Tectonics 2024, Glasgow City Halls

I’ve attended every Tectonics bar one over its eleven year span (not counting the COVID years) and one thing I have noticed is that the number of acts has dwindled a little. The price is still dirt cheap compared to any comparable events, so there’s not really much to complain about. For those who don’t know, Tectonics is an annual new music shindig curated by conductor Ilan Volkov and local promoter Alistair Campbell that presents new orchestral works played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra along with pieces from artists working in all sorts of fields from electronica to free jazz, performance art to noise, folk to avant-pop. It’s always a lucky bag as far as quality goes. Amazing things rub shoulders with not-so-amazing things (to be kind).
This year’s festival had a few of the latter. Not many, though. Everyone is always enthusiastically received, even if it’s more for their efforts rather than the results of them. To pick on the weak spots seems churlish, so I’ll gloss over them.

Day One
Saturday was the stronger of the two. Norway-based duo fiddler Sarah-Jane Summers and guitarist Juhani Silvola collaborated withthe BBC SSO strings on a suite called The Spirit Multitude which combined some slightly out there avant-gardisms with Scottish traditional music. Occasional squalls of electric guitar and atonal string drones punctuated passages of joyful, up-tempo, melodious music. It all blended organically and was a triumphant start to proceedings. Elaine Mitchener’s bio conjoured up the phrases vocal improv and performance art, both of which have my heart sinking to my knees. Just goes to show how you should never presume or pre-judge. Her take on the old spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” was slow, deliberate, and rode upon a dark, metallic noise that reminded me of Scott Walker’s Drift-era journey into darkness. Her version of “Amazing Grace”, again slow and prolonged, used vocal loops to make it a multitude of voices, perhaps echoing the origins of the song in slavery (composer John Newton was an ex-slave ship captain turned abolitionist). In between she did an improvised piece with audience walkabout that was both clever and amusing. The evening’s orchestral concert was totally underwhelming before the interval, and sensational after it. Matthew Shlomowitz and Mariam Rezaei’s Six Scenes for Turntables and Orchestra was a superbly realised and seamless fusion of scratching and looping, and orchestral colour. The latter not just providing a background wash, but actively engaging with the turntablism. It was brilliantly wrought and performed and deservedly got one of the best audience responses I’ve seen at Tectonics.

Day Two
Brian Irvine is an Ulster-born composer, and a conceptualist par excellence. With just one rehearsal he brought together a bunch of musicians of multiple backgrounds, ethnicities, ages and abilities, and created something really quite special. Directions came on cue cards rather than traditional conducting methods. Beginning with a solo violin playing the Londonderry Air, it evolved through music and movement, singing, chanting and playing that at times was a barrage of cacophonous noise, at time plaintive, at times naive, and at times genuinely moving as in the choral finale. And at times it was just bonkers. What there was throughout was a palpable joy of creation, and the fun was transmitted to the audience who were eager to join in when they could. Irvine should be sent to every school and care home in the country. He could do wonders for people’s psyches.
The two solo works for electric guitar played by Yaron Deutsch were both inventive. The first had patches of brilliance, but seemed to lack much structure as it moved linearly from one idea to the next. The second, perhaps lacking those transcendent spells, felt more of a piece. The final orchestral concert featured four works, including two world premieres. All were engaging enough in their own way, but the closing Uberlala, Song of Million Paths for violin and orchestra composed by Mireal Ivecevic was something much more. Beautifully played by soloist Ilya Gringolts (who’d tested my patience on Saturday with a long and tedious piece for solo violin by Salvatore Sciarrino, but was quickly forgiven) and the orchestra, it mixed tonality with experimentation in the way that kept it grounded and yet let it wander off into unexplored spheres. So, another festival ended. The best bits will stay with me. The BBC SSO deserve special praise for their dedication in learning these new works, and giving them the same focus and application as they world a performance of an established work from the classical canon.

Palisander, St Mary’s Church, Aberfoyle

For much of the year the third Sunday of the month sees a classical or related concert taking place on Sunday afternoons at St Mary’s in Aberfoyle. These range from organ recitals to string quartets, and have in the past had artists as high profile as the Wallace collection. Palisander are a very highly rated recorder quartet, and it’s easy to see why. Four recorders of varying sizes doesn’t exactly set the pulse racing as a prospect, but these young musicians are not just highly skilled players, but are adept at putting an entertaining and varied set together. Much of the material dates from between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and includes arrangements of well known material such as Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d, to Giuseppe Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata which was originally composed for violin. There were also Greek and Italian dances, a Broadside ballad about witch burnings, and original material including a suite composed by the group’s Miriam Monaghan inspired by Johannes Kepler’s work on the music of the spheres. All told it was a fascinating and hugely entertaining hour or so, one of the best chamber concerts I’ve seen for many a year.

Session A9, Lochinver Village Hall

Scottish traditional music is not my bag, but a friend is a big fan of Session A9, so when we were up in North-West Sutherland for a week last week, it seemed daft not to go and see them when they were five minutes walk up the road from where we were staying. As it turns out, I’m pleased we did. The band are something of a folk super-group who have been active on and off for more than twenty years. Four fiddlers, guitar, keyboards and percussion make up the septet. Two sets (with an interminable village raffle in the middle, and no, I didn’t win anything) of around an hour or so would have tested the patience if it weren’t for the fact that the material was much more varied than I expected. Covers of songs by John Martyn, Tom Waits and Robbie Robertson broke up the fiddle tunes nicely, although these were actually the weakest parts of the sets. Much of the other material was self-penned and ranged from genuinely moving, almost neo-classical balladry, to furious workouts that would have tested any dancers. They also had a good line in banter without turning things into stand-up-with-songs. Pick of the tunes from me was “The Magic Roundabout”, inspired by the traffic system in, of all places, Swindon, which had a distinct post-rock edge to it. The audience was rowdy, but respectful in the quiet passages, and nobody went home disappointed. I’d go see them again in a heartbeat.

Stars of the Lid

I saw Stars of the Lid twice. The first time was in October 1997 upstairs at the Briton’s Protection pub in Manchester, not far from the Hacienda. I knew nothing about them at the time and had gone to see the headliners, Labradford. (Yes, that was some double bill!). I’m always suspicious about folk who reel off detailed descriptions of events that took place more than a quarter of a century ago, so there are only vague memories of the night. I was in the habit, though, of keeping a journal of all the gigs I attended at the time, and I gave Labradford five stars and Stars of the Lid four. At the end of January 2001 they were back in Manchester, this time as headliners. But only at the crumbling ruin that was the Star and Garter pub next to Piccadilly station, a place I have very fond memories of. I remember more about this show because there was a power surge that knocked out all the power upstairs where the gig was to be held, and also, I think, wrecked one of their synths. Like troopers, though, they set up in the main pub room and played what had to be a truncated, and limited set. Would love to have seen them somewhere with a decent sound system, but that was never to be.

I found this link to the Stars of the Lid set at the Highbury Garage the night after the Briton’s Protection gig in 1997.

Scanner / Zombie Zombie / Roy Book Binder – various venues, Jersey

It’s been two weeks since I posted but I’ve not been totally idle. I returned yesterday from a week in Jersey – a welcome break from distinctly autumnal Glasgow.

My visit coincided with the third annual Branchage Film Festival, a three day bash that encompasses not only cinema but also other visual and sound media events. On Saturday, Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner played three short afternoon shows accompanying Magic Lantern slides of the island, mainly dating from the late Victorian and Edwardian era. These slides are 10x10cm photographic plates printed on glass and often hand-tinted. Rather having their showing accompanied by a commentary, Scanner provided a mainly ambient soundtrack. The result was a bit like seeing your great grandparents’ holiday snaps whilst listening to some cool electronica on the stereo – ie not really in synch, but interesting all the same. With an audience that was definitely not a collection of Wire readers and electronica geeks, Rimbaud shied away from his more esoteric and experimental ouevre (no intercepted phone calls here) but still managed to do something that was far more interesting than bland background tinkling without doing anything to frighten the horses.

The festival closer was a screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Soviet agitprop piece Battleship Potemkin shown on the back of a tug in the harbour and accompanied by a live soundtrack by Paris’s Zombie Zombie duo (best known for their interpretations of John Carpenter’s fim music). The idea of showing a film about a ship on the back of a boat was genius in its simplicity and it worked really well, with maybe a couple of hundred souls gathered around the harbour’s edge to watch. Like The Man With a Movie Camera and Metropolis, Potemkin is one of a handful of classic silents that seems to have a real pull for musicians. The Pet Shop Boys did a fairly spectacular rendition a few years back. That was more like Socialist Realism meets disco. Zombie Zombie opted for a much more organic and subtle accompaniment that encompassed acoustic, electronic and musique concrète elements. They were especially good with the climactic final reel when the tension ratchets up as the battleship under its crew of mutinous revolutionaries encounters the Imperial Navy.

Roy Book Binder is a veteran blues guitarist and singer who continues to fly the flag for the pre-electric country bluesmen. Although he’s hardly a household name, his CV is mightily impressive. He was among the second wave of singer/guitarists who arrived in Greenwich Village after the initial brouhaha had died down and the likes of Dylan had moved on, but where Dave Van Ronk and others continued the tradition of old time American folk and blues. He played extensively with legends such as the Rev. Gary Davis and Pink Anderson, and continues to this day as a proselytizer for the music of folk such as Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt and many others of that era, some of whom are largely forgotten now. His show in an old church hall in St Helier was an informal affair of songs and stories both fascinating and funny, with a mix of original tunes in the old style and dusty classics both familiar and forgotten. His singing is functional and his playing a little rough round the edges, but this was a hugely entertaining portal into a forgotten world. He made the telling comment that him and guys like John Hammond Jr and Jorma Kaukonen are older now than most of the grizzled old country-blues veterans were when they were rediscovered in the sixties. It was a privilege and a pleasure to see this link to a long lost world.

Gig: TINDERSTICKS (Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh 22/3/10)

Nearly eighteen months on from a superlative show at Glasgow’s City Halls, Tindersticks were back in Scotland, albeit at the other end of the M8. It’s been years since I’ve been at the Queen’s Hall. It’s smaller than I remembered, and a little on the shabby side, but has a good reputation for acoustics, one that’s deserved.

At the Glasgow show, the front end of the set was loaded with selections from the (then) new album, The Hungry Saw. What had at first seemed a collection of a handful of great songs and its fair share of filler came to life in spectacular fashion. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Falling Down a Mountain, and the weakness of the material just couldn’t be covered up, no matter how much heart and soul the band put into it. A glistening Marbles stood out head and shoulders above the rest in a first half dominated by new songs.

The older stuff was superb. City Sickness was dusted off, and Can We Start Again was transformed into something akin to Gospel. It was good that the band revisited different material from their past to the stuff they showcased at Glasgow – in fact, with the near absence of anything from The Hungry Saw, there can’t have been more than a couple of songs at the most (possibly none) that they played at both shows.

As a live act, Tindersticks are a band at the top of their game. As far as new material goes, though, they seem to be in a bit of a dry patch. But they have a rich back catalogue that would be the envy of most bands.