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Posts tagged ‘Gavin Bryars’

Feb 7

Looping time at the Science Museum

To reach the performance space, it was necessary to walk under a 1929 Handley Page biplane suspended from the roof, around a steam engine by the 19th century inventor Henry Maudslay, and past a row of human skulls apparently once used for phrenological analysis. Not your regular gig, then, but Time Loops, a performance by Icebreaker at the Science Museum.

Formed in the UK in 1989, Icebreaker play new music (from Louis Andriessen to Kraftwerk via Philip Glass and Brian Eno), always involving amplification. For this concert, in which their musicians were dispersed around the exhibits in one of the galleries, they utilised electronic devices old enough to be in the museum’s collection: the Watkins Copicat tape-echo unit from the late 1950s, the VCS3 and VCS4 portable synthesisers from the ’70s, and the ShoZyg instruments made between 1967 and 1975 by the late composer Hugh Davies, once a member of the Music Improvisation Company and Gentle Fire.

The audience was free to wander around the perimeter of the performers’ space, able to observe at close quarters as the musicians — a cellist, a violinist, two flautists, two saxophonists, a percussionist, a guitarist, a bass guitarist, an accordionist, a number of keyboard and synth operators — went to work on three commissioned compositions.

The first, “Time Loops” itself, a 42-minute piece by Shiva Feshareki, began with high harmonics from the bowed cello, joined by similar high frequencies — from pan pipes, bowed guitar and bowed vibraphone, among other things — as the layers built up, with a synth adding loud floor-trembling bass rumbles to counterpoint the scratches and whistles that sounded like outtakes from the NASA space noise Terry Riley used in Sun Rings. Then the textures gradually thinned out again and the piece ended with discreet guitar feedback. I found it a very enjoyable sonic space to inhabit.

The first affordable echo unit was celebrated in the second piece, Sarah Angliss’s “Copicat”. I was looking forward to this, since the first band I was in, at the age of 13 or so, managed to acquire one Charlie Watkins’s inventions to help us on our journey through post-skiffle, pre-Beatles rock and roll. Angliss subtly evoked its original use in the minimalist twang of the guitar and the bass, but began with solo violin before incorporating accordion stabs and swells, a pair of bass clarinets, toy piano, and alto flutes. Watkins’ voice was also sampled in a 20-minute piece I’d gladly hear again, live or on record, not only in order to decipher more of what he was saying.

Electronics were a more salient feature of “Concerto Grosso for ShoZygs”, Gavin Bryars’ salute to his old friend. The ensemble realigned itself into three parts: a “rhythm section” of guitarist, bassist and percussionist (the latter standing between a gran cassa and large gong with a mallet in each hand, sustaining a steady, surging pulse), a chamber group of violin and cello, alto and baritone saxophones and accordion, and a very active quartet of electronicists, manipulating devices from the pre-turntablist era, including the home-made ShoZygs.

Also 20 minutes long, this was the piece that was hardest for the listener to get a handle on, given the topography of the space, but Bryars, who sat listening throughout by the mixing desk, deserved the applause with which he and this adventurous ensemble were greeted as he took a bow at the end of an intriguing and worthwhile evening.

Nov 22

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Lush laments in Dalston

Hakon Stene at Cafe OtoIf I had to persuade you to buy one album this year by someone of whom you’ve probably never heard, it would almost certainly be Håkon Stene’s Lush Lament for Lazy Mammal. I wrote about it here in March, and last night Stene brought his four-piece Ensemble to the Cafe Oto.

In addition to the leader on marimbas and guitars, the group comprised Tanja Orning on cello, Heloisa Amaral on piano and organ, and Sigbjørn Apeland on harmonium. They played through the compositions by Laurence Crane, Gavin Bryars and Christian Wallumrød that make up the CD, opening them up to the further possibilities inherent in the act of live performance, even when the performers are reading from a score.

Crane’s gorgeously drifting compositions, such as “Prelude for HS”, and “Blue Blue Blue”, feature dreamlike slow-motion harmonic shifts that, in these tintinnabulating interpretations, made me think of some lost blueprint for the instrumental tracks of the ballads from Pet Sounds. The same composer’s “Bobby J” — which we were told had been inspired by the Tour de France rider Bobby Julich — saw Stene apply his electric guitar to a similar format. The darker colours and hovering surges of Bryars’ “Hi Tremelo” created a mood of subdued ecstasy, while Wallumrød’s two pieces opened up the structures a little, and on one of them, called “Low Genths”, Stene made use of his second marimba, tuned a quarter-tone away from the first. In all, an hour of extremely beautiful and compelling music.

In a modest sort of way, the evening was a showcase for Hubro, the interesting young Norwegian label which released Stene’s album and has a catalogue that also includes recordings by Huntsville, the trio called 1982 (which includes the Hardanger fiddle virtuoso Nils Økland), the piano trio Moskus, Erik Honoré, and others.

An opening set was played by Sigbjørn Apeland, whose Hammond-size single-manual harmonium was placed front and centre of the performance floor so that the audience could watch his hands as he moved between gentle Nordic folk and hymnal elements, at one point tearing and folding pages from what looked like the London Overground timetable and stuffing them between the keys to create middle-register drones on which then he elaborated at the extremes of the instrument’s range. He has a new album, too. It’s called Glossolalia, and if it’s anything like last night’s recital, it will be worth investigating.

Mar 17

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Hakon Stene

Hakon Stene 2Normally I wouldn’t be telling you now about an album that’s several weeks away from its release date, but in the case of Hakon Stene’s Lush Laments for Lazy Mammal I can’t wait that long. Since I first put an advance copy on the CD player, it’s been a struggle to listen to anything else. No space — workroom, car, outdoors — seems complete at the moment without its shimmering textures.

Stene is a Norwegian percussionist of considerable experience in all kinds of music.  He was a founder of a group called asimisimasa, performing the work of modern classical composers such as Brian Ferneyhough and Alvin Lucier, and he’s currently a research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, developing new repertoire for multi-percussion. I went to see him at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last week, performing the Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen’s Black Box Music with the London Sinfonietta, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t enjoy it at all. But the experience didn’t change my feelings about his album.

Lush Laments for Lazy Mammal — to be released next month on the Oslo-based Hubro label, also the home of Huntsville, one of my favourite bands, and the interesting experimental guitarist Stein Urheim — consists of six compositions by the British composer Laurence Crane and one apiece by Gavin Bryars, Christian Wallumrod and Stene himself. They’re played by Stene on regular and quarter-tone vibraphones, bowed marimba, electric guitar, acoustic guitar with e-bow, electric keyboards and piano, with appearances by Tanja Orning (cello), Hans Christian Kjos Sorensen (cembalom) and Heloisa Amaral and Wallumrod (pianos).

I suppose you’d call this minimalist music, in the sense that there isn’t much going on here in terms of incident and gesture. What the pieces have in common, apart from the overall texture imposed by the keyboards and tuned percussion instruments, is a desire to isolate and exalt the process of modulation. This is a strongly tonal music from which virtually everything has been removed except the simple and repetitive chord changes, which are allowed to occur regularly but free from an explicit pulse, exposing the harmonic shift as the principal trigger mechanism for the emotions, as it is in so many kinds of music.

Here is Stene talking about his decision to play instruments other than the percussion for which he is known: “I am definitely not to be regarded as a guitarist any more (and absolutely not as a pianist!), but all my experience as a contemporary percussionist, where one must constantly adjust oneself to new playing situations and instruments, somehow makes it feasible. I don’t approach these instruments, for example the piano, as an altar, but as a tool for playing these relatively simple pieces. This is the kind of attitude that percussionists often have: instruments are tools one uses in order to produce a particular sound.”

It’s hard to find a language in which to write about this music. In its meditative tone and the beauty of his textures, it reminds me strongly of my favourite pieces by Morton Feldman, “Rothko Chapel” and “For Samuel Beckett”. It’s also reminiscent of some of the Necks’ work. And some of it (like Crane’s “Blue Blue Blue” — here’s a snatch of it) reminds me of what happens when the Beach Boys’ more experimental records are stripped right down to the basic rhythm track. So it might be best just to leave you with a couple more examples. Here’s Crane’s “Prelude for HS”, the first track from the album, with Stene on vibraphone, Orning on cello and Wallumrod on piano. And here’s Stene’s gorgeously ecstatic version of Crane’s “Riis”, on which he plays everything. You’ll get the idea pretty quickly. To me, this is a wonderfully pure distillation of what music can do.

* The photograph of Stene is from his website: http://www.hakonstene.net.