“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: Viola Torros, Orazbayeva, Duplant
Tuesday 28 July 2020
My personal setbacks from coronavirus have been trivial compared to others. One of the disappointments has been the second missed chance to see Johnny Chang and Catherine Lamb’s Viola Torros Project performed live. Their double CD was one of the outstanding releases of 2018 and I was looking forward to hearing them at Counterflows in Glasgow this spring. As a small consolation, Cafe Oto’s Takuroku series has now given us Preliminary Study for V.T., a sketch exploring pre-mediaeval musical styles across Eurasia. While the Viola Torros pieces use spectral augmentation through reverberation, subtle feedback and voices, this Preliminary Study features just Chang and Lamb in a viola duet, recorded back in 2017 and reworked into a piece this year. It’s starker and more subdued, of course, closer to first principles that make it seem as much a distillation as an embryonic version of the music’s later, more developed forms. The interweaving violas play modes derived from Arabic, Byzantine and Indian music, all within a very narrow range of pitch and dynamics that brings attention to small changes in the grain of the instruments as much as their intonation. I did not give much attention to the musicological implications of the finished works at the time, as the material by that time had been transformed into a vehicle for broader timbral exploration. On the Takuroku recording, the material is heard more clearly, making it a useful addition to what I hope is a continuing series of V.T. works.
I listened to Aisha Orazbayeva’s Music for Violin Alone a couple of months ago and have come back to it repeatedly since then. Her Takuroku release Slow Change continues in a similar vein of home recordings for solo violin. Two of Orazbayeva’s exploratory works sandwich one of Orlando Gibbons’ viol fantasies, which is here played with a deliberately light touch to produce and fluting, breathy tone; Gibbons’ Jacobean sense of impeccable order faintly outlined in what Cage would call “empty” sounds. The Fantasia carries over from the first piece, in which Orazbayeva plays with paper threaded between the strings, muting and distorting the notes. For the title piece, she has created her own answer to James Tenney’s Koan from her previous release, a gradually evolving tremolo whose sonic metamorphosis is brought about by imperceptibly guiding the bow from bridge to nut.
It’s easy to describe features of Bruno Duplant’s music but he’s still hard to pin down. In his earlier Chamber and Field Works there are musicians and there are the environments they occupy, where each are present but neither makes demands of your attention. Each frames the other, with emergent properties. His Covid lockdown piece insaisissable(s) instant(s) is a piece about time, where time is an empty space upon which competing emotions and thoughts may intrude unbidden. There is a piano, sometimes, and the outside world can be heard, but at a distance. The piano’s silence becomes the subject, speaking of withdrawal indoors, moving back and forth between contemplation and impatience. As for ambience, the piece is measured out in regular domestic squeaks and thuds from around the room with a steady insistence of overfamiliarity that threatens incipient cabin fever. An electrical hum comes and goes, which may or may not help to relieve the tension. Who said this stuff is relaxing?
