There was more to the London Contemporary Music Festival than I previously let on, such as Melinda Maxwell playing an improvisation on an aulos and Kurdish songs sung by Dengbêj Ali Tekbaş with accompaniment on duduk by Murat Savaş, which open up a different perspective on the events overall. As supposed totem for this year’s festival, the Trickster gradually emerged over the four nights as a figure offering more substance than simple misdirection. The third night featured the LCMF Orchestra, which couldn’t help but appear more substantial. They began the evening with Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony, a notorious work typically more contemplated than heard. In a reversal of much of the first two nights’s performances, something often mistakenly considered as a conceptual work was revealed as a piece that’s at least as impressive as a musical experience as it is as an idea. Inside Hackney Church, the orchestra made the air come alive with both the presence of sound and its absence, first playing a D Major chord for twenty minutes before resolving into a resonant silence of equal duration. The boldness of its structure creates a tension that plays upon our expectations and anticipations, while also signalling a number of musical attributes that would gain currency in the half-century or so following its composition: drones, diatonicism, steady dynamics, silence. It held the punters, partly thanks to conductor Jack Sheen’s valiant effort to stand still with his arms extended for forty minutes.
Not much later, Sheen was also required to throw shapes and then add spoken narration to the premiere of Maggie Nicols’ work for voices and orchestra Our Wits About Us, one of the cross-disciplinary events LCMF likes to try out. As on most other occasions, it was a fun and curious experience but ultimately ephemeral in a way that makes it better considered as a good old-fashioned Happening than as a composition. Looking back over the programmes for the last two nights I’m shocked to find that I’m struggling to remember a bunch of the pieces which I heard barely a week ago. This wasn’t a problem for the first two nights; possibly it’s true after all that it’s better for art to irritate than amuse.
That being the case, I’m going to jump ahead to the end of the Festival (not quite: there’s another event in January) when the Christmas lights went up on the balcony railings and Charlemagne Palestine was let loose on the Hackney Church organ to play SCHLINGENNN TRICKSTERRR BLÄNGENNN!!!!!!!! Palestine had played at the first LCMF and so ending this year’s festival seemed to close a circle; he addressed the crowd before playing, repeating a small ritual with two brandy glasses and saying he hoped to make our ears tingle. In a way, it was a fitting counterpart to the Klein symphony that opened the previous night: he filled the space with long chords that he would periodically adjust on the keys or the stops for varying harmonic density and brilliance, creating moments of contrast by throwing himself foward onto the manuals to produce dense clusters, then relaxing and letting harmony return. He might even be mellowing in old age, as towards the end he began working in some brief cadential motives in the bass, with some upper movement that could have been prodded into melody.
Besides James Clarke’s string quartet mentioned last time, the Sunday concert also featured Apartment House performing the premiere of Laura Steenberge’s I Only Have Eye For You. It’s a peculiar but mesmerising work, taking her signature blend of acoustic sound and dissasociated theatrical activity but on this occasion producing something that seemed to unfold as a single, integrated action, curiously purposeful even as it seemed to defy interpretation, in spite of the programme note alluding to Greek mythology. A string trio present but never quite complete, each member rotating between instruments while also attending to a funnel filled with sand cascading into a plastic pail, exchanging pails to ensure the funnel remained filled. The strings provided fragile continuity to the near-inaudible but constant backdrop; the percussion throughout the piece acted as both stabiliser and disruption at once, with knotted fabrics and a cymbal used in various ways to provide small, almost inadvertent sounds later on as the piece continued to evolve.
Focusing on the music-music, on Saturday night Lisa Streich’s KIND for prepared acoustic guitar, play by Jacob Kellermann, seemed to almost get lost in all the bustle: it makes itself seem smaller and thinner than it is. Streich requires metal strips and a small wire grill to be attached to the strings and soundboard, rendering much of the piece’s Spanish-influenced classical gestures to sound as tiny, high-pitched chimes, while other notes are filtered through to sound at normal register, but blurred and distant. The LCMF Orchestra’s premiere of Sofia Jernberg’s The murals in Quinta del Sordo was game in its evocation of rough textures in a disjointed series of tableaux, but the piece suffered from a recurring use of awkward stage business which added a comedic element that detracted from the music. Jernberg also suffered from her piece inadvertently following both Our Wits About Us and Laurence Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5, with which it happened to share several distinctive elements. It could come across better given different staging in another context.
Which brings us to Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5 ‘In Hackney’: the piece is a stunner. It begins in a strikingly uncharacteristic way, with the orchestra members all playing small, untuned, hand-held percussive objects. You think it’s a nice little opening gesture, but it keeps going. The gentle noise rises and falls in calm antiphony, amid repeated fake-outs that the real music is about to begin. It’s entirely unlike anything I’ve heard from Crane before, to the point you wonder if the piece and the title are some big Fluxus-inspired feint, in keeping with the Festival’s theme. Just as you’ve accepted the piece as a well-crafted essay in orchestrated white noise, a big Haydn-type cadence swells up. There’s no follow-through and the gentle noise continues. You’re now convinced the piece is a witty postmodern spoof; soon after you begin to realise you were wrong again. It’s just occurred to me that Crane’s method here resembles that of Lutosławski: you’re getting into the music when he suddenly reveals that he’s just been laying out his basic materials, and then he really goes to town. ‘In Hackney’ is utterly different yet entirely in keeping with Crane’s aesthetic, while pushing that line of clear musical thinking into new territory with more complex cognitive ramifications for the listener.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Charlemagne Palestine, Laura Steenberge, Laurence Crane, Lisa Streich, Maggie Nicols, Sofia Jernberg, Yves Klein
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The LCMF2024 review (part 1)
Friday 20 December 2024
“Where’s the music?” is just the sort of thing you should be saying at a contemporary music festival. LCMF was back for 2024 with a programme promising plenty of tricksters and musical shitposting, a prospect which threatened enforced jollity and pre-baked disappointment. At first, it delivered on that promise very nicely with acts heavy on the shenanigans; these are always awkward in an art context, uprooted from the more fertile soil of low culture. A large part of the first evening was given over to Adam de la Cour’s deliberately ham-fisted panto pastiche Groyne ‘n’ Goosed, with an all-star cast. De la Cour is one of a group of British composers who humourously interrogate and deconstruct the cultural mores of music-making in a clever way that has remarkably little pay-off for anyone who chooses to listen to it rather than contemplate it as an intellectual exercise. The mode is comedic, but draws its inspiration from Monty Python at their most obtuse, and leaned heavily on the very limited schtick of Only Pretending To Be Crap. Groyne ‘n’ Goosed‘s muddled premise and extended antics wore thin very quickly; as with Laurie Tompkins’ The Feelmouth Greeny earlier that night, the attempt to play it off as ‘modernist shitposting’ was torpedoed by the amount of visible exertion put into wasting our time and a persistent eagerness to please, so that both works lost confidence in themselves.
A complete contrast in approach, Russell Haswell’s opera the truth is as elusive as ever took an apparently earnest approach to produce something trivial: diverse narrations and narrators suggesting some implied narrative out of a random-association text, strung together with chunks of Haswell’s typical live electronic noise. Musarc was the chorus for this piece, and were required to dress in bin bags and mill about amongst the audience for a bit of minimum-viable-product drama, matching how the work’s ambitions didn’t live up to its aspirations. The night ended with aya reminding us that she’s a girl two or three times while talking about herself more than playing music. I assume I’ll want to know who she is one day but the opportunity to find out why will have to wait, apparently.
These were all world premieres, commisioned by the Festival. Everything was a premiere, if only for the UK, which was admirable. Also on that first night was a new viola duet by Viola Torros, with Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang sticking out like a sore thumb with their quiet, focused and attentive playing, leading each other through a piece that elusively slipped back and forth between slow contrapunctal melodies and passages of near harmonic stasis, kept on edge by their microtonal intonation. A similar square-peg-in-round-hole effect was created on the second night by Explore Ensemble giving the UK premiere of James Clarke’s 2016-E, eight years after the British composer wrote it. Clarke’s presence on the bill was justified by the power his music has to frighten off most concert programmers in his native country: complex, virtuosic methods to produce sounds that can verge on brutalism. 2016-E is a particularly astrigent piece, juxtaposing violent but controlled bursts of action against a flat frieze of extended, dirty chords. On Friday, Apartment House also played Clarke’s String Quartet No. 7, composed just last year before getting its first airing here. It’s a concise single movement that boils down its expressivity to the most rudimentary gestures, each instrument playing solo descending lines in turn against compressed, flattened chords, yet still articulating turns of texture and mood as though it were a work from the Romantic era, shorn of all extraneous ornamentation to reveal the defiantly melancholic core.
Explore also premiered Laila Arafah’s Sibelius Studies 2: [keeping expectations to the absolute minimum so the disappointment will reciprocate], a title in keeping with LCMF’s premise but whose music in fact delivered much more. Arafah has used the music notation programme Sibelius and its automated playback system to make doodles, filling pages with rapid clusters of notes at impossibly high or low extremes, which the computer’s synth renders as oddly textured buzzing sounds. These scores were projected on screens while Explore added scraps of sound for added colour and eccentric rhythm, with unusual percussive effects adding to the strangeness. Each piece is very short, fleeting like a Webern bagatelle with electronic interference, while really being entirely dependent on computer scribble. Amongst this was more antics and shenanigans, the low point being hypnogirl 24 in which Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster took a pointless story and told it badly. (“It is difficult for me to explain,” she said. We had noticed.) There were some excerpts from Jon Rafman’s COUNTERFEIT POAST videos, made out of cultural trash and debris, much like punk aesthetics from the 80s and 90s but with the ideology inverted: immersing oneself in garbage in search of the uncanny and attempting to make it relatable. An improvised duet by Maggie Nicols and Steve Beresford showed the influence that the 60s/70s school of British free improv still has on contemporary musicians: their stiff, formal japery appeared to capture the spirit of denuded panto at the source.
Around this time it had occurred to me that the LCMF curators Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen might have put together an enormous four-night prank to confront us with the great con we tell ourselves that the reason we all come to these sorts of things is to enjoy music. It’s true that I was feeling a bit jaded by that stage, but I unexpectedly cheered up with the closing set from ∈Y∋ + C.O.L.O. Usually LCMF nights end with a loud set of demotic dance music but Tetsuo Yamatsuka and Yasumichi Miura infused their stage bit with so much harsh-edged, rigourous noise (accompanied by suitably eye-splitting rectilinear projections in stark black and white) that even when the dance beats kicked in they seemed to be an extension of the noise. Better still, they didn’t end it there but just kept moving on to one thing after another until you genuinely wondered where you were all going to end up – something that rarely happens with electronic gigs.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: ∈Y∋, Adam de la Cour, aya, C.O.L.O., Catherine Lamb, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, James Clarke, Johnny Chang, Jon Rafman, Laila Arafah, Laurie Tompkins, Maggie Nicols, Russell Haswell, Steve Beresford, Viola Torros
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Takuroku Shooting Gallery: End-Of-Year Edition (Part 1)
Sunday 27 December 2020
Cafe Oto’s Takuroku imprint has now released over a hundred albums of new music made during this year’s pandemic lockdown, with more promised for 2021. (Presumably it will end sometime next year, as will the pandemic.) Faced with such plenitude, it’s impossible to do them all justice in a substantial review. My occasional brief notes on them run the risk of making these releases seem like minor works or casual throwaways, but in most cases the artists have contributed significant statements or made bold experiments that cast their work in new light.
Along the way, Takuroku has pulled off some firsts such as, incredibly, the first solo album by Maggie Nicols. Her Creative Contradiction release has given me a better view of her work as an artist in the round than any single gig of hers I’ve witnessed. Nicols’ music often falls into the realms of improvisation and song where I feel less inclined or qualified to comment. My reviews here have tended to shy away from Takuroku’s jazz, folk and improv releases, which have made it and Oto’s live programme seem less diverse than they are. The download catalog extends even further, to film (Tori Kudo’s Archive) and their often overlooked coverage of poetry and spoken word.
Phoebe Collings-James’ Can You Move Towards Yourself Without Flinching? and Roy Claire Potter’s Entrance song; last time present us, or rather confront us, with dialogue and monologue respectively that unfolds in ways unlike a narrative and more like a Hörspiel, establishing a state of mind in the listener. Caroline Bergvall’s Sonoscura collages together a set of meditations on poetry, language and place. Michael Speers’ Green Spot Nectar of the Gods takes up language and the speaking voice as a source for music, with electronic processing transforming its sound, rhythm and informational content (instructions on how to make the piece). Nour Mobarak’s 3 Performance Works is a different proposition: stereo documentation of multichannel performance pieces and installations that document and scrutinise idiomatic uses of phonemes and phrasing. The last of these can’t help but lose a little of their impact in this format.
We’ve had previous excursions into psychedelia in this series and I would have said that Kelly Jayne Jones’ the reed flute is fire had capped the lot. In addition to the record, a accompanying limited edition of art boxes is also for sale. They contain a drawing, incense, a small pyramid, shiny stones and gold velvet, which should help give an idea of the music. Jones’s voice and flute are processed and overlaid with melting drones that can make you feel the need to crack a window and let some fresh air in so the walls stop moving. It all pales in comparison to Nakul Krishnamurthy’s Tesserae, a pair of works that draw upon Indian classical music theory and techniques. Anyone expecting patchouli-scented pabulum will quickly have their mind tied in knots by the undulating orchestra of shruti boxes and voices in Anudhatthamudhatthassvaritham, which steadily gains in psychic power through its refusal to make nice, giving the consequences of its theoretical foundations free play. Ten Thousand Dancing Shivas shows that it’s no fluke by forgoing the textural overload and still making a poweful impact on the listener, weaving together vocal phrases and instrumental responses that evoke without ever mimicking traditional practice.
