Last weekend (3 August) I had the pleasure of experiencing A Whispered Shout, described by its
organiser as ‘an afternoon of contemporary and experimental music featuring a
wide variety of different sounds and approaches’. Indeed! Part of my motivation
for going was to catch-up with old friends and, I hoped, to meet some musicians
in the flesh that I’d only had the chance to meet online in the past.
Thankfully the whole day was a huge success on all fronts, especially when it
came to the musical stimulation it offered, both aurally and… well, orally.
A B(l)ack Room in South London
I should begin by saying something about the venue. Matthew’sYard is a calm, airy, café-type space in the heart of Croydon built in the
converted lower floor of a conference centre (at least that’s what I think it is).
Away from the main area there’s a smaller, windowless room painted in black
with a low stage running across the width of the space. There are a few stage lights
scattered about, there’s a pokey sound engineer’s box and the leaning-post-of-choice
was a wooden counter obviously designed to function as a bar should the need
arise. It felt like the kind of place you’d go to watch your friend’s band
play. You certainly wouldn’t pick it out as somewhere to hear anything ‘classical’.
Which brings me to the first major success of the event: artistic neutrality. I
mean that in the best way possible. So many experimental music concerts take
place in non-standard spaces, or else take their cue from the traditional
classical set-up hoping, I imagine, that the audience is more likely to revere
the experimentalism if they’re coerced into watching it like a Beethoven
performance. A Whispered Shout had no
such baggage. Individual seats were set-out across the room, in vague rows but
easily moved. There were no programmes or other such formalities. The room was
spacious enough for a decent sound, but intimate enough to feel like you were
really involved in every performance. And the space wasn’t so obviously wacky
that it screamed ‘EXPERIMENTALISM’ like an obnoxious market seller desperately
trying to flog his wares. Granted, it’s certainly the kind of space in which you
might expect to hear laptop performances, and four artists on the billing were
using laptops. That said, two of them sat to one side of the room, away from
the stage entirely. In a really non-obvious way, everyone involved managed to
subvert the loaded connotations of the most common performance set-ups, which
(to my mind at least) helped the audience to relax and enter a neutral
interpretative space. By being so comfortable – beers in-hand and sandwiches appearing
from all directions – we were able to properly appreciate the artistic statements
that were being shared. In short, I can’t think of a more perfect setting.
