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.
The Music
First to play was the event’s organiser, Sam Grinsell. I’ve
had the pleasure of working with Sam before (I used a poem of his in some of my music), but I’ve never heard him play live. He presented a
composed piece and a live improvisation, both on slide guitar. It was nice to
get to hear a solo slide guitar set – it’s really not often that you see one!
Sam’s music was calming and unfussy but certainly not short on detail. There
were inflections and devices apparently derived from all kinds of sources. I
heard elements of western classical and popular musics (thankfully not much in
the way of blues, which would’ve been a horrendous cliché) as well as pitch
treatments drawn from traditional eastern musics (I’m not enough of an expert
to say which or how many!). The fluidity and technical assuredness of Sam’s
playing, as well as his highly attentive ear, made for a great start. What
could’ve seemed like a genteel afternoon strum (much louder and more aggressive
things were still to come) was, in fact a perfect mood-setter and musically
intriguing. In fact, I was stimulated enough by what I heard to invite Sam to
work with me on an upcoming theatre music project. Watch this space for more
info!
Next up was Lauren Redhead who, uniquely, only performed
music by other composers. She finished her set with a work for solo voice,
building up to it with two pieces for voice and electronics. How do you build
up to something more basic, you might wonder. I’ll explain in a moment. Lauren
opened with Gudrun by Tina Krekels. A
lot of technical expertise had obviously gone into the crafting of Gudrun, which involves live scoring
elements. This means that the computer decides the order of events, presenting
the performer with bits of score in a random order. Lauren was certainly kept
on her toes and performed marvellously. Sadly, the computer decided not to have
her sing for very much of the piece at all; that’s just the way the cookie
crumbled on this occasion! Although the performance was very enjoyable and the
craftsmanship of the composer clearly evident I must confess I didn’t really ‘get
it’. At times I felt like I was watching a Max patch unfold, a fact perhaps compounded
by the randomly determined lack of singing. At any rate, I found it difficult
to arrive at any interpretative conclusion. I didn't feel as though I was being even encouraged to go away
and think about what I’d heard either. Nice though it was, I couldn’t help feeling ‘was
that it?’. Perhaps a programme note would’ve helped in this case. I'm sure there's a statement there that I'm just not grasping. I’d
like to hear the piece again, perhaps in a different setting, before I make any
firm judgements.
The second piece from Lauren was l’okki ppi kianciri by Sicilian composer Marcello Messina. I’ve
known Marcello’s music for some time and it was great to hear more of it. The
one thing you can guarantee with a piece of Messina is that you really have no
idea what’s about to happen! I put him on a par with Larry Goves in that
respect, though the outcome is very different stylistically. l’okki ppi kianciri should, by rights,
have been too simple to work. The vocal and electronic elements are heard in
alternation and never together. What might’ve been a banal binarism was, in
fact, a highly versatile juggling act. Again, there was a live scoring element
so Lauren had to be super-alert to ensure a successful performance. There’s a
big difference between Marcello’s use of live scoring and that of Tina Krekels
in Gudrun. This difference was very
basic: the way each encourages the performer to react within the context
created. In Marcello’s piece Lauren’s actions always felt spontaneous and
energetic (matching the electronic interjections perfectly), which became a
vital part of the performance itself. If I hadn’t known that both pieces used
the same scoring technique I wouldn’t have guessed there was any similarity
between them at all. Again, I don’t want to belittle Tina’s work – I need to
spend more time with it.
Lauren’s set culminated with solo speaking by Alistair Zaldua. Having chatted with Alistair
about this work (and knowing some of his music already) I can tell you it’s certainly
a foray in a new direction for him, but no worse for it. I had a glance at
the score before the event and, I must admit, I was sceptical. I saw lines of
fragmented text – unrelated words and syllables either juxtaposed or running
into one another. I wasn’t sceptical about the approach in itself; that kind of
disruption of language, communication and understanding is potentially very powerful.
But it’s so easy to do it badly. And I’ve seen it loads of times before. Perhaps
now you can see why this piece needed working up to; despite using fewer
resources (in almost all senses of the word) Alistair’s solo speaking had the potential to be the most focussed and
powerful in terms of audience engagement. This doesn’t mean I thought it was
the best piece. It was a very different piece, and one that demanded a certain
kind of immediacy in performance. It would be easy to perform solo speaking badly. And, as a world
premiere of a new kind of composition for Zaldua, it could equally easily have
turned out to be a bit of a dud all-round. But the risks paid off. I was lucky
enough to see the rehearsal, which allowed me to compare two versions of Lauren’s
interpretation. Okay, rehearsals are never quite the same as performances, but,
my God, did Lauren turn things around. solo
speaking went from a decent work to an absolutely captivating one almost,
it seemed, at the flick of a switch.
What made Alistair’s piece work so well was, I think,
something that helped to distinguish Lauren’s vocal performance from so many
others. Ordinarily, highly-trained singers from an operatic or a chamber music
background are the people we find performing vocal works. Lauren, while definitely
a singer, comes more from a choral background (as a chorister, organist and
experimental musician). This has a huge impact on the kind of delivery she uses,
which is very naturalistic. I could feel the benefit of her approach across the three
works she performed, especially in Alistair’s, which relied heavily on the kind
of immediacy that highly-trained singers often lose in the name of ‘good’ projection.
Don’t get me wrong, I like both types of performance a lot, but it’s harder to
find the kind that Lauren provided last weekend.
After the interval (more beer and sandwiches) came two back-to-back
sets of laptop pieces. The first was from Carya Amara, a project of Kevin Busby’s.
I became cynical quite quickly. We were told that the performance would be accompanied by images projected onto a wall that was awkward to see but that seeing them
wasn’t very important anyway. My cynicism was compounded by curt ‘that was that one’ announcements made the very second
each piece finished. That's before I get to the beguiling array of dissociated images
that seemed to bear no relation whatsoever to the music we were hearing. I don’t
want to sound too negative about the music. I’ll admit that it’s not exactly my
thing, but I could certainly see an audience for it and the value of it. The
way it was presented did it a disservice, though. So much so that my notes
on the performance read like a list of bugbears: begins like opening of Sanctus from Britten’s War Requiem, bebop Aphex Twin, Joe 90 sound effects, changing textures
casually overlayed on rhythmic pulses, etc. These observations are a little
harsh, I must say. I heard shades of Christian Fennesz, an artist that I
greatly admire. And, actually, some of my apparent bugbears would’ve felt right
in a slightly different context.
How odd, then, that I earlier described the
setting of the gig as ‘perfect’. Surely this proves otherwise? Well no. I
thought that there was plenty of potential for the Carya Amara aesthetic to
take an interesting direction, sitting alongside music that does similar things
in very different ways. But, as it turned out, it was made to sound isolated
and, consequently, out of place. I’m still not convinced by the slideshow of
passport photos, wartime posters and pigeons. A comment on urban life perhaps?
Or identity? Surveillance? I simply don’t know. This set had so much room to breathe, but Busby didn't seem to want to take it.
Next was Norah Lorway with more laptop music. Norah’s
contribution, described as ‘live-coding with beats’, was, in essence, similar
to what we’d just heard. However, the music sounded more organic, wasn’t framed
by baffling comments (or pictures of pigeons) and, in my humble opinion,
generally fitted the context better. Both Carya Amara’s and Lorway’s music can
be seen to fit in that most slippery of musical genres: the one that straddles
glitch, electronica and ambient. Of course, all three of those labels have, at
different times and in different places, referred to specific things. But these
days the intersection between all three seems to be where the most interesting
(and sometimes least interesting) things happen. If Carya Amara began with music that
had shades of Fennesz about it, Norah followed-up with shades of Oval and the better
parts of Boards of Canada (I say this without irony – she is, after all, Canadian). One of the most
remarkable sections of her performance I find difficult to describe in straight-up
musical terms. The best description I can think of is this: Tarantino in sound.
Tarantino movies are famous for those moments where the director’s
choice of music comes blazing to the fore with a powerful unsettling feeling.
Norah achieved this not with music and dramatic cinema, but with music and
music. Absolutely remarkable.
We then left the domain of laptops, albeit briefly, and entered
the world of Chrissie Caulfield. Chrissie has a powerful stage presence which makes no use of physical drama or laid-on theatrics. Why point this out? Well, her
set-up might make you think otherwise. It’s obvious from the very beginning
that Chrissie is coming at her music from a rock (or more specifically
post-rock) background. I know a lot of good, diverse electric guitarists. Some
of them have many pedals. Many many pedals. Next to Chrissie, though, they have
none. But Chrissie’s instrument is not the guitar, it’s the electric violin.
When you see a solo guitarist with an arsenal of pedals you expect the ensuing
performance to be loud and brimming with loops, delays, distortions and
probably a little bit of feedback every now and again. If I say Chrissie takes
much the same approach I’m not really suggesting similitude at all. The difference in string instrument has profound results. There’s no need for strumming or
repeated tapping. There’s no need to employ a bottleneck to get round the pitch
divisions caused by frets. There’s a phenomenal amount of dynamic and timbral
control you can get from the bow alone. All those differences are then
magnified many times by the various pedal-triggered effects at Chrissie’s
disposal. The poise of a violinist’s stance combined with that kind of raw,
diverse and often abrasive sonic power is something to behold. And, as I said,
Chrissie lets that sound speak for itself. There’s no rock-influenced leaping
about or exaggerated arm movements. It’s all wonderfully noisy violin. It’s fantastic.
Chrissie gave us two pieces. The first was a solo piece called Wrong Way Home, which she describes as “a
pretty intense ‘ambient’ piece, if those two adjectives can be combined, with
humongous amounts of reverb and some samples of boats and planes”. I can’t
really top that description other than to say how very enjoyable it was. The
second piece was a solo version of a piece by her band, Helicopter Quartet (interestingly
enough a combination of her electric violin with electric guitars). I don’t
think this worked quite as effectively in the context of the gig, but that
might’ve been due to it being overshadowed somewhat by Wrong Way Home. Nevertheless, it was all extremely good fun.
Finally, Stuart Russell, who’d been beavering away as sound
engineer up until this point, rounded-off proceedings with a few more laptop
pieces. The first of these crafted a
bizarre kind of continuity out of disparate sound sources. To give you an
example, I heard what I can only describe as the electronic version of woodwind
multiphonics combined and sometimes juxtaposed with insistent beats and the
sound of rain. If I’ve given the impression of something slightly hippyish
there I apologise unreservedly; that’s really not what Stuart produced. I doubt a hippy
would revel in the sound of apocalyptic triangle (my label, but one that I
think really deserves to be common parlance). I was initially concerned that
the sounds used were too disconnected, like isolated thoughts falsely consolidated.
I was wrong. I’ll say that the opening of the first piece was its weakest part,
but what followed made up for it.
The second piece continued the general
aesthetic Stuart had established. The source material here was the sound of various different trains.
My only complaint was that the ending would’ve been more effective if it
came as soon as the mainline train hurtled past our ears (I think you’d
have to experience the piece for that to make sense). As it was, Stuart played a short
organ-like coda. I don’t think added very much, nice though it was. The
last piece of the event was Stuart’s romping take on blind panic. Apparently, the piece is a response to having a tyre blow-out at high speed. Perhaps not his best piece, but certainly a stomping number to
end with. And so we retired for more sandwiches and beer… but mainly beer.
Final Impressions
As you may be able to gather I was a big fan of A Whispered Shout. That kind of
mixed-media format in an informal setting takes a lot of the perceived pretence
out of experimental music. In this instance it allowed the distinctive voices
of artists from diverse backgrounds to speak clearly and effectively. I’m not
going to trump-it-up and say that everything was golden. There was the
occasional bleeding of excessive noise from next door, for example. I don’t think all the pieces
realised their full potential and/or made the best use of the space they were
given to speak either. Nevertheless, they all had something
to say, which is oddly rare. I just wish I
had a better idea of what that something
was in the case of Carya Amara’s set and Krekels’ Gudrun. My lack of understanding may be my problem. I don’t know. I’d like to
hear the music again, perhaps in another context, just to see what else it can do.
But I’m glad I heard everything I heard in A Whispered Shout.
All in all, the event was, I think, a success and testament
to the artistry of the people involved in it. I’d like to thank Sam for staging
it in the first place and all the performers and composers for providing such a
stimulating experience.
