Constitution Rock – Troyka and Jazz @ The Con Cellar Bar

Troykart

The Constitution in Camden is an unassuming Pub. I feel like I’ve never seen it in daylight, even though I definitely have. Its cellar, which opens up onto the towpath of the Grand Union Canal, is home to one of the most progressive and intimate jazz nights in London, organised and curated by trumpeter Richard Turner. The music is of a consistently high standard and the audience is rarely without a handful of London’s jazz elite. A few weeks ago, Jazz @ The Con Cellar celebrated its third birthday.

Opening the evening with a solo set was saxophonist James Allsop. He has such facility that for breathless minutes he blows away and there is nothing he cannot do. While his command over the instrument is impressive, there is a level of communication in his playing that is as inanely beautiful as the bric-a-brac surroundings of the Camden basement.

Like, yeah, man. {ginger between sushi}

\\

rice rice rice (no rice – con cellar birthday buffet)

enter Troyka.

(Chris Montague, Kit Downes and Josh Blackmore – all brilliant)

Guitarist Montague introduces one of the tracks: “this is a song by Nirvana” and I automatically flash back to some guys who used to play together before school band every Wednesday afternoon.
They always played Smells Like Teen Spirit.
They never sang.
It was never very good.
But it always had us mesmerized: the little kids, who were too young to have known about it all when it actually happened.

And then we all got Nevermind. Except I didn’t. I think they had sold out of Nevermind at HMV and I had to settle for an on-sale copy of In Utero from Modern Music in Abingdon. I listened to this album non-stop for ages. I remember having it in my discman on the bus to orchestra every Saturday morning. I loved it. While everyone else in class was discussing Come As You Are and Polly, I had to bluff along the conversation. They didn’t care for Serve the Servants or Rape Me.

Troyka weren’t playing Lithium or In Bloom: Troyka were playing Heart Shaped Box. Troyka were my new best friends.

Their disconcertingly bipolar sound revealed more about this music than I had ever noticed before. They showed me – or rather my fourteen-year-old self, also at the gig – that there are many dimensions to Nirvana’s songs which have not been explored. Heart Shaped Box demonstrated Troyka’s powers to me in a way other tunes couldn’t have: While there were even more exciting moments in their set, the fact that this song is embedded so deep in my memory made me listen very closely. I wanted to know why they had chosen it…

Nirvana’s music is one of extremes: From the eerily quiet to the painfully loud, the pretty and delicate to the noisy and indestructible. One of the things Troyka did was expand this to include crushing leaps in tempo and the ingenious improvisation which makes all of their performances so engrossing. The result was a musically distinct yet hair-growingly familiar rendition of one of my forgotten all-time favourites.

Of course, such musical development can be heard in all of Troyka’s work, and it reaches fantastic extremes of its own in their original compositions. However, in Heart Shaped Box I could hear the investigation I had always wanted into music I had not really listened to in nearly a decade.

- Soon after the gig, I listened to In Utero all the way through, twice in a row. And I loved it. Twice. I have since lifted my embargo on Seattle.

P.S. For a ruthless defence against the jokey-jazz-cover-of-a-pop-song accusation, look no further than The Bad Plus’ blog.

F-IRE at the Thames Festival – 13/09

I caught Porpoise Corpus and Troyka, and it was all very good indeed. Lots of people enjoying massive jazz under the terrifying shadow of the Tate Modern’s chimney.

This photo – taken by exquisite trumpeteer George Hogg – shows the Corpus mid-crusade. Look closely for guitarist Jonathan Bratoeff’s epic windswept hair. A true rockstar if ever I saw one…

Pins and Needles #2 review

photo by flickr user stevendepolo

Café Oto, Saturday 12^th September:

• Grapefruits
• Thee Moths
• Jon Collins
• C Joynes
• Stray Ghost
• Message to Bears
• Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides
• Braindead Collective

review by Matt Lomas for archive 113:

Massive night, starting off at 5pm and going through to 1am with the services of DJ Chan. Sort of in conjunction with Dead Pilot Records, Tartaruga organised this showcase of music including post-rock, noise, free improv, ambient, contemporary classical composition and whatever the hell it is that Braindead Collective are.

I confess I got there a little late, and so missed Grapefruits and Thee Moths, which I’m sure were wonderful. For £8 you got your ticket, but you also got rights to a certain amount of the fruit that the organisers had laid out on the tables, which was a lovely touch, especially since 8 hours of music for £8 is already not exactly bad value. The crowd probably peaked for Message for Bears, the antepenultimate (sorry, had to) act, although it really was a pretty good turn out throughout the show. DJ-ing responsibilities (which fell to DJ Chan) were sizable, since slots for bands were generally twenty minutes, with twenty minutes set-up time, although near the end of the evening the slots got a little longer. They were also, imaginatively, intersticed with performances by the Wet Wheeler string quartet of Bridget Samuels’ compositions. So let’s start there…

Bridget Samuels

Bridget is a composer studying at the Guildhall and a violinist. As part of the incidental music, her string quartet would perform a short work of hers, which provided a nice contrast to the pre-recorded music of the DJ, and, as one performer noted, an intimidating prequel to some of the bands’ sets. The string quartet included violinist Harriet Wheeler, violist Jenny Lewisohn and cellist Max Ruisi. The compositions demonstrated restraint in the individual parts, working towards more of an abstracted sound, with one piece requiring no more than a single note for one violin part. One of the pieces really explored the interval of a minor second, and another was diatonic (practically triadic) feature for cello, and all were played with minimal rehearsal (ten minutes max) around one of the tables in the audience, creating a wonderfully relaxed atmosphere. A brilliant idea, both in terms of exposing people to contemporary classical music and blending super-highly trained classical performers with musicians who have a completely different approach to technical ability, basing it more around what they creatively want to do with their music.

Jon Collins

This, the first act I saw, was a short ambient set broken into different moods, rather than songs. A solo act, Jon sat filling the unfortunate position of shoegazer: Pedal use was fairly minimal once the basic sound was set up, but it seemed to be worth keeping in check. The pieces were non-repetitive and generally unstructured, so I think they were more improvisations about rough themes rather than completely composed, and they generally struggled to come to an end. Definitely eyes-closed music, the general lack of a tempo contributing to a very nice ‘dreamy’ sound, the only technical problem being that some feedback caused some notes to resonate out of proportion, unbalancing the textures rather badly.

Stray Ghost

More than a little nervous, Mr Ghost produced a bit of an unprepared set. Having not been able to bring ‘all his gear’ on the tube, he did the first half of the set on a laptop, producing a landscape of slowly morphing synth sounds for an interminable fifteen minutes. Apart from brief sea noises near the end, all the sounds were pitched and limited to one diatonic scale, no note shorter than twenty seconds. Without melodic, harmonic or rhythmic interest, there should at least be some attention to timbre and sound quality. Isn’t that what electronic ambient music is about?

The second half of the set was the loud ‘rocky’ bit with a small band invited on stage to join Mr Ghost (this time on guitar). Disappointed by the tuning of the trumpet and alto sax, my focus was on the guitar, and maybe that’s how the bandleader intended it. This band quickly hit the problem that most post-rockers have: structure. The interest in the climax of a piece was provided by the varying levels to which the lead guitarist spasms around the stage. This might perhaps be more interesting if you actually are the guitarist. Oh well.

C Joynes

Probably the least expected sound of the evening, this fantastic guitarist finger-picked his resonator guitar through a very interesting set indeed. His pieces were well-structured, starting with a strong melody, leading into a largely improvised middle section, returning powerfully to the original tune: Think Tommy Emmanuel but more musically diverse. The pieces at times evoked a Latin American sound world, at times deep South blues, and at times Chinese musics. The only criticism I have is that his improvisations all created tension in the same harmonic way, often with the same picking patterns. It was the only example of technical limitation in a very rounded musicianship.

Also deserving of mention was the fantastic sound he got by threading a strip of plastic through the strings at around the seventh fret, whereupon he began a tune with a melody played on the upper strings above the plastic, while an accompaniment was played on the lower strings, the plastic providing rattles and distortion. However, two further innovations were to come: For varation, he moved the plastic to a different fret. Also, he started fingering chords behind the plastic, which had the strange effect of changing the pitch of the string and the quality of distortion. A really interesting innovation I hope we hear him using again.

Message to Bears

Normally a solo act, Oxford-based Jerome Alexander assembled a band of bass, glockenspiel, viola, harmonium and guitars to play along to his backing track of drum beats and occasional backing vocal. It started off as a fairly typical Sigur Ros-influenced acoustic guitar-led music, with the acoustic instruments creating dynamic levels absent on the pre-recorded drum-beat. However, after a few minutes we’re given a viola solo playing a simple pattern. Within ten minutes, the night completely belongs to the violist, Tim Gill. Such a long viola solo in the middle of this set of so many instruments was unexpected and really powerful. Tim’s patience – sticking on such minimal motifs for so long – was effective in bringing the audience to a still moment in order to completely roger them senseless with sensational ten-part looped viola. Spontaneous applause followed. What a shame he’s off to Qatar to live as a street performer for six months.

Rest of the set was fine.

Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides

This free improv duo was definitely the furthest out act of the night. It consisted of a flute going through some boxes of tricks and a drummer who also used a harmonica-mount to mic up his voice (put through more boxes of tricks). He proceeded to make some of the weirdest noises I have heard in quite a while. And they worked fantastically with the flute. Generally atonal, generally arrhythmic, the energy and melodic shapes of Kelly Jones’ flute playing kept our interest while Pascal (just Pascal) drummed. When he was vocalising, there was enough keeping our interest. Some clearly found it a little brutal, which, in fairness, it was. Think Coltrane’s Interstellar Space or a lot of Anthony Braxton’s stuff.

Braindead Collective

And so to the headliners: Sebastian Reynolds, extrovert extraordinaire, singer, saxophonist, and vocalist without limit leads this band, with a seemingly open-door policy on membership. Tonight we had trombone, trumpet, viola, drums, bass, guitar, electronics and his sax. It was a wild wild 40-minute jam: sometimes pure noise, with any notes or sounds going, other times it was broadly diatonic. Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, but with punky drumming, synth landscapes and some very interesting trombone loop-work. Chris Alcock, the trombonist, deserves some mention: not only was he flexible, playing piano, trombone and electronics, but he also effectively led the band in a new creative direction on several occasions when it sounded like it was coming to the end. He’d lie on the floor, nonchalantly twiddling knobs, exploding some distorted something or other over the drone that was running out of ideas, and after a minute or so, everyone was off again.

The other aspect of their performance, which personally I thought worked very well, was the marching out of sax, trumpet and trombone to blow at various corners of the room. I’m sure it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but Sebastian seemed to exude such enthusiasm and affirmation that it just seemed natural rather than contrived.

A night of some rather interesting moments, some hugely lacklustre bands, but generally wonderful.

Jeanne Added and Vincent Courtois at The Vortex

Thursday 3rd September, The Vortex

review by Matt Oscar Lomas for archive 113

Jeanne Added (voice) & Vincent Courtois (cello)
Second half – joined by Fred Thomas (prepared piano), Dave Smith (drums), Robin Fincker (tenor sax), Alex Bonney (trumpet) and Johnny Brierley (bass)

photo by flickr user mattxb

Ollie Weindling (Vortex artistic director, I think) came across this duo several years ago, performing in a church in Belgium as part of a music festival, and booked them for this gig when Vincent was working over here in the UK earlier this year. It is the first in a series of French concerts taking place at the Vortex, in what appears to be part of an ongoing effort by the LOOP organisation to build connections with the continent (Outhouse having been on a European tour earlier this year). Jeanne appeared on the Outhouse record last year, while Vincent has worked with Ellery Eskelin and others.
The first set comprised three of long pieces built of strongly contrasting sections. Each had ‘song’ sections, once in French and twice in English, but also included were freely improvised sections for each player individually and together, as well as composed instrumental music. The encore, Lou Reed’s New York Telephone Conversation, completed in under two minutes, provided a well-judged counterpoint to these longer pieces.
Jeanne’s is a bare, un-dressed-up voice. It doesn’t raise the roof but it can certainly raise the hairs on the back of your neck. One of the most powerful aspects of her musicianship is the way she can let her voice break down into noise – into creaks and groans – from even the loudest high notes, in a way that throws you right into the human-ness of the sound she’s producing. The (almost total) lack of vibrato adds to this feeling of immediacy, and the subtlety with which she plays with the vowel sounds does so again (as contrasted with the clunkiness of the Berio Sequenza or some Phil Minton’s stuff). It’s not experimental; it’s musical.
I actually got this thought at the previous night’s Xenakis Prom, but it occurred to me again here: This music sounds like thoughts: It sounds like an inner monologue, and the fact that there were only two musicians (rather than the Prom’s BBC Symphony Orchestra) made this performance even more poignant qua private experience.
Jeanne’s eyes are closed for the improvisation (a completely understandable and natural mechanism: I wish those concert-goers who mumble about how there was no connection would close their eyes and open their ears), but they are open and alive for the worded songs. She certainly has the acting skills a singer needs to bring alive the song, eyeballing the audience with a certain cheeky insolence. It goes without saying that technically she is what people sometimes refer to as ‘a beast’: the kind of intervals she’s singing, at all dynamics, are ferociously well controlled. And when improvising she had the guts to stick to a melodic idea as simply as an interval of an octave for much longer than you might’ve been expecting. My main lasting impression was definitely the control and colour with which she could shape a single note lasting ten or twenty seconds.
Vincent Courtois is clearly one of the hottest cellists in the biz. At times his cello is a mandolin, a violin, a guitar, a fretless bass, a viol, absolutely any stringed instrument you can imagine. It’s even a cello at times. That said, what’s interesting is that his use of extended technique is mostly pitched: there is the odd tapping of the tuning screws, but there is no slapping of the sides of the cello, no scratching of the strings, and, I think, (Lucy Railton can correct me if I’m wrong) little – if any – use of the wooden side of the bow. Rather, his innovation comes from the complexity of the melodies he builds up in pizzicato improvisations, and the integration of picking and hammering down on the strings with the left hand in order to sound the notes. His solos were rarely conceived in traditional phrases, but rather, say, tremolo double-stopping for a minute, or pizz chords with microtones in, and so on.
Obviously his is the natural choice for accompanying instrument, but the way he accompanies was frequently leaving me on the edge of my seat, simply in the notes he didn’t play, the space he creating and his killer articulation. Not to mention the dynamic range he managed to fit underneath Jeanne’s voice.
In the third piece, they hit what was so far their climax, but then, after that they went further! At the point that you were aware they were both at the tops of their dynamic ranges, and you’re thinking ‘ok, we’ll be down again in a sec’, Jeanne did this amazing thing where she allowed her voice to fragment into unpitched scream-creaks, which was completely not in the rule book, and then, while you’re trying to cope with that, Vincent then slid his tremolo chord out of tune and down the finger-board at an achingly slow pace. Beautiful. Just not conventional beauty.
My only real observation that might be taken as a criticism was that while I was aware that it was all incredible music, in the interval I was thinking about the emotions I had experienced, and it seemed like at the end of it all, I hadn’t had that much of an emotional workout. Even when it was pretty ‘out’, but you were still aware you were listening to music. That may sound obvious, but for example, when I listen to Mahler 1, Purple Haze or Kind of Blue I’m not aware that I’m listening to music, I’m just aware of the music. And, of course, the feelings.

The group assembled for the second half have an interesting history, because they actually recorded an album at Abbey Road in 2006 (12 Tales of Abbey Road) but haven’t played together since, and so this night was in fact the launch party for the album. (Out now on MiniLOOP.)
I have less to say about this second half, because I always struggle to talk about long sets of largely freely improvised music. The ‘front line’ of cello, trumpet, saxophone and voice took turns with long solos, with the rhythm section sometimes playing time sometimes not. The piano being prepared was interesting, because it instantly added some distance from standard free jazz territory. And in fact, this was the main observation I had of this playing; that it was, if not in line-up, then in ensemble and general tone much more contemporary classical than free jazz. The trumpet and saxophone were at times detuning and overblowing the same note in different ways, like some Ligeti, and Fred Thomas’ piano lines were frequently very minimalist. Even when there was a soloist there was a sympathy and connection between the soloist and accompanying musicians that almost took away the notion of front man. While this may seem the case in all free jazz, what I mean is that the soloists didn’t in fact build up to any climax of notes, intensity and ultimately musical focus, it was more that there were periods where the texture was being directed by one particular person, like if you have a net and you move a particular point, the rest of the net moves too, following that origin of motion.
The highlight for me was a stonking duet between Alex Bonney and Robin Fincker, where I was just blown away by I don’t really know what exactly. In my notebook I have written down, helpfully, ‘notes. good.’, because what was going on wasn’t melody, it wasn’t really rhythm, it was ultimately just sound, and communication between the two players simply in sound quality, I think. I may be wrong.
Having expected something along the Outhouse lines, given the presence of three of that band’s members, I was a little surprised because it’s definitely one of the wilder LOOP ensembles I’ve heard. There’s less composition than bands like Fringe Magnetic and Blink, and particularly with the prepared piano, they’re miles away from the tonality of people like Phronesis and Gemini.
If you get a chance to see Jeanne Added or Vincent Courtois in action, I highly recommend it. I hear they’re on tour to Scandinavia and Ethiopia.

Kämmer Klang 9 – 1st September ‘09

Looks like another great night from Lucy Railton:

Kämmer Klang presents an eclectic night of contemporary classical compositions and electronic music, headline set from Simon Bookish and music by John Cage, Christian Wolff, Luciano Berio and Tristan Brooke.

outside cafe oto: photo by flickr user andynew

SIMON BOOKISH

Simon Bookish – Vocals
Emma Smith – Violin
Max Baillie – Violin
Mandy Drummond – Viola
Lucy Railton – Cello

Cult pop experimenter Simon Bookish will present a selection of his songs in special new arrangements for strings, including songs from Everything/Everything, his ‘big band album about science and information’ which was released on the Tomlab label last year.

Simon Bookish is the pseudonym of composer and vocalist Leo Chadburn, whose recent projects have included everything from a new score for Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle for the National Theatre, electronic music for choreographer Frauke Requardt, a site-specific performance, Not wanting to say anything about John Cage for the Magazin 4 gallery (Bregenz) and disco string arrangements for the band Fan Death.

JOHN CAGE    Etudes Boreales

John Cage’s Etudes Boreales (1972) use the piano as a percussion object;
the performer is instructed to use mallets to strike parts of the body
of the instrument and strings as well as playing normally on the keys.
Similar to his Atlas Eclipticalis (1961), Cage used star-charts
published by Czech astronomer Antonín Becvár to place musical events.
Various properties of the stars (magnitude, colour, etc) determine
characteristics of the musical event such as which part of the
instrument should be struck and with which material.

Performed by Mark Knoop.

LUCIANO BERIO  Sequenza I

This solo piece for Flute is the first of 14 works by Berio entitled Sequenza.  The specific notation here doesn’t dictate note lengths, allowing the performer to control the momentum of the piece although Berio’s influence of Serialism remains in his strict organisation of pitch, harmony, articulation and dynamics.

Performed by Carla Rees

CHRISTIAN WOLFF  Music for 1, 2 or 3 players.

Christian Wolff says about the work that “this music is drawn from the interaction of the people playing it”, Peter Nikolas Wilson comments that [the score consists of] unbound white pages with several notes loosely distributed on the notation systems (but no clef indicated): vertical, horizontal or diagonal lines; numbers in red and black; indications for dynamics and a few graphic symbols.  The symbols stand not just for modes of producing sounds, durations of sounds, timbres and so on; above all they define coordination: play this sound after the previous one has begun and hold it until it ends, or: start somewhere, hold the sound until another begins, and end them both together.

TRISTAN BROOKES Threads for amplified viola and 7 loudspeakers

I.    Prelude
‘Humming wires.  Each to each.  A different hum.’

II.   Ludus
‘Footsteps.  Below.
Voices
threads.  Caught in pavement cracks.’

III.  Melody

IV. ‘Messages from clouds…’

Performed by Robert Ames
Electronics – Tristan Brookes and Oliver Whitworth

Music starts at 8.30pm, £5 on the door.
CAFE OTO
22 Ashwin Road
Dalston
E8 3DL

Three Trapped Tigers – EP2 review

photo by flickr user Clownhouse III

Three Trapped Tigers
EP2 – Blood and biscuits

Review by Matt Lomas for archive 113:

This EP, EP2, is ‘the second part in a triptych of releases’, as their website states. The band, comprised of drummer Adam Betts (James Taylor Quartet, Full Fat), guitarist/synth programmer Matt Calvert (Full Fat, MA, Typewritten) and keyboardist/synth player Tom Rogerson (did an album of free improv with Reid Anderson – the Bad Plus bassist – a while back), was formed by Tom Rogerson as an attempt to recreate in a live situation music that draws heavily on the electronica of artists such as those found on the Warp record label, the kind of music supposedly labelled ‘IDM’ throughout the 90s. The compositions are sometimes staggeringly complex, all around the 5-minute mark, and jam-packed with mind-boggling polyrhythms and gorgeous sonic textures. Somewhat jokingly, I suspect, Tom described his music as ‘catchy’, but in a way it really is, though it takes about five or six listens to any of these tunes to unpack the layers of writing that have been built up.

And what’s stunning is that this music can be made by three musicians, live, with no pre-recorded samples or backing tracks. Reminiscent of Matthew Herbert’s self-directed manifesto about how to proceed in electronic music, this approach requires technical virtuosity, which the players all obviously have, and intimate knowledge of the music, also present. My only live experience of Squarepusher was utterly depressing, watching him cue something on the laptop then piddle all over his bass’s fingerboard, occasionally stopping to salute the audience – in which time I’m sure the line he was supposedly playing continued – and even when the drummer he was touring was on stage as well, well over 75% of the music was coming from the laptop. We know this – it’s music-minus-one, and you never know, there might be space for Squarepusher on Jamey Aebersold’s ‘historic’ series of such books.

The other point about this approach of being able to play the music live is that being conceived of as a performance, there is far more awareness of the experience the audience gets; there is structure, and, generally, it doesn’t take so long for things to bloody to happen. That was always my problem with Autechre and others: much though I loved the sound, each piece was essentially just the one sound. Which is fine but, firstly, it gets predictable – your mind probably just shuts off the bit that flips out when an original theme comes back over the intervening material (think Young Person’s Guide to the orchestra, or any of those fugues where two mighty themes together at the climax of the piece). Secondly, it belies an approach to music that has gone so far down the route of the individual auteur that it has forgotten that music is made, is performed, not just something, like a painting, that can be dealt with completely independently of any performance that may be made.

Anyway, back to the EP. ‘6’ (yes, EP(1) went ‘1’ – ‘5’) starts in complete Aphex Twin mode, with drums bursting in, before Tom’s diatonic keyboard melodies shape things into phrases. I’m afraid as a non-drummer I’m not really able to say where the drum kit stops and the synth pads start, but I’m sure in this track there’s a large role for synth’d drums. The surprising thing about this piece, for me, when I heard it, was that it was largely in 4/4 and largely in phrases of four bars. Although unhappy with the label ‘math rock’ (Tom would far rather be called ‘electronica’), the time signature complexity in their first EP certainly pushed it in this direction. Of course, the music flowed and the signatures made sense, but it still involved an amount of ‘Count! Count!’ to determine ‘2’’s 2-bars-of-15/8-one-bar-11/8-one-bar-4/4 main riff. This EP however, seems to be more about rhythmic creativity and complexity within straightforward time signatures. ‘6’ then continues with a layered vocal texture, over music that continues to grow in energy. There was a little singing in the first EP, but much more in this one, and of a greater complexity and priority: essentially for the second half of this track it is the focus, with little new material in the music beneath.

‘7’ is probably the ‘single’ from this EP, uploaded onto their myspace first and just generally the phattest thing since people began spelling fat with a p. We’re back to ‘what the fuck?!’ rhythms here. It’s probably all in 4/4 but it’s seriously hard to keep track of it. Matt Calvert is featured heavily on the guitar on this one, unlike ‘6’ in which I could convince myself that he was on synths all the time, perhaps. The composition on this tune is sensational, with melodic lines jumping out, basslines that stretch out longer than you expect, and rhythms that go all over the place. Halfway through we’re assaulted by an onslaught of rhythm that makes your previous grasp of the beat seem totally solid. Then everything falls away for a lurching keyboard line, from which everything builds up again. As I said, the single of the EP.

‘8’ was the hardest tune for me to get into. On the first, second and third listens the first half seemed a wall of noise, only giving me a clue to anything when everything dropped away to leave an organ turning over chords every 6 beats. I now think the piece is something like a cocktail, you’re presented with several motifs, albeit within the context of a completely relentless metal-esque frenzy of sound, which again has a pulse throughout, but which lurches through metric modulation left, right and centre. Drums are on full acoustic blast in this one, I think, and Matt Calvert is on the edge of achieving his desire to make the guitar sound completely unlike a guitar. Matt Calvert must be a useful man to have in your band: constantly shifting from electric guitar to synth keyboard, and hugely adept at both, he is normally doing about three things at once, as is Tom on the various keyboards he has going at any one time. As I said, however, from the mid-point of organ tranquillity, this piece completely lifts off, the various mad rhythms and riffs joining together to literally take off over the ostinato of the organ. Listen to it on good speakers, and you’ll feel like the room is being stretched upwards. The main thing that occurred to me after this experience is the absolutely crucial balance in level between this organ and everything else: I’m very keen to see if this mesmerising effect really can be reproduced live.

I did sort of expect ‘9’ to be ‘the slow one’, like ‘4’ is on EP1, and it is. But it has even more balls. It’s shorter, by a minute, but it grows without capitulating to a drum beat, which is agonising by the time it is searingly loud, with sound qualities that feel like their straining at the seams. Radio interference and something like gull cries are the only thing we’re allowed as the music dies down to a melancholy piano solo that finishes the album.

That the song-writing credits this time go to the whole band rather than Tom is reflected, I feel, in their having a slightly more opaque conception – that’s really wanky isn’t it? sorry – the songs on EP1 just felt like they were more easily apprehended. Not a criticism of this music, certainly, just, y’know, on observation. It’s definitely a more ambitious EP than EP1, and I would almost go as far as to say that it’s a good thing that they released EP1 first, but then, that’s sold out so it’s not like it’s going to be an introduction to them as their star continues it’s ascent. They’re still an outrageously talented band playing outrageously good compositions. I believe they’re in no hurry to release an album, having resisted various contractual offers, but at least there’s the third panel of that triptych for me to await impatiently. Also, they’re on tour.

Huw White’s Neon Bedroom at The Others, 22th July ‘09

This interesting venue, a sort-of-art-studio located above a snooker club out in Stoke Newington, is notoriously hard to find. In ensuring that I would not be late for the gig, there was one eventuality I had not prepared for: I was far too early. In a truly Mark Corrigan moment, I reasoned that going in early would be far too awkward, and that it would be far easier to stand outside the station looking at my mobile: You’re never alone with a phone.

The empty screen got boring pretty quickly, so I took in my immediate surroundings: a Caribbean takeaway, a few shut-up shops and an evidently musical barbershop. Nice. Across the road from me was the band itself, just leaving the venue. Huw White, the pianist and bandleader, gestured me to come over. I almost reluctantly shut my phone – as if I had been mid-communication – and started a flaccid jog across two sets of crossing lights.

I had already eaten, but joined the band in a brief trip to the Pangea Project, another quirky venue in Stoke Newington. Food here comes as a choice of three options: Red, Yellow or Green (the Green one being vegetarian, from what I could tell). You are then given the choice between large or small portion, or to have your chosen dish served within a toasted wrap. Huw ordered a Green wrap from the barmaid…

“With cheese?”
“Does it work with cheese?”
“Everything works with cheese… except curry.”
(At this point, Neon Bedroom trumpeter Freddie Gavita sagely reminded us of such curry and cheese favourites as Saag Paneer)

I think this particular dish did actually contain coconut milk…

As we awaited the food, a bluegrass band was sound-checking at the back of the room. After a fairly corny cover of Sweet Child of Mine, they tried out some more traditional material. This was a vast improvement, and saw them move from irritating background music to a temporary focus for the conversation. Bluegrass can be powerful, with strong harmony and the real conviction of people brought together by a very specific musical tradition genuinely having fun. These guys managed to mix a relaxed attitude with real musicianship: For Gavita, the genre has “its own language” comparable to the vocabulary employed by jazz musicians.

I’d spoken to Huw before about the naming of this project in some detail, and this time the venue had embraced the name Neon Bedroom in order to theme the evening (culminating in a wig and hi-vis jacket worn by the announcer). I remember being at a gig at the Green Note in Camden when Huw announced that the name Neon Bedroom was, at least in part, a nod to Aussie rockers Silverchair’s 1999 album, Neon Ballroom. Since then, he has pointed out that the word neon was carefully chosen for its own variety of meanings. Firstly, there is the neon lamp: Neon lighting has a firm place in the history of advertising. Not only does it include the once-ubiquitous “coca-cola” neon sign which still peppers old American cinema, but it has come to symbolise the seedier side of urban life: gambling, brothels, and so on. The reddish glow produced by these signs comes from excited gas within, a noble gas, and the least reactive element on the periodic table. It is invisible, odourless and occurs naturally in trace amounts throughout our atmosphere. It therefore pervades most of what we see and do while still remaining very elusive. In this way, neon takes on an almost ghostly quality, far from the Malthusian glare of barroom baiting. Furthermore, the gas was named after the Greek word for new, νέοσ [neos]. All of these meanings are incorporated in some way into Huw’s approach to his work.

Because of the thought that has gone into the music, it is conceptually rich and very challenging. This in turn causes the band to focus in a peculiar way. At times, it can be very much “heads down” music, as a friend pointed out. The potential, then, remains for these musicians to really explore the material as they become more and more familiar with it, rather than simply going stale. Bassist Tom Farmer is beatific throughout most of the two sets, outwardly contented with jazz itself. He gives off a paradoxical optimism that encourages us to enjoy what is there at the moment, without having to focus on what might happen in the future.

The ideal situation, Huw tells me, would be to play this music on a grand piano; for this concert, Huw will be playing a Fender Rhodes. What we hear tonight, therefore, might not be what he had in mind when he was writing it. However, jazz is a medium which allows its artists to adapt to such alterations in timbre and texture in a way others might not, without sacrificing too much of the initial vision.

The venue is very pleasant, and there is plenty for the audience to do before and between the performances. There is art hanging all around the room – currently including a pencil portrait of Kämmer Klang curator Lucy Railton – and a communal fußball table rattles away, unsure of its own artistic status. My favourite ornament is the TV-screen frame supported on a microphone stand right in front of the DJ booth. The room was very distinctive in both the way it felt and the way it sounded, although it made Huw’s instrumentation seem dense at times and tended to round off the angular arrangements in a way which wasn’t quite in keeping with his aesthetic.

In the end, the complexity of the music works in its favour. With the space afforded by the right room, a grand piano and a faithful distance from the page, there is plenty more detail to be heard in what Neon Bedroom are creating. The influences are displayed in a way comparable to that of the bedroom itself: A dimly lit CD rack in the corner of our eyes flickers with the occasional reminder of something Huw has heard all his life.

How to be a Composer – BBC4 18th, 19th July

Paul “I-love-the-eighties” Morley learns the difference between a major and a minor chord in a specially designed yearlong course at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Unfortunately, a bizarre focus on the musical theatre department mars this otherwise interesting documentary. Even though this department seems the least relevant to Morley’s personal aims, it makes up most of the footage. Not until the second half is any justification given for this, when we are told that both Paul Morley and the musical theatre department are crossing over between the pop and classical worlds. This is not a satisfactory explanation: While musical theatre uses popular and classical influences to entertain and tell stories on stage, Morley is trying to gain a deeper understanding of music with the aim of expressing himself in a more personal and spiritual way; he sees an artistic advantage to composing instrumental music over his usual medium of critical prose.

Another reason for this confusing allocation of screen-time could be the Academy’s paranoid desperation to shake off a ‘stuffy’ image (as if Sasha – the “pin-up boy of the Tuba world” – wasn’t enough to allay such fears). Tuba student Sasha Koushk-Jalali makes intriguing and genuinely interesting sounds: The distorted drones and clever use of overtones inspire Morley to work with him throughout his year at the Academy. Why, then, didn’t they show more of the many brilliant and enthusiastic young musicians performing music relevant to Morley’s personal quest? One particular pianist, who gives a technically demanding and fully engaging performance, is given mere seconds of exposure, while we are repeatedly bashed over the head with a ‘jazzy’ arrangement of Wicked Soul which, frankly, caused me to temporarily mute my laptop.

Morley is clearly enthused by Jazz music, yet no attempt is made to introduce him to the prestigious Jazz department at the Royal Academy itself. In fact, the department is entirely overlooked. Morley dedicates an entire work to the commemoration of one Miles Davis, and is not corrected upon forgivably misquoting a tune he is obviously inspired by. He wants to “play piano like Bill Evans” and compares a piece he hears early on in the programme to “an Ornette Coleman double quartet”.

At the end of the show, it is revealed that Morley will be teaching at the conservatoire next year. I am curious to see what he can achieve, given an enviably open mind and perpetual desire to push himself to the limits of contemporary music where “almost no-one will hear it”.

Baptiste Trotignon – Charlie Wrights, 7th July

This is a baffling photograph. At this concert, there was no jumping. Also, it was indoors. Trotignon was joined by:

Mark Turner – Tenor Sax
Matt Penman – Double Bass
Eric Harland – Drums
Jeremy Pelt – Cigar, Trilby and, somewhat more infrequently, a Trumpet – or “Pimphorn” – presumably his.

Most of this gig was great, particularly Penman and Harland, whose work together was completely mesmerizing for most of the evening.

the end.

P.S. Highlights also include a sax intro, throughout which Trotignon held the sustain pedal, transforming the piano into a bignormous set of sympathetic strings that subtly resonated with each note Turner played.

Kämmer Klang 8 review

Text by Matt Lomas for archive 113:

Brutally edited.

Kammer klang number nine and it is time
for a change of venue. Café OTO
was the new venue, convenient for the
first act, Mayming, who’ve played here before.
A duo of cello and vocals, though
with both making rich use of electronics,
they played several pieces, some with lyrics

- by Shelley - and others without
discernible
words.

The extended technique on the ‘cello
was nicely matched with the effects pedal;
a lightness that most affecting-anythings don’t have.
The voice was used in all sorts of ways, and
what I liked most about the use of the
effects on the voice was that they did not
stay the same for long – as if th’experiments
were done at home beforehand, which is, I
presume, the case. I guess they’re aware that
beginning several pieces with the
‘cello bassline loop is a little same-ish;
at least the nature of those basslines is
varied. For me, when the vocals open
up into this full mic-at-arms-length roar,
it is a little hard to reconcile
with the colour of the rest of the music;
the piece completely electronics-free
really balanced the set, and revealed a
compositional flow that looping -
by definition - rules out.
                          Next up, one
Shabaka Hutchings, hot off playing for
Charlie Haden and Carla Bley at the
Meltdown Festival, gave us Cardew’s Mountains,
which makes a sort of set of variations
on the Gigue
             from Bach’s Partita number
six. a piece of at times pretty fiendish
writing and at others - on long, still notes -
multiphonics. it was, by most people
I spoke to, a rather hard piece to get
into, though the performance was completely
musical and gripping; I’m sure we could
have found a page-turner though.

Kerry Wong’s performance of three of Peter
Abelinger’s Voices and Piano
was for me the highlight of the night.
although the pianist has a click-track in
his ear I still think the logistics of
the piece, and the sheer rhythmic complexity
involved in Abelinger’s transcriptions
of the speech patterns of the speakers is
pretty colossal. At times the piano
matches voice frequency for frequency,
and at times it is clustered, using only
rhythm to keep itself interweaved with
the voice. Partly, I’m sure, it’s sheer effect
of a piece being nothing but these matching
phrases that emphasizes
the musical idea at the core of the pieces,
and it really is breath-taking.

Shabaka Hutchings returned with Lucy
Railton - KK MD, I suppose to
give us Xenakis’ Charisma, for ‘cello
and clarinet. energetic performance,
peppered with the kind of microtonal
long note vyings that Xenakis is known
for, the players both obviously worked
hard to bring out the vigour of this piece. 

Lastly, Kerry Wong returned with an
interesting piece
by Nono pairing live piano
with a recording
of Maurizio Pollini hitting various parts
of the piano with certain keys down.
As Kerry noted afterwards, the quirks
 and charisma of the piano in
Café OTO made a nice contrast to
what was a standard concert grand on the
recording. The level of Pollini’s
part was slightly too high. after an untenable wait,
(given the technician’s job was
 to press play, I presume.)
                           the
dialogue: percussive and inviting
and a strong sense of structure added to
the listening experience. To me,
the piece seemed to present an int’resting
half-way house between going to a gig
and listening to a CD at home.
you-the-audience cannot see all that is
happening, and the performer has a
diminished freedom in terms of tempi,
but at the same time, it is live.
                                 the end.