Just quickly, I’m trying to keep a record of gigs I’ve been to lately. There were a few last weekend, all at Cafe Oto. It’s close by and the weather’s nice enough to sit outside with a G&T. On Friday I finally saw my old nemesis Phill Niblock in action. It was as I expected and I was glad of it. It’s always a learning experience to watch the old masters in action. Four sections, or panels, of sound, each made of drones of like instruments, sampled and combined on two laptops. The old films were projected. The pieces seem busier now and they probably are; a combination of increased understanding of how to listen and increased technical possibilities.
There was craft, first and foremost, displayed in all these gigs. Tim Shaw opened for Niblock – I knew nothing about him but he put his impressive rig of electronic components and array of bullhorns to good use. The slowly evolving drone that transitions from time to time can easily become trite but Shaw’s sounds were pleasantly rich and well resolved, with textural details emerging out of held tones in an organic way and not just another boring crossfade once each sound is played out.
Saturday was a duet of Angharad Davies and Phil Julian – what could have been an awkward pairing of violin and analogue electronics went together beautifully, each exploiting the knowledge of their own instrument to accent, comment, elaborate, support and contrast the other. At time you couldn’t be sure which was which, and each could be either.
The same night, cellist Lucy Railton played a solo set. I’ve only heard her playing other people’s stuff before. As expected, cello with electronics. Not expected: cello was dropped after a while, briefly returned to later and then abandoned for good. Railton spent the rest of the time working with a small table of electronic devices. The timbres were suitably gritty at first, then went happily off-piste into collages of divergent sounds, sometimes rubbing up aganst each other hard, ending with a unintelligible conversation under a wash of electronic hail. The setup was ripe for musical and physical fumbling but this was mostly avoided in a way that inspired confidence for further work in this vein.
Monday night was supposed to be spent at home but I was lured out by more G&Ts and the chance to see electroacoustic composer Bryan Eubanks do his thing live. Turned out that he was playing soprano sax as part of a sort of free jazz trio. He had what appeared to be a homebrew stompbox which transformed his instrument from time to time, sometimes moving away from pitch and into pure timbre, at others slashing away like an overdriven guitar. It was a useful insight into what makes him tick. Thinking of his previous work using windows as speakers, I listened to the second set outside.
[…] tangential brushes with Niblock’s music played live, and hearing the man himself with laptop last month, I think I finally got the true live Niblock […]