Almost forgot to say I had a nice day out last month at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, for the Editions Mego gigs. (As it happened, I was on the same train as that reviewer, but I was proffered disposable coffee cups of prosecco instead of cans of Bloody Mary.) Any cool cred I may have had was lost when I found a hardback of A Suitable Boy for 50p on the way from the train station to the Pavilion and lugged it around for the rest of the night. I was so preoccupied with it I forgot we got a free CD with the entry ticket. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.
I agree with most of the Quietus review, particularly for Russell Haswell’s set, but for me the Mark Fell set was the most disappointing part of the event. Everyone else seemed to love it. Why?
Fell’s set was unique amongst the acts at the event. While everyone else worked with noise, i.e. treating sound as a fluid, plastic artform which can be stretched, squashed, twisted and moulded, Fell’s piece was nothing but notes and beats. Synthesizer pads and drum machine claps, an assembly of prefabricated parts. There’s nothing wrong with that, but while everyone else enthused over the construction I got bogged down in details. The unvarying sounds felt dead and dull, the cheesiness of them seemed like self-congratulatory irony. It didn’t help that the shuffle play on my ipod that morning had served up some library music with what sounded like the exact same synth patches.
Some people went around saying it was a deconstruction of rave. I guess that’s also part of my problem and why the experience left me feeling flat. Raves suck. Don’t bother arguing with me, because you’re wrong.
As for the other musicians on the day, the whole event strongly reminded me of what should have been a very different gig the week before, when the Arditti and JACK quartets played together at Wigmore Hall. Even though the whole gig was acoustic, the pieces played by these two string quartets showed how pervasive the influence of electronics and computer-manipulated sound has become on modern composition. Each piece placed its emphasis on the same musical concerns as the electronic noisemakers in Bexhill: timbre over pitch, texture over harmony, a sculptural sense of balance. The musicians created densely interwoven glissandi, ground their bows into the strings to create complex tones. The concluding work by Mauro Lanza made this method of working explicit, creating a musical argument that crossfaded back and forth between coherent sound and incoherent noise, instead of the old drama of divergence from a harmonic norm and the inevitable return home.