-spoken style of Kurt Weill. (Perhaps an unorthodox treatment for an Irish poet, but it worked.) Musicians came and went, with instruments picked up and discarded, everything always on the best setting for that poem now.

The only marring moment was when Scott mock-read ’The Second Coming’ while wearing a theatrical horror mask to a swirling organ. (Do you call it “mock-read” when someone on stage pretends to read from the prop of a huge tome, but never actually looks at it?) But that was a few minutes only of bad Genesis tribute act.

If Bang on a Can made me consider how concepts have a paradoxical effect on creativity, capable of stifling or stimulating, here Scott seemed to find Yeats an endless source of riches. From what little I know of Yeats, he probably makes a fitting subject, with a variety to his work and a language that’s not over-florid. He even wrote a volume helpfully called ’Words for Music, Perhaps.’ Wyndham Wallace’s BBC review confirms something I suspected, that Scott is “not entirely beholden to a poem’s structure.” You need to treat adaptations such as this like collaborations with someone not in the room, respectfully but not reverentially.

The band returned for an extended encore (virtually a third half). This was mostly based around the ‘raggle taggle’ era of Wickham’s playing and perhaps worked better for it, for my earlier concerns did not return. The venue had (somewhat inappropriately) imposed a no dancing policy on the night, which was soon swept asunder and Scott had those of us standing at our seats turn round on the spot. (See accompanying illustration.) They must have played for two and a half hours. Not the mark of an art project.

In total, a band who had a few hits in the Eighties and Nineties, with one original member, whose works from the last two decades I barely knew. And I went home wishing they’d played more new stuff. Not a normal reaction? Not a normal band.

Postscript: My old Mac is neither repaired nor replaced but held together by sticky tape and glue. As what it doesn’t like is powering up, I am no longer powering it down but putting it in Sleep mode when not in use. How well that works may well be measured by how often I get to post here...

SLOW DOWN THE PRESSES, IT REALLY IS THE NEW FAST!!!

Still in the slow-art spirit of my last post... There’s no way I’ll be able to make it up to the North East. And I’ll admit some of the events sound similarly gimmicky. But the ‘As Slow As Possible’ Festival seems on the right track... which of course is the same place as the slow lane. (Personally I’m particularly taken by the car not filmed crashing into a wall in slow motion, but actually happening at that speed.)

There’s something sublime about, rather than faking another world, simply screwing with our sense of pace about this one until it is seen anew. And merely speeding it up seems way too close with what’s happening already. Slow is the way to go!

Idle speculation from someone who will never see it, but perhaps the festival’s main fault is its concentration on media which already exist in time – performances, installations, music, films etc. There’s plenty of books and comics which stamp their own sense of time upon you. I remember in my teens first seeing pages from Koike and Kojima’s ’Lone Wolf and Cub’ (see below) after being reared on a hectic diet of British and American action comics, and barely being able to believe my eyes! Okay, you could theoretically read it through fast, just like you could wolf down a fine meal. But anyone who does simply won’t enjoy it!

More on the festival here.

A brief excerpt from John Cage’s ’ORGAN2/ASLSP’. (The whole thing takes 639 minutes, which is a bit beyond YouTube’s length limits... part of the appeal, of course, is that this is something which can’t be caught on YouTube!)

Jem Finer’s Slowplayer:

SLOW IS THE NEW FAST (YOU-TUBE JUNKIES)

Check it out! Slow the ’Star Wars’ theme down 800% and you end up with something massively preferable to the original! (Described as Star Wars O)))) in the comments, for anyone who gets that particular in-joke!)

It may originally seem like a gimmick or a lolz attack, but that’s not the way I’ve come to respond to it. You can follow the links to other themes which have been stretched the same way, and each has it's own charm. It’s more like revealing a richness to things our perceptions are mostly oblivious to. It’s like one of those Muybridge-style film clips, which slow down a movement enough to make you aware of all the intricacies involved in running or jumping or what seems like basic actions. Or one of those ‘microscope’ films, where they home in on something at greater and greater magnification and more and more details appear. 

But overall I don’t think it’s too fanciful to say it’s one form of music transformed into another. In fact it reminds me most of the work of experimental composer Basil Kirchin, just with less editorial intervention. In a Radio Three interview he claimed that there’s a whole symphony within something like a tram going round a corner, it just has to be made audible to us.

PS: Is it my imagination of does Kirchin look a little like Stanley Kubrick?

BRIAN ENO – RESTORING THE BALANCE

Grevious and prostrate apologies for the untimeliness of this posting. Going back to events in May is a new level of lateness, even for me. Whenever I had time to work on this blog, there always seemed something more time-specific just about to slip over the horizon, so this piece kept getting shunted back and back. But it’s not every day that Brian Eno guest-curates the Brighton Festival. (It can only happen once a year, for one thing.) So just go with it, okay?

Though his Illustrated Talk took place last, it was the event I was looking forward to the most – so shall give it first place here. Much of Eno’s art is conceptual, which is to say the most important aspect of it is the idea within it. (Or, in a more poetic analogy, the crucial part of the fruit is the seed.) Some people seem to see this as a criticism, for reasons I’ve never fully understood. If the man was a bongo player, the event I’d look forward to the most would be his evening of bongo playing. As things stand, it was his talk.

He made for a great communicator and a witty raconteur, which made it enjoyable to hear him break free of the sound-bite constraints of TV. He would probably make the world’s finest drinking buddy! (He even managed to sound affable to the berk who thought it appropriate to ask a question about his own marital difficulties, surely no easy task!) Without merely repeating what he said (much of which I agreed with), here’s a few random observations... (Direct quotes come from this contemporaneous Guardian interview.)

His definition of art as “anything you don’t have to do” was reminiscent of Scott McCloud’s infamous passage in ’Understanding Comics’ (above). He gave the example of a screwdriver, where the ‘useful’ screw head is married to an ‘aesthetic’ handle. This suggests aesthetics and function are linked but only at the hip - two separate entities conjoined. I’m not sure this easy separation exists, I regard function and aesthetics more as things intertwined. (This is probably even true in the case of a screwdriver, where the handle has to fit the human hand.)

Marc Bolan regarded pop songs as like little spells, Alan Moore has seen writing as an act of magic... I don’t think its necessary to take these comparisons literally to see art as something which has a social impact. (It’s perhaps notable that Eno was dismisssive of didactic art, seeing it as merely propagandist.)

I was more in accord with his view of the arts as an ecology rather than a hierarchy. Pop songs do not exist beneath operas or symphonies, but in some overall symbiosis with them. Some might regard them as ticks beside mighty elephants, but the elephant needs those tiny ticks. This strikes me as unarguable, but also rather redundant - reminiscent of a General fighting the last war instead of the current one.

Art is no longer trapped in a hierarchy but reduced to a commodity, something which is measured by units shipped or bums placed on seats. Even visual art, one of the last reserves of high art, became part of celebrity culture with the arrival of Brit Art. To get to grips with where art stands today, we need a critique of contemporary capitalism - not Victorian classification systems.

But pretty soon he had moved onto the core of his talk – his valuation of surrender. He claimed we currently had the balance struck wrong between control and surrender, something he was keen to rectify. “I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens... I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.” He illustrated this with an anecdote about being the only atheist in a gospel choir, and the others expecting him to “come out”. His point was, of course, that in one sense the others were right. The choir did allow him to access something bigger than himself, even if that ‘something’ was just the choir itself. He also said of an a cappella group he’d set up, “when it’s going really well, we don’t know what we’re singing or who’s singing what.” Though often presented as the preserve of individual genius, art is at root a collectivising force – a way of getting you out of yourself.

This not only drew together most of Eno’s other concepts, but to my mind made his concerns more contemporary. The push to control is clearly a feature of propertarian societies; when we buy into a piece of art we require a return on our investment, rather than having to embark upon a process. This is perhaps underlined by our two key uses for the verb ‘get’, as in “only when I got all their CDs did I get what they were singing about.”

Many react against such notions, with hostility so vehement that it becomes interesting in itself. Some claim to find the whole idea de-individualising, as if the individual could ever have any meaning without reference to the collective. Generally, however, I find this reaction comes from wanna-be creators; people who are clasping their one or two (normally quite average) ideas, hoarding them like a lottery ticket which they hope will one day win.

However, its not just that those with more ideas are more happy to surrender them. The process of surrender, by offering up ideas like dishes at a potlatch dinner, creates new combinations which generates more ideas – sharing makes more.

Of course as soon as art becomes unpredetermined it becomes ‘unbottleable’, and some start to worry about audience tolerance. (Both the Guardian interview and an audience question broached this subject.) But Eno clearly intends the concept to apply to the audience as well as the artists – the audience needs to surrender too.

Think of the ritual of clapping live performances, and its unstated but different rules for different people. Some see it as a reflex response, like returning a greeting. Others, such as myself, will only clap when moved to do so. (Sometimes causing irritation among the first type, who see only illmanneredness in unresponsiveness.) In the second, of course, the audience is actually surrendering. This difference is underlined by looking at the apparantly similar words ‘audience’ and ‘crowd’. While both can be used as verbs, ‘audience’ is passive and permissive (‘to give audience’) while ‘crowd’ is active (‘to gather together’).

This concept was chiefly in action for Pure Scenius, a neologism coined as the plural form of genius. Eno was joined by Karl Hyde of Underworld, all three of the Necks, plus Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins for a six-hour improvisation. (Split into three sittings of which, alas, I could only afford to attend the last of.) Eno cheerily parodied his own egghead persona, presenting the gig as a lecture and even attempting to set homework!

The conceit was that all the recent years of music had been forgotten, swept away in some great meta hard disc crash which had left nothing but doo-wop to work with. (Of course a metaphor for the necessity for artists to picture a blank slate.) As you might imagine from such a line-up, the gig was actually a storming one - far too varied and inventive to attempt to capture in a short description... try this short snippet instead.



It could of course be argued that ‘scenius’ is just a more polysllabic term for the more regular ‘group’. Indeed, the weaker numbers tended to be those most connected to one of Eno’s concepts, and the stronger ones where the esemble just let rip beyond any conceptualisation. Perhaps we shouldn’t get too hung up on the concept of surrender, lest it get in the way of actually doing it!

I probably wouldn’t have gone to Tales of the Afterlives if not for the Eno connection, fearing New Ageyness. Thankfully, such fears were groundless. The best science fiction doesn’t concern itself with trying to second-guess the future, but acts as a prism to shine a different light on the present. This series of vignettes by David Eagleman did a similar thing for the afterlives. Please note the plural form there.The more scenarios we get, the more they combine into a stimulant for speculation. You don’t respond by wondering which one might be the closest to the truth, but trying to think up something so clever and novel. (The inverse of when fundamentalists label the Bible as ’the book’ or it’s message as ’the word.’)

This was underlined by the simple but effective staging, in which all the readers were on stage at once, picked out in turn by a spotlight. Though their workings may have been mutually exclusive, this arrangement encouraged you to keep all their hypotheses in your head at one time. The readers entered and left by a backlit door, as if the stage was some ante-chamber to the afterlife, from which they’d emerged to tell us about it.

The one New Agey element was, ironically, Eno’s own musical accompaniment. While of course this was only intended as backing music, it did feel generically ‘spiritual,’ with all the connotations of the afterlife the piece was unconcerned with. (It also seemed to klunk on and off at various points. Perhaps conceptual artists don’t make for great DJs!)

Eno spoke often and proudly of his Seventy Seven Million Paintings art instillation, put on in the Fabrica gallery. Yet for me it fitted far too readily the venue’s previous life as a Church, it was quite reminiscent of watching the play of light over strained glass windows. With all the shape-shifting confined inside neat geometrical shapes, it seemed rather tame and ordered. Perhaps I was spoilt by recently seeing Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment, which felt much more like a systematic derangement of the senses. (See my ravings about it here.)

The Speaker Flower Sound Instillation, not featured in the Festival guide, did come across as a somewhat impromptu addition – and was all the better for it. It worked largely from the space, which actually was mostly space – a large, empty and rather ramshackle building.

This setting probably enhanced the acoustics. (Just as well, with the sound provided by somewhat lo-fi ghetto blasters.) Certainly, the echoey voices in the video clip below sound almost as aesthetic as the music! But more importantly, the empty space made for a contemplative setting. This was not a parcel, pre-packed for delivery, but more a space to think. You felt minded to linger, soaking it all in, rather than walk round and leave once you’d ‘done’ it all – a feeling a ‘proper’ gallery would inevitably inhibit. Conceptual art should perhaps always look unfinished, like a rough sketch rather than a blueprint poised for mass production, an invite not a schedule.

Best of all were the mono guitars, which allowed for audience interaction. You could add or remove pebbles from baskets, altering the pitch of the fret-boards. Though there were three guitars, alas attendees didn’t try to create something in synch. Clearly, we all needed to surrender that little bit more...

(Photos I took of this installation here.)




Coming Soon! (if somewhat shamelessly...) more completely out-of-date stuff!