Instal 09. Day Three (Glasgow Arches, 22/3/09)

I have to admit to feeling pretty deflated on the way home on Saturday night. Was it me, or was this year’s Instal really as dreary as it seemed? I embarked on Sunday’s proceedings several rungs down on the ladder of expectation. Fortunately, the evening went some way towards redressing the inspiration / desperation balance.

Nobody made me want to throw things this evening, but neither Seymour Wright nor the duo of Sean Meehan and Taki Unami exactly set the pulse racing. Both acts definitely fell into this year’s themed trap of doing very little for a very long time. Wright is a saxophonist. In the spirit of Instal, of course, he did everything but play the damn thing. He blew whistles through the mouthpiece, rubbed it against his trousers and rattled it against a battery operated fan amongst other fairly pointless activities. I didn’t even understand what Meehan and Unami were actually doing. Meehan had a snare drum and a couple of cymbals which he seemed to barely touch. Unami had a laptop and some trays of what looked like dried rice. He clapped every now and then. The trays rattled every now and then. Er, that’s it.

To be fair, they were the low points of a night on which standards were fairly high. Rolf Julius used field recordings of crickets, birds and pond life, and then mixed them and rerecorded them and remixed them etc etc. The result was a gentle, but continually changing sound that seemed to snake around the room. Sometimes it sounded pastoral, sometimes alien – a sort of avant-garde chill out music.

Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide‘s set was divided into three parts. Sachiko fiddled with some contact mics for a while, gleefully creating a series of snap, crackles and pops – like an amlified bowl of Rice Krispies. Otomo played a strange looking pair of pianos, somehow hooking them up to a guitar amp, causing oscillating feedback of various pitches. It was interesting, but I’d like to have heard it used in a more musical way. The pair then played their improv piece “Filament”, a duet for turntable with no records and sampler with no samples. It was a spacious piece, full of longeurs and near silence, punctuated by static crackle, feedback squeals, and the beautiful, rhythmic sound of needle on turntable.

I ventured in the small Studio Theatre on a couple of occasions this evening. Fraser Burnett, Jean-Philippe Gross and Grant Smith created an enjoyable and rhythmic scree of noise using a trio of mixers. Neil Davidson and Hannah Eliul on guitar and clarinet respectively created some delightful improvised music, let down only by vocalist Ben Knight who seemed to be convinced he was an extra on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Back to the main hall, and possibly the best two sets of the entire festival. Gross reappeared with Jérôme Noetinger, seated at opposite sides of a table situated in the middle of the arch. It was covered in all manner of electronic gizmos with cables and wires sprouting in all directions. They proceeded to create a maelstrom of electronic noise. Sometimes it was intense and dense as Merzbow, sometimes it used extremes of pitch like Pan Sonic, and sometimes it almost purred like a contented cat – albeit one with a very short temper. It was visceral and physical and rather wonderful.

The final set of the festival brought back memories of Maryanne Amacher’s extraordinary 2006 performance, in which she produced frequencies of sound that seemed impossibly loud, and also seemed to emanate from inside your head, but yet allowed you to have normal volume conversations at the same time. This time Jean-Luc Guionnet and Taku Unami somehow tuned in to the frequencies of the actual building. Using speakers set around the room, and the sort of sub bass frequencies that would have your average dubstepper gazing slackjawed in amazement, they produced a deep, rumbling barrage of noise. It wasn’t constant in pitch and tone, but oscillated, making the very fabric of the building seem to vibrate. At one point, my skeleton seemed to be jingling around in my body! The volume was high, but not excessively so – this wasn’t a performance that left your ears ringing afterwards. It was all done using frequencies of sound. Quite an experience.

It has to be said that the highlights this year weren’t plentiful. Sunday was the best day by far. There was too much stuff that seemed to lead up blind alleys, and not a great deal that felt inspiring. When the outer limits of what could be considered music are being explored, it’s always going to be hit and miss whether the results are enervating, excruciating or exciting. It’s the possibilities that keep me coming year after year. Even when the festival is below par, there is always something magical to take away from it.

Instal 09. Day One (Glasgow University Chapel, 20/3/09)

Weird and wonderful, exciting and excruciating, Instal can be all of these things and more. It’s become Scotland’s premiere experimental music shindig since its inception in 2001. Each year, a bunch of musicians from various fields descend on the city to showcase their art. Nobody tries to pretend that it’s all going to be equally enjoyable. There is a Reithian spirit to the event – inform, educate and entertain – and sometimes it does feel that the third of those noble aims has been tacked on as an afterthought. The reason it’s always worth it is not just the considerable horizon-broadening that it offers, but also that there is inevitably something that absolutely takes your breath away. Last year’s three hour set by Japanese quartet Marginal Consort definitely fell into that category.

Every Instal has a slightly different format. This year, the first day of three was held, not in its usual haunt the Arches, but at the Gothic pile that is the Glasgow University Chapel. The interior of the building is like one of Britain’s great cathedrals, only in miniature. It’s a splendid mixture of towering, gabled roof, columns and arches and is dominated by a large stained glass window at the eastern end. The reason we were all there was that the night’s performances were all using the chapel’s organ. It’s a strange beast – the pipes stand out proudly on the north wall, but the actual organ is hidden away in an alcove high up on the south side – invisible to all but a few of the audience. This means that the entire evening’s visuals consisted solely of the building’s impressive architecture (I particularly liked the heavy wooden saints (disciples?) who jut out of the beams at right angles, dangling chandeliers on long chains – but would feel a bit vulnerable sat beneath one).

The first performance was by German minimalist composer Eva-Maria Houben. The description of her work as ultra-minimalist in the programme was an understatement. For 45 minutes she played a practically unwavering low volume drone – a harmonic of sorts with a low frequency rumble and a high frequency pitch. The boredom threshold was severely tested. I began to think I was back at school in Friday afternoon detention.

The duo of Jean-Luc Guionnet and Toshimaru Nakamura were much more interesting. Guionnet helmed the organ with Nakamura providing accompaniment using a mixing desk that input its own output creating feedback loops of electronic noise that he could then manipulate. The music was highly abstract, but not without concrete form. It was almost like a gallery of aural paintings evoking an industrial landscape. There were vast locomotives, steamships in fog, colossal machines and the hum and crackle of power stations – all topped off with a dash of Universal horror and Colin Clive zapping kilowatts of electricity through poor old Boris Karloff. It ranged from thunderous rumblings to delicate fizz, and restlessly moved ever forwards. Hugely impressive.

Hermann Nitsch was probably the star attraction of the evening – perhaps of the whole festival if fame is your yardstick. A founder of the post-war Aktionist movement in Austria, his art has always been confrontational and multi-disciplinary. Tonight, though, we were treated to a series of organ pieces. According to the notes, the music was designed to conjure up images of the cosmos. That was certainly true, but only in the way that it conjured up early Tangerine Dream’s attempts to do the same. The music was simply a series of sustained chords (sometimes dischords) layered and in sequence. It was interesting for about ten minutes. After an hour it just sounded tired, lazy and uninspired. Many artists in experimental music suffer from the same fault – take an idea, but then stretch it well beyond the point where it ceases to be interesting.

Tonight was an interesting experiment, but the lack of a visual element (even just being able to see what the artists were doing) and the static nature of most of the music made it a fairly dull experience – Guionnet and Nakamura excepted. To the Arches, then.

Gig: Instal 08 Day 3 (The Arches, Glasgow, 17/2/08)

So. All done and dusted for another year. As ever, it was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Perhaps even more so this year.

Wit, invention, humour, imagination, character, melody, originality, unpredictability. Just some of the things that last night’s debacle completely lacked. Today kicked off with another three hour improvised set, but this time it had all the above and more in spades.

The Tokyo quartet Marginal Consort specialize in playing very long pieces. Three hours was by no means a stretch for them. They were each sat at their own table, in the four corners of the room, armed with mixers, all manner of effects pedals, customised instruments and a bizarre array of household implements, toys, hardware and plain old junk. Because of the way the performance area was set up, none had any means of communication with the others since the audience were all in between them. The only way they could respond to each other was through the music they were making.

Three hours. That’s a bum-numbing duration at the cinema. For a single piece of music, it’s a ridiculous length of time. But it worked, and at no time did it get boring. The whole thing was a seamless flow, and yet constantly changing, constantly unpredictable, constantly anything but constant. Musical references? Test Department, early Tangerine Dream, Can, Merzbow, Supersilent, the soundtrack to Kurosawa films, a noisy day in Toys R Us. I couldn’t even begin to describe it. OK, I could begin, but wouldn’t get very far. There were passages of drone, passages of noise, but also plenty of melody; bamboo, wood and metal percussion, bizarre sounds fashioned from paper cups and pipes – even gargling and a mini display of martial arts using sticks, and a dirty great log. It was everything that improvised music can and should be. It constantly shifted in tone and mood, and never stood in the same place too long. The process, and its use of instruments and junk, was equally fascinating. At one point I was thinking how great it would go down (or at least an abridged version) with an audience of eight year olds. There was something very Blue Peter about it in many ways. If you ever get the chance to see them, and I guess they don’t come around very often, don’t let it go begging. A contender for my gig of the year already.

***

As yesterday, Instal Sunday was divided into two. An hour’s break for food, and a nose buried in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was followed by something called the Cherry Blossom Ball. Of all the Instal’s I’ve ever been to, this was definitely the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. Simply because it was so un-bizarre. Instal’s motto is Brave New Music. Quite how this fitted into that remit is beyond me. First up, though, Richard Youngs played us a video and got us to sing along in the gaps of the song. That was jolly, even if it felt like being at school. The main part of the Cherry Blossom ball consisted of two bands – the Cherry Blossoms and the Golden Road who each did two sets, bookending them with collaborative tunes that included both bands. The Cherry Blossoms are a Nashville outfit, and are definitely the more Instal-friendly of the two. Taking an old timey Carter Family / jug band vibe, they mixed in elements of improvisation and Sesame Street like singalongs. In parts it was great, in parts chaotic. At its worst, it sounded like a hippie peace camp sing song, at its best a heartfelt modern take on the prewar Americana tradition. The Golden Road, on the other hand, were utterly perplexing. Basically, this was a band straight out of the Neil Young & Crazy Horse / Allman Brothers / American Beauty era Grateful Dead tradition. No angle, unless you count a female lead guitarist as an angle. I liked them a lot, but then I like the aforementioned bands. I think the general audience reaction was split between people who just liked them for what they were, people who were genuinely annoyed at something so ‘trad’ being at Instal, and people who didn’t seem to know nor care how avant-garde they were or were not. Like I say, I liked ‘em, even if they ripped off “Down by The River” wholesale on one of their tunes.

So, Instal 08. It was definitely the most extreme one yet in terms of the range of material presented, and in terms of its quality. Saturday was a downer, to be sure, but Friday and Sunday more than made up for it. It’s the only festival that can both fill me with wonder, and have me bristling with rage. Like life, it’s the shit that helps make the shinola seem so much better.

Gig: Instal 08 Day 2 (The Arches, Glasgow, 16/2/08)

Day one of the Instal experimental music festival contained a lot of pleasant surprises and no unpleasant ones. It existed well beyond the boundaries of music in parts. Day two pushed things even further out, but this time fell squarely flat on its arse. More about that later.

The proceedings at the Arches were divided into two more or less separate shows: Translation at 4 o’clock and Energy Births Form at 7.30. The former had little to do with music at all. The first piece was underway, deliberately so, by the time the doors opened – one of its precepts being that it didn’t matter at what point you arrived. Spinners is a play-cum-duologue-cum-conceptual art piece that involves two guys in suits on exercise bikes reading a text whilst peddling away furiously. The conceit of the bikes gives it a breathless quality, and the text is made up of passages by the likes of Andy Warhol, John Cage and others of that ilk. Sometimes the two cyclists would take it in turns to read, at others do it simultaneously. It was actually pretty good – especially when they talked over each other. You could tune your ears to one or the other speaker and get some quite bizarre juxtapositions, like overhearing two conversations at once. It was billed as ‘Extreme Reading’ which is like extreme ironing only more intellectual, I guess.

Junko Hiroshige of the Incapacitants, Blood Stereo’s Dylan Nyoukis and a third vocalist (whose name I don’t know) were up next: basically making silly noises and having it played back at them, electronically warped. Hiroshige seems to have two volume settings – loud and ear-splitting. It’s really disconcerting listening to her.

Jarrod Fowler had what had to be one of the best introductions I’ve ever seen. “How ya doing Glasgow” he yelled amiably, in the finest, clichéd rock ‘n’ roll tradition. And repeated it until the response was loud enough for his liking. “That’s better, my name’s Jarrod Fowler and I’m from…”: then everything was drowned in a sudden eruption of white noise. It sounded like the end of the world. Gradually, radio stations, snippets of music and garbled conversations could be picked out, and Fowler walked around talking to people, recording the conversations, and adding it back to the mix. As the noise faded back, more and more stuff could be heard, and the odd bit understood. The only problem for me was, as with so many of the artists who’ve appeared at Instal over the years, Fowler took a good idea, but just ran with it for too long, and by the end people were drifting away to the bar.

Kenneth Goldsmith comes from New York. He couldn’t be from anywhere else really. His act was part stand up, part performance art, part storytelling. The mock letters to jazz-lite artist Kenny G were very funny, and he was an engaging and refreshingly light-hearted presence. Finally, Achim Wollscheid asked everyone to switch their mobiles on, and recorded and processed the resultant din. Not much more than an interesting party trick, but at least he didn’t stretch it out to half an hour.

***

Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel They Shoot Horses Don’t They is set in the world of the Depression-era marathon dance contests where couples would dance, non-stop, for hours, maybe days, on end for a cash prize. It was a case of last couple standing wins, and there were many people desperate enough to enter. In these contests, a human activity that expresses joy, warmth and bonding was turned into a soul-less and artless drudge.

The pompous programme notes for Energy Births Form, written by David Keenan (a guy physically incapable of writing a paragraph that doesn’t include the names of at least two free jazz musicians), can be basically be boiled down to this. We’re going to play as loud as we can for three hours and see how knackered we get at the end of it. In other words, creativity, expression, and any other point of music, or any other art form, were irrelevant. This was purely about narcissistic self-examination. Like David Blaine in a box, really, only louder.

The collective included the Incapacitants, Michiyo Yagi and others. And yes it was a right din. I stood and watched for 45 minutes (about a quarter of the set!). In that time, there were only two occasions when I could sense anything sparking creatively on stage. For a brief instance, Yagi got something resembling a groove going from her koto which a couple of others followed. Maybe fifteen minutes later, Kazuo Imai got some interesting sounds out of his guitar. The rest of the time, it was just a mess: ironically, given the title, utterly formless. I actually think that this farrago was pretty damned contemptuous of the audience. Three hours of navel-gazing with absolutely nothing to say. Maybe those who stayed the distance got to see someone collapse from exhaustion. Maybe that’s the only reason they did stay. Or maybe they were just conducting their own personal endurance test. A lot had already gone by the time I left – and it was barely 8.30.

Later on Usurper, Neil Davidson and Aileen Campbell and Kylie Minoise and Nackt Insecten were playing at Stereo, but that was three hours away, so I just buggered off home. Sunday should be better.

Gig: Instal 08 Day 1 (The Arches / Stereo, Glasgow, 15/2/08)

Low expectations.

A few days ago I had a bit of a moan about the pretentiousness that surrounds Instal during a general rant on improv. Tonight’s theme of ‘self-cancellation’ was a case in point. What exactly was that supposed to mean, and don’t intellectualised concepts like that only serve to drive people away? On the whole, tonight was one of those occasions that are a joy to the natural pessimist – low expectations being confounded, and naysaying being proved wrong.

I’ve been going to Instal since 2002, and I was surprised that tonight’s audience was one of the largest and youngest for a few years. Especially since there was very little that could be conventionally described as music on show tonight, even in the widest terms. The two arches used at the Arches had small performance areas set up at various points making it look like an art installation before any of the musicians appeared. And after a while I began to have suspicions that the concept behind self-cancellation was that everybody had cancelled leaving a confused audience to mill about wondering what was supposed to happen.

When things did get underway, Arika head honcho and Instal curator Barry Esson explained the concept a little more clearly that basically tonight was about auto-destructive sound – of aural decay and musical collapse. See? I’m sounding pretentious now – it’s difficult to be conceptual without sounding a little arsey.

Sarah Washington’s idea of self-cancellation was to not listen to what she was doing by using ear-protectors. Unfortunately, although presenting a golden opportunity for me to make some snide remark about her being the lucky one, it was actually rather good – gentle oscillations and feedback tones redolent of some of Ryoji Ikeda’s stuff. Lee Patterson did a short piece which consisted of dropping sodium bicarbonate into water in various shaped vessels and mic-ing up the sound. I thought “yeah and”. Later, though, when he did a second piece involving the heavily amplified sound of burning nuts and seeds, I was at the front, and actually found myself transported back to a time when I was making regular visits to one of the Inner Hebrides, and the wild winter nights spent falling asleep to the sound of the crackle of a log fire.

John Butcher’s comments in the Wire had led me to write my previous tirade against British improv musicians. Of course, he had to be droll and self-deprecating in his introduction, and one of the musical highlights to boot. His set up of using the feedback obtained from a saxophone to create vibrations that, via piano wire and e-bow, played a guitar and snare drum was clever and effective. It was by far the most recognisably musical thing thus far. It segued perfectly into Benedict Drew’s piece using broken stereo leads, but really all that was was some feedback squeal interrupted by a few bursts of white noise. The interval in proceedings was preceded by nine of the musicians responding to a set of slides of super-imposed sudoko puzzles (from the Guardian, of course). Basically, as a pointer hit each number it was a signal for a musician to start or stop playing. Eventually as more puzzles were overlaid, the numbers became black blobs and the music petered out. The idea was better than the execution, I think.

Mark and John Bain’s “Archisonic” was easily the highlight of the first part of the evening. Using seismic sensors, the pair blasted out oscillator drones and picked up the feedback from the building itself to create a bass-heavy, bone-shaking noise that resembled Pan Sonic at their most extreme. You could almost dance to it, in a fashion, as there were some regularish beats under the noise. Although it was loud, it wasn’t uncomfortably so. The main impact of the sound was felt rather than heard. My whole skeleton seemed to vibrate as the soundwaves passed through me. It felt kind of weird, but it was a thrilling thing to witness.

There were other short sets. Michael Colligan amped up the vibrations caused by scraping and jamming metal objects into a big block of dry ice. It was weird watching aluminium plates become really animated as they came into contact with the material, and as such was much more of a visual piece than an aural one. I couldn’t really see what Rhodri Davies was doing with his customised harps, but it sounded like he was recording the sound of them being destroyed. Robin Hayward’s party trick involved an egg-timer like contraption leaking sand into the bell of his tuba until it couldn’t be played. The point was to illustrate the changes in the sound that resulted. I think it would have worked far better had he played some simple repetitive melody, rather like William Basinski’s Disintegration Tapes, rather than just blast out the occasional, random note. That way the changes in timbre would have been more apparent, and the piece more engaging.

The final performance consisted of slides of acid being dripped on to nylon, with the destruction amplified. Again, it was more of a visual spectacle than an aural one. It provided a good excuse to clear us all out of the building as there was “acid” in the air, and they didn’t want us to get it into our lungs. Barry obviously paid less attantion in chemistry lessons than me, because, as any fule no, hydrochloric acid gives off chlorine which is not an acid, but a particularly noxious gas.

On the whole, tonight was more sound art than music. It was one of the most enjoyable Instal nights yet, though.

Part two of the evening kicked off some 2-300 metres away at Stereo. Just three acts, and a far more conventional rock and roll setting. Michiyo Yagi’s koto (a kind of huge, elongated zither-cum-Hawaiian guitar contraption) was a weird instrument to behold, but her playing was stunning. Pure beauty isn’t something that often occurs at Instal, but this had it in spades. At one point I was thinking Debussy, at another classical guitar. One of the four tunes she played was much more atonal and drone-based as a contrast, but she was fantastic. Blood Stereo’s ouvre consists of wailed, unworldly vocals, eastern-tinged drone, violin and storms of electronic noise. I went through a cycle during their set of disliking them, liking them a lot, and then getting bored when they sailed passed the end of my attention span and into the far distance. The evening was rounded off by the lilting folk melodies of the Incapacitants. OK, total mayhem. I’ve seen them before, and they are a ridiculously extreme band: guitar, white noise and a ‘singer’ whose volume and pitch is incredible. What is even more incredible is her stamina. She barely lets up to breathe, it’s almost inhuman. I admit to fleeing before the end. The Incapacitants are a bit of an endurance test.

More musings tomorrow on Day 2. But so far, thumbs up.

Instal 08

The website with details of the happenings at the next instal(ment) of the experimental music festival is up and running and can be found at http://www.arika.org.uk/instal/2008/event1/

It looks like it’s going to be the most ambitious one yet, with talk of three hour sets and all manner of weirdness. Tickets are a tenner per day, or £25 for all three, and it all takes place at the Arches on Argyll Street in Glasgow between the 15th and 17th of February.