“Given the laws of probability,” a friend of mine said afterward, “I suppose it was inevitable that any selection of a hundred guitarists would contain at least one wanker. But that guy up in the back row, he was one in a million.”
Glenn Branca was in London making the usual noises he makes, both on-stage and off. First there were his usual interviews where he says “kick ass” a lot and tells you how totally freakin’ loud his music is. The Rambler found links to a couple of them:
“I am the most pretentious person on the face of the Earth,” he declares, “but I’ve always tried to make powerful artistic statements, confronting the audience in what I thought of as a Brechtian way – that idea of the alienation effect.
“My music isn’t for everybody; it’s not pop music by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve always done things that I would like to go and see. I like things that are going to challenge me, things that are going to f*** [sic] with my perception. As it turned out, in New York and elsewhere, I’ve met a hell of a lot more people who are like me.”
It’s Branca’s “Barnum thing”, as one commenter on The Rambler’s site said, adding “the real show is watching people who show up to see if anything is going to happen.”
I showed up at the Roundhouse in Camden, slightly woozy after a few too many Chimay Rouges at the Belgian bar down the road, to see what would happen when Branca presented a performance of his notorious Symphony No.13: Hallucination City for 100 electric guitars. I had two good reasons for doing this (going to the concert, I mean – I don’t need a reason to drink Chimay): despite his macho posturing, I quite enjoy Branca’s music. Sure, it has a few too many flat spots, and the drumming is usually a bit Spinal Tappish but, as I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for microtonal music.
The real appeal of Branca’s music, outside of the visceral thrill of dozens of loud electric guitars hammering away, is his use of the harmonic series. All the guitars are carefully retuned to overtones of a common base frequency. At first, the guitars sound exotically out of tune, until the combination of sonorities causes beautifully pure harmonies to float up over the crashing din, and then the small shifts in pitch create aural hallucinations of one harmony melting into another.
The other good reason I went is for comparison. About fifteen years ago I went to a performance of Rhys Chatham’s piece for 100 electric guitars, An Angel Moves Too Fast To See. (Branca and Chatham seem to have been in a pissing contest over who can get the most microtonally-tuned guitars into one piece: Chatham has since written a piece for 400 guitarists.) It’s the only piece of Chatham’s I’ve heard, and I found it underwhelming: I remember lots of steady-rocking chords that quickly got tedious, interspersed with some interesting passages of glissandi that swept back and forth across the orchestra. There was also the distraction of some of the more extroverted guitarists roped in for the concert – this is where the anecdote at the start comes from. All in all, it felt like the music existed solely for the sake of the idea of having so many guitarists on stage. Other people have told me I should give Chatham another chance.
The first encouraging sign at the Branca gig was that there were only about 80 guitarists on stage, and not 100 as promised. This was good, it suggested the Symphony was about the music, not the logistics. The music was typical of Branca’s work, but thankfully typical of his better work: insistent, pounding rhythms of dense chords that moved from one eerie tonal region to the next, balancing the harmonic complexity with the overall noise and sensation just about enough to keep anything from getting too dull.
The drums were as big and dumb as usual, but the interplay between the conductor and the drummer (who plays without a score) in setting the tempo for the pickup orchestra gave them a purpose not usually obvious on record. All four movements were pretty much fast. Added theatrical interest, besides observing the different guitarists’ behaviours, was provided by Branca himself skulking around backstage, occasionally wandering amongst the instruments to check how things were progressing.
Special mention goes to the guitarist who needed to rush off for a toilet break between movements. Many of us in the audience were feeling for you. This Symphony goes for over an hour and, after those Chimays and a £3.50 pint of Kronenbourg I’d brought into the theatre for succor, as soon as the applause died down I was racing for the nearest toilets. As were half the crowd, who were queuing down the corridor for both the ladies and the mens. Never seen that before.
During that final movement, there was no sight as gladdening as the conductor turning to the final page of the score, nor a sight as heartbreaking as when he then turned back a few pages for a dal segno.
Tom Hughes in The Guardian has written about his experience as one of the volunteer guitarists appearing in the piece (and quickly learning to read music along the way).
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Attitude Problem 1: Haswell and Hecker at Conway Hall
Wednesday 17 October 2007
Last week I saw Pansonic play at Conway Hall, along with Haswell and Hecker performing with a UPIC computer music interface. I’ve been to Conway Hall before and described that strange little venue last year: I hope the all the noise didn’t distract the seminar on “Mindfulness” being held down the hall.
It was the wrong sort of place to hear a Pansonic gig. (I remember someone saying later that there had been a last-minute change of venue after a double-booking elsewhere.) I enjoyed the last time I saw them, but that was at the end of a long night in an overcrowded, smoky, noisy club. This time, everything felt a bit too flat and distant to get a connection with the music. Besides, the main reason I was there was for UPIC, and Haswell and Hecker had played first.
UPIC is among computer music nerds as the revolutionary musical instrument developed by Iannis Xenakis in the 1970s, but opportunities to actually hear music created on it are relatively rare. Haswell and Hecker’s set, with its harsh electronic sounds clashing against each other, accompanied by strobe lights and hyperactive laser beams, forcefully summoned up flashbacks from The Ipcress File. I’m not sure if that was the intention. The way they exploited UPIC’s features was impressive: for all the brutality of the noise they generated, there was a richness of detail in the sound so often lacking in computer music. Even at its most abrasive, the music was kept alive with nuanced shifts in tone.
The light show was a distraction. It had all the bluster of the music, minus all of the charm. The use of laser was reminiscent of Robin Fox’s gigs, but where Fox’s light displays complemented the music, here it quickly became irritating. It felt like H&H lacked confidence in the ability of their music to hold the listener’s attention for extended periods of time, and used the lighting as a diversion. The overall effect was the reverse, making enduring the complete set a chore.
The lighting was one part of what seemed like an attempt at imposing a type of rock attitude to the set. Despite some wonderfully intricate quiet sounds which punctuated the early stages, most of the music fell back onto a deadening reliance on a uniform goes-to-11 volume level. Meanwhile, Haswell kept pulling mildly ridiculous rockstar moves at his console. No amount of heavy-metal posturing can fool anyone into not thinking you’re some nerd hunched over a computer.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Tuesday 16 October 2007
Kenneth Gaburo, “Fat Millie’s Lament (Exit Music No.2)” (1965).
(4’45”, 4.65 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Sunday 14 October 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Filler by Proxy LV: All together now! “If they can send one Eurodisco group to a war zone, why can’t they send all of them?”
Saturday 13 October 2007
From The St. Petersburg Times, 9 October:
“Ra-Ra-Rasputin! Russia’s greatest love machine!” These are not exactly the kind of lyrics you might expect the Georgian government to consider appropriate as part of its struggle to win back control of the tiny pro-Russian separatist region of South Ossetia. Nevertheless, informed sources insist that those flamboyant disco-era swingers, Boney M, are on their way to the Georgian-controlled sector of the conflict zone this month.Boney M will perform in a rural village in volatile South Ossetia. Not a sentence I thought I would ever write, even amid the everyday surrealism of life in the Caucasus. But maybe someone here thought that a sweet blast of “Sunny,” not to mention the deathless “Daddy Cool,” would help convince the separatists that Georgia has the best tunes.
The BBC confirmed today that, as suggested above, Boney M were big in the USSR, and are still popular in the former Soviet nations, and that “Marcia Barrett played a concert in a small frontline village not far from the rebel capital Tskhinvali.”
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili told the BBC he hoped the music would persuade people to lay down their arms.
The other band members didn’t come because they’re all touring the world in separate groups, each one claiming to be the real Boney M. Presumably, the other Boney M bands are not in Iraq and Darfur right now.
Hopefully, the success of this concert will lead to a touring production of the stage musical visiting rebel-held regions of Georgia.
Filed under: Filler By Proxy, Music by Ben.H
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The New Magic Online Survey: Gene McDaniels vs Susanna Hoffs
Friday 12 October 2007
Click on “Listener Advisory Board” and take the survey yourself! The new survey starts off blah enough (Bangles?) but then builds up to an astonishing climax.
Is Gene McDaniels the most ubiquitous unknown pop star? I’m guessing that 9 out of 10 people you ask won’t know who he is, yet every nostalgia show in the world feels obliged to play at least one of “Tower of Strength”, “Chip Chip”, or “Point of No Return” every day. I’ve only just learned his name now by copying and pasting it from the survey website.
Also, I’d never heard of Toni Arden’s “Padre” before, and the excerpt provided in the survey gives a very misleading impression of what the song is really about. I only know this because I just tuned in to Magic again last night, and – hey! – they played “Padre”.
As on previous occasions, songs with that special ‘Magic’ quality are marked with an asterisk: pick of the bunch here has to be the Ronnie Burns. Once again, all survey songs were marked with at least “like” or better, with one exception (no, not the Bangles).
Living A Lie – Al Martino
Eternal Flame – Bangles
Eleanor Rigby – Beatles
If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body – Bellamy Brothers
From A Window – Billy J Kramer *
The Night Has A Thousand Eyes – Bobby Vee
Jambalaya (On The Bayou) – Carpenters
As Long As I Can See The Light – Creedence Clearwater Revival
The Legend Of Xanadu – Dave Dee, Dozy Beaky Mick & Titch *
Six Days On The Road – Dave Dudley
Mission Bell – Donnie Brooks *
You Make Lovin’ Fun – Fleetwood Mac
Strangers In The Night – Frank Sinatra
Chip Chip – Gene McDaniels
Home Of The Brave – Jody Miller *
China Blue – Julie Anthony *
Since I Fell For You – Kate Ceberano
Rose Garden – Lynn Anderson
It’s Hard To Be Humble – Mac Davis *
And I Love You So – Perry Como *
Somewhere – PJ Proby *
The Last Farewell – Roger Whittaker *
Age Of Consent – Ronnie Burns **
Padre – Toni Arden *
The End – Earl Grant *
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Dormoblies of Brockley (Slight Return)
Thursday 11 October 2007
The number of Volkswagen campers lurking between my house and my local café has cracked double figures, now that this specimen has parked down the street.
Also, the name and subject indices are gradually being updated, having now got as far as mid-August.
Filed under: London by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Tuesday 9 October 2007
Mary Gauthier, “I Drink” (1999).
(3’49”, 3.02 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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“Now that things are so easy, there’s so much to do.” Nono, Tarkovsky, Facility, Impossibility.
Monday 8 October 2007
It must be nearly ten years ago that I took a friend to the abandoned power station in the middle of Melbourne for performace of Luigi Nono’s epic work for violin and tape, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura. He came away from it exhilarated, saying that it was like the musical equivalent of a film by Tarkovsky.
The last and greatest piece on last Monday’s concert program was Nono’s ‘No hay caminos, hay que caminar’… Andrej Tarkovskij, for seven instrumental groups distributed around the concert hall. Nono described Tarkovsky as “a soul who enlightened me”; both made art that fought against the way modern life dulls one’s perception of the world.
Alison Croggon at Sarsaparilla has recently written beautifully about Tarkovsky, particularly his film Stalker.
Stalker’s beauty is woven out of its limitations, its finitudes. When I watch a Tarkovsky film, I am always aware of the literalness of his medium; he is never doing anything more than making a film. Out of his refusal to aggrandise his medium he forges a profound poetic.
Croggon writes that Stalker is a film about faith: it articulates faith, but does not attempt to explain its meaning or its purpose. The Stalker is a guide, who offers the hope to others of realising their desires, but he cannot fulfil these hopes for himself.
Meanwhile, Daniel Wolf at Renewable Music has also been writing about Luigi Nono, in particular his late string quartet Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima:
… each attempt to write something meaningful about the quartet has failed, and I’m not sure whether my failure lies in my inability to get closer to a work whose distance to my own musical culture is great, or in a more fundamental doubt about the work as a technical and musical achievement.
Wolf has problems with this piece: it seems hermetic and obscure. Worse still, Nono’s material seems thin, facile; is he using hermeticism as a cloak for a lack of musical substance?
This is something I hadn’t considered before, but if it is an issue then it strikes me as being of a piece with the other distinctive aspects of Nono’s late music. Nono’s music had always been about struggle, most obviously in the many works dealing with political and social struggle. In his late works the struggle becomes internalised, a matter of personal and spiritual wrestling. The quotation “No hay caminos, hay que caminar” is invoked in several of Nono’s titles from this period. It comes from a graffito he found on the wall of a Spanish monastery; loosely translated, it means “There is no way, yet we must go” – a sort of variant of “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
The struggle is not just metaphysical, it is also a testing of Nono’s musical ideas and technique. Morton Feldman (who provided the quote for this post’s title) liked to complain that one of the many problems with composers is that they liked to make everything seem so easy: there is always the compulsion to make the music, even at its most anguished, seem to have emerged unmediated from the abstract, unscarred and unruffled. In other words, glib. It’s an important theme in writing and painting, but music pretends it doesn’t exist.
Nono’s music confronts this smoothing banality of technique with denuded musical material, isolated, halting phrases, inarticulate gestures, made from habit and apparently empty of meaning. In the same way, Tarkovsky in Stalker guides his limpid camera over industrial waste and other detritus. “Out of his refusal to aggrandise his medium he forges a profound poetic.”
This method shows itself most clearly in La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, with its taped part built up out of sounds produced by violinist Gidon Kremer in the studio. Set adrift by Nono without any music, Kremer was left flailing, confusedly making tentative, awkward, disconnected noises; his mutterings, dropped objects, and extraneous studio sounds intrude on the soundscape. When writing the solo part, Nono kept Kremer waiting until the morning of the premiere for the complete score, semi-legibly scrawled in biro. Composer and musician each stripped of language and technique, forced to make sense of what was left.
It’s a world that offers glimpses of an unsettling beauty that flourishes beyond human desires and yet can provide a home for the unsayable, unattainable longing that reaches beyond the confines of the self.
Repeatedly, in the score for Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima, the musicians are confronted by a fragment from Hölderlin, inscribed above the music, silently chiding them: “…but you cannot know that…”
Filed under: Film, Music by Ben.H
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He’s sick, but he still takes a plastic cup of cheap red wine into a Nono concert
Friday 5 October 2007
I’ve only been to one Proms concert, to hear Berio’s Coro, a piece so overwhelming it couldn’t be swamped by the Albert Hall’s notorious acoustics. I was sat behind a row of BBC employees whose sole remark upon the music was that it wasn’t a bad effort for a commie.
Perhaps this back row brigade of insiders is the target audience for the protracted music festival “Luigi Nono: Fragments of Venice“. The lifelong Red has been slowly regaining the attention he deserves since his death in 1989; for a while he was pigeonholed amongst the B-team of post-WWII serialists, distinguished by his explosive temperament and expressive vocal writing, usually for revolutionary texts that had not aged well (“UNCLE SAM WANTS ‘YOU’ NIGGER. Join the best paid army of negro mercenaries in the world! Support White Power, take a trip to Vietnam and win a medal!”*)
There is talk (and there are talks) about Nono’s politics and how it shaped his music in the program, but not too much of the music itself. Apart from a few notable exceptions (particularly a performance of A floresta e jovem e cheja de vida) the series focusses on Nono’s late works, less overtly political and more spiritual in nature.
I don’t know exactly why this is bugging me so much. These late works include many of his greatest pieces, his most haunting and mysterious music. Usually I can’t stand art that tries to sell a message. In part, I think it’s because of the faux-edginess of the program: at Monday’s concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall there were university students “responding live to the music by literally writing on the (foyer) walls”. That last bit was written on the back of a blank postcard us punters were handed as we entered, upon which we were invited to doodle and affix with blu-tac upon approved sectors of the foyer walls. I’ll spare you the five paragraphs of ranting I had written on the triteness of this gesture, “inspired by Nono’s ideas of protest through art.”
Also, I think I’m mildly annoyed at how many avant-garde composers are now gaining prominence under false premise of being some sort of proto-“Holy Minimalist”, like highbrow New Age music, all wafty spirituality and hushed tones of reverence. Besides obvious choices like Part, Gorecki, and Tavener, less tractable composers like Cage and even Webern are now getting gentle, mellow recordings of works that were once rightly considered prickly and demanding. Late Nono, with its pauses, long durations, and sense of ritual, seems to be the latest candidate for being co-opted by this movement.
Luckily, Nono’s spirit and soundworld is combative enough to resist this type of treatment, but I still wish there were some of the earlier, more confronting pieces on the program, like the monstrous, jawdropping Como una ola de fuerza y luz, which I’m sure spooked not one, but two of my housemates into moving out after they came home when day when I was playing it a little too loud.
I’m due down the pub, so no time to write about the concert now. Sorry, maybe next time!
* From Contrappunto dialettico alla mente (1968). The text is taken from a “pamphlet distributed by the Harlem Progressive Social Club”.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Tuesday 2 October 2007
György Ligeti, “Hungarian Rock” (1978). Adapted for barrel orgran by Pierre Charial.
(4’52”, 4.56 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Next thing I know it’ll turn out that St James’s really was eaten by a giant adenoid
Sunday 30 September 2007
Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable of English coughdrops, the Meggezone…The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp. Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop’s mouth. Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs. It hurts his teeth too much to breathe, even through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose down inside the neck of his olive-drab T-shirt. Benzoin vapors seep into his brain. His head floats in a halo of ice.Even an hour later, the Meggezone still lingers, a mint ghost in the air…
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, pp.118.
Filed under: London, Writing by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Thursday 27 September 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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What’s on top of the pile?
Thursday 27 September 2007
Brian Eno, The Drop
The sound of someone starting to believe the critics who say his ideas are more interesting than his music.
Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes, The Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound
I’m compiling a list of albums I love to bits but cannot be bothered going out of my way to find out about anything else by the same artist. So far I’ve got Highway 61 Revisited and this.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Filler by Proxy LIV: Actually James, you’d be surprised how often it works if you just tell it to them straight.
Tuesday 25 September 2007
The Guardian is a newspaper which occasionally lapses into worryingly consistent periods of self-parody (like in the opinion pages over the past month or two) but how can you not love a widely circulated, national morning paper which publishes items like this review of James Blunt’s new album:
Elsewhere, songs ruminate about celebrity, among them the deeply peculiar Annie, on which the titular heroine’s failure to achieve fame is bemoaned -“Did it all come tumbling down?” – and Blunt, gallant to the last, offers her the opportunity to fellate him as a kind of consolation prize: “Will you go down on me?” More bizarre still, he offers her the opportunity to fellate him in the kind of voice normally associated with the terminally ill asking a doctor how long they’ve got left: tremulous, replete with pregnant pauses, suggestive of brimming eyes, etc. The overall effect is so bizarre that it overshadows anything Blunt may have to say about the fickle nature of fame. You come away convinced that the song’s underlying message is: give me a blow job or I’ll cry.
