Review: Blackbird Ensemble presents THE NIGHT SKY

Claire Cowan: director, keys, vox
Alex Taylor: lead vocal, tenor sax, percussion;
Jessie Cassin: lead vocal;
Samantha Dench: flute, piccolo; Ina Patisolo: oboe, cor anglais, percussion; Kenny Keppel: clarinet, bass clarinet; Callum Passels: alto sax; Liz Stokes: trumpet,  flugelhorn; Henry Swanson: horn; Kevin Keys: trombone, rap; Francesca McGeorge: trombone, percussion; Samuel Taylor: electric guitar; Sam Rich: percussion; Andrew Rooney: drums; Charmian Keay, Jenny Chen, Siobhan Thompson: violin 1, Leith McFarlane, Kim Choe: violin 2; Alex MacDonald: viola; Callum Hall: cello; Eric Scholes: bass, Mark Michel: electronics.

Galatos, Galatos street
Review by Celeste Oram

Apparently, radio waves keep beaming outwards from earth into space, travelling more or less at the speed of light. If this is the case, The XX has got as far as Alpha Centurai, our closest stellar neighbour. Sirius has for a few years now been tripping to Portishead. Ziggy Stardust has just about reached Ursa Major. In fact, earlier this year the Hubble Telescope spied a pair of “super-Earth-type” planets 40 light years away. These twin planets would have just started succumbing to Bowie-mania. By the time we humans get our act together and make our mass inter-stellar exodus, fortunately, the entire David Bowie back-catalogue should have arrived at GJ 436b and GJ 1214b. Which is just as well, because a planet without Bowie is not a planet worth living on.

Should aliens happen to have in their possession super-powerfully-tuned radio receivers, have been intercepting the leftover radio waves from 70s and 80s space-kitsch pop music (and the later 90s space-stalgia), formed an interplanetary orchestra to cover those songs, and hologrammed them back to earth, it would look and sound like The Blackbird Ensemble’s recent show, ‘The Night Sky’: which re-calibrates these songs as newly strange, newly beautiful.

However, it would not be altogether fair or accurate to call Blackbird a covers band. Yes, they play songs that once had incarnations as songs by the National, or Portishead, or R.E.M.. But Blackbird don’t sound like they’re playing someone else’s music. Director and arranger Claire Cowan knows what it is to get under the skin of a song and renovate it from the inside out. They know that, to their audience, these songs are little houses where their hearts once lived. The Blackbird Ensemble moves into those houses, makes themselves at home, and then throws an ecstatic party.

The Blackbird experience is the whole live music experience; it acknowledges that the impact of a performance depends on what people see and feel as much as what they hear. At this ‘Night Sky’ gig—as they did at other two Blackbird gigs I’ve caught—the whole venue is transformed into an expectant vessel for magic. In the black-walled Galatos Ballroom, white mesh floated from the ceiling and on the stage’s back cyc, upon which video artist Joseph Michael’s digital starscapes beamed and flickered. Then, to the summoning sounds of synths, the ensemble (flute, oboe, clarinet, 2 saxes, trumpet, french horn, 2 trombones, electric guitar, drums, percussion, Cowan on keys, 5 violins, viola, cello, bass, and electronics) silently invades the stage and plays a cinematic overture/mash-up of Holst’s ‘Jupiter’ before moving onto the set list of songs radiating closer to our solar system. The ensemble never talks to us – seldom even a ‘thank-you’; they communicate rather through a kind of musical telepathy.

Another hallmark of Blackbird gigs are the wild costumes and facepaint that transform the musicians into the edgy, ethereal shamans of their ancient tribal counterparts. Though I interact frequently with many of the players IRL, somehow, whenever they take to the stage at a Blackbird gig, I don’t quite recognize them as themselves. The costumes are where the ‘blackbird’ part of their name perhaps rings most true; they’re made from bits and pieces from here and there – but lovingly strung together within a strong visual aesthetic: which, for ‘The Night Sky’, was the best kind of space-kitsch – flagrantly theatrical, and highly individualised. Austerely-clad in black tulle, Liz Stokes—whose trumpet solos burbled warmly throughout the show—was a kind of Odile/evil twin of Jessie Cassin, who floated Princess Leia-like in white tulle. Singer/saxophonist Alex Taylor radiated in gold lamé; Charmian Keay’s fluoro supernova-spangled tunic matched her radioactive-green electric violin.

The strongest numbers of the night were those captained by the Ensemble’s superb two vocalists, Jessie Cassin and Alex Taylor, whose voices are real, warm, and human. The evening changed gear from awesome to mind-blowing as soon as the set list reached their rendition of Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland’ – also owing to Samantha Dench’s liquid crystal flute playing. Jessie’s stunning voice is halfway between a child and a high priestess; in the final numbers, her soulful belting tending strongly towards the latter. Alex has a smouldering swagger, his voice a gravelly velvet.

The ensemble’s teaser-finale (before they were roared back onstage for an encore), Nick Cave‘s ‘Push the Sky Away’, was heartbreakingly beautiful, almost liturgical, as Jessie and Alex repeated “you’ve got it, just keep on pushing the sky away…” while the players drifted off the stage. But Blackbird know how to have criminal amounts of fun too: earlier in the night, trombonist Kevin Keys escaped from the brass section’s naughty corner to rip it up on the microphone with some intergalactic planetary rap (courtesy of the Beastie Boys).

                                                                                            

The show’s decadence tempts me to keep writing with such baroque language. But you know what – I’m just going to leave it at this: the gig was really MOVING, pure and simple.

It’s seldom fair to compare things. But… comparing this gig to Blackbird gigs past, there wasn’t as strong a narrative arc/continuity as in their ‘Dunio Elegies’ show a few years back. ‘The Night Sky’ had some continuity between songs in the form of disembodied, spacey voices and synths, but that’s never going have the same impact as Oliver Driver reading Rilke. Their “By The Sea” gig for last year’s White Night felt more like a collection of songs – which also worked a treat in its simplicity. But ‘The Night Sky’ felt like a cross between the two approaches: not quiiiite enough continuity to feel like a through-composed show (although the set list was carefully crafted). Also, the Holst arrangements would have had even more zing had Claire Cowan let her fertile arranger’s imagination run wilder still, comprehensively re-inventing the music rather than presenting a roll-call of famous tunes.

From the outside, the Blackbird Ensemble might look like one of those ‘saving classical music’ campaigns: hot young classically-trained things let their hair down. Before the show, I wondered whether the audience would suffer any anxiety of taxonomy: is this a classical gig or a pop gig? Conflicting evidence arose. The venue was on a dodgy K Rd back street; we had to queue up outside to get through the door; but then we were given nicely typeset programmes as we walked in. There were chairs in tidy rows! At Galatos?! But the bar was heaving and people milled of their own free will, spilling up the stairs and crouching on the floor.

The truth is, those classical vs. pop hang-ups were irrelevant. There was absolutely no awkwardness of etiquette. The packed audience knew intuitively when to quieten down (but didn’t police silence militantly – you want to be able to laugh to your friend or sing along at a gig like this), and when to clap (and clap and cheer uproariously they did). Blackbird doesn’t care what’s this music and what’s that music, what’s ‘concert hall’ music or what’s ‘gig’ music. ‘Eclecticism’ only happens when there’s discomfort at borders. The players onstage, unfazed by morphing from Holst to rap, thriving on thresholds, had none of that. None of the creakiness of trying to get ‘classical musicians’ to groove: because, for them—like for most people who get their music not from record stores divided into genres, but from a deeper, denser field (i.e. the internet)—music is just music.

It would be easy to say, “give these guys a stadium gig or a massive outdoor arena”. They have the sound, the ambition, and the stage presence to fill it. But then, Blackbird’s magic is in being with you at close quarters. Sure, the sound mix is a little muddy – near-unavoidable when you put 23 musos in a black shoebox. Sure, a tarted-up sound system might make the strings sound a little less pinched and grainy, and balance everything out to the point of unremarkableness – but I’d rather hear real instruments than a crystalline studio rendering. This is not to say that Blackbird indulge in that trendy kind of rough-around-the-edginess. They are tight. But their sound is so live that you can hear that tightness.

And the venue needed the threat of bursting at the seams, the sense of this being the party at the end of the universe. At every gig, Blackbird turn their stage into a Tardis, fitting in inconceivably many people plus their instruments. Some of the best moments were when the music dropped down a notch, allowing the majority of the band to lower their instruments: and they all involuntarily, subconsciously, telepathically, began to bop. Like an organism, or legs of a jellyfish – their music-stand lights bobbing like alien anglerfishes’ little phosphorous lanterns. It would also be easy to say “these guys need to record an album”. But Blackbird are also onto something in their insistence on the liveness of music. Music is not just a freely downloadable commodity; it cannot be held in the hand or the hard drive. It necessitates a communion of musicians, an audience, and an atmosphere. And that is the Blackbird Experience.

Review: Karlheinz Company "Composing Now" - Alex Taylor

University of Auckland Music Theatre, Auckland, 8pm 12 April 2014

featuring works by Chris Cree Brown, Helen Bowater, Samuel Holloway, Chris Watson, Jason Post, Celeste Oram and Louise Webster
performed by Jennifer Maybee (soprano), Luca Manghi (flute), Melody Lin (flute/piccolo), Alison Dunlop (oboe), Andrew Uren (clarinets), William Hanfling (violin), Charmian Keay (violin), Alex MacDonald (viola), Paul Mitchell (cello), Gemma Lee (piano), Dean Sky-Lucas (piano), Eddie Giffney (piano), Kento Isomura (piano/synthesizer), Jonathan Cruz (electronics), Samuel Girling (percussion)

conducted by John Elmsly
artistic direction by John Elmsly assisted by Samuel Holloway

review by Alex Taylor

Having entertained, challenged and bewildered an Auckland public for almost four decades, the Karlheinz Company is an important institution in the new music scene. It has nurtured generations of talented composers, and it is heartening that it continues to do so after all this time. Saturday night’s concert was curated by John Elmsly and Samuel Holloway as part of the CANZ Composers Conference, Composing Now. What could have easily turned into a representative roll-call of known names was instead a refreshingly youthful lineup, punctuated by contributions from older mavericks. The sensitive curation allowed common threads to emerge, and perhaps nudged at a reassessment of the New Zealand canon, such as it is.

Opening the concert, Chris Cree Brown’s electroacoustic work No Ordinary Sun was as tactile as it was apocalyptic, immersing its audience in massive creaking torrents. These huge outbursts were set into relief by hyper-crystalline birdsong; everything about this work felt more brilliant, more acute than reality. But Hone Tuwhare’s voice was the hero of the piece, poignant in laborious, breathy baritone, giving the tree’s last rites: “O tree / in the shadowless mountains / the white plains and / the drab sea floor / your end at last is written.” As powerful as the poem is as text, it was the sound of Tuwhare’s recitation as it was captured here, intimate and ominous, that lifted us into the transcendental.

After the terrifying surround sound of No Ordinary Sun, Rangitoto, a solo piano work by Helen Bowater, felt relatively conventional in its forces. But the piano was put through a rigorous workout by virtuoso Gemma Lee, who navigated the work’s jagged ascents with precision and vigour. At times the relentless, Sisyphean motion was exhausting on the ear, but the residues of that physical toil provided space and allowed the harmonic saturation to dissipate periodically.

Samuel Holloway’s Hard Science was not what I expected. Having heard many different accounts of a recent performance of Things by 175 East, I was quite ready to feel uncomfortable, to have my attention stretched, to be confronted with my own tastes. Instead of the flat, neutral, singular objects that were described to me as being component parts of Things, Hard Science was bright, clean, colourful. The timbral combinations were too interesting, the formal skeleton too beautifully adorned, rippling with low piccolo and synthesizer, the voice leading too distinctive. This sensuality was surprising, and a very long way from the ruthless abstraction of Things.

Brought to life with an impressive lightness of touch by flutist Luca Manghi and pianist Dean Sky-Lucas, Orbicularis by Chris Watson explored the explosion of a single melodic line. Occupying a chiefly treble register, the work bent and flurried, both instruments dovetailing and punctuating each other’s material with witty interjections and non sequiturs. The title of the work comes from a facial muscle used in playing woodwind instruments, orbicularis oris. Watson has written another woodwind work, Mandible, which shares an interest in facial musculature. I couldn’t help but ponder that the incredible complexity of those muscles and the myriad expressions they produce seems in a sense analogous to Chris Watson’s music: intimidatingly intricate, but also emotionally rich.

After interval Jason Post’s Cataphora hinted at a much longer form: the almost hypnotically repetitive piano chords were gone all too quickly, and the piece ended just as it had begun to demand something of its listener. Although the performance felt rather rushed, there were tantalising glimpses of something more fragmentary and challenging.

As with Hard Science, I had expectations of Mirror & Echo by Celeste Oram: something theatrical, something readjusting our perspective of music performance. Oram has been building a substantial catalogue of music-as-performance-art; her Eye Music featured in a concert the night before, a whimsical setting of a sign-language poem. Mirror & Echo was both more conceptually ambitious and less sonically diverse; two temporarily deafened string players copying each other by sight, with a temporarily blinded percussionist reacting spontaneously to the sounds they produced. I felt that while the conceit was initially very striking, it produced a somewhat predictably periodic musical result. Nevertheless the frame of ostensibly free improvisation provided space for exploration and error from the hearing percussionist: it was Samuel Girling’s earnest, haphazard but highly virtuosic attempts at feeling his way round his instruments that gave the work life. While the visual tunnel left violinist Charmian Keay and violist Alex MacDonald somewhat ritualistically hamstrung, the aural tunnel allowed Girling to shine, shadowing and disrupting the foregrounded visual argument with brave sensitivity.   

Unlike the other large ensemble works on the programme (Holloway’s and Post’s), Louise Webster’s Grief of a Girl’s Heart was a platform for expressive virtuosity. All five performers, conducted by Karlheinz director John Elmsly, fed into an ornately crafted world tinged with nostalgic modal harmonies. Alison Dunlop’s lilting oboe was particularly charismatic. The narrative was driven with a dark swagger, cutting right to the heart of the promise and desolation of love. But it was soprano Jennifer Maybee who most compellingly projected the crushing weight of grief, and an underlying pathos that made Webster’s composition gleam so brightly in a stellar line-up of New Zealand works.  

With so many performers lending their talents here, it is impossible to adequately discuss their offerings, but they all deserve credit for focused and precise realisations of some very difficult works. In some ways it was a shame to have fifteen performers in a concert whose largest works were sextets; the use of performers was uneconomical, even profligate. It is a personal preference, but to me chamber music is at its most intimate and cohesive when it recognises the diversity and synthesis of a small group.

I also felt there was a certain obliqueness to the works in the middle of the programme – Samuel Holloway, Chris Watson, Jason Post, Celeste Oram – that needed its own space. Bookended by works that were more transparent, and more emotionally directive, these harder-edged compositions sat most comfortably in one another’s company. Nevertheless, there was something cleansing about Holloway’s Hard Science after so much urgent struggle in Rangitoto, and perhaps the former work even cast the latter in a slightly impressionistic light. Conversely, the gestural terseness of Oram’s Mirror & Echo was followed up by emotional saturation in Grief of a Girl’s Heart – for me at least, this withholding and fulfilling of emotional expectation was adroitly judged in the programme as a whole. The Karlheinz Company can be justifiably proud of their seminal contribution to New Zealand’s musical life. 

Review: Intrepid Music Project presents New Blood - Jonathan Mandeno

Kerr Street Artspace, Auckland, 8pm 11 April 2014

featuring works by Glen Downie, Nelson Lam, Celeste Oram, Salina Fisher, Alex Wolken, Callum Blackmore, David Grahame and Reuben Jelleyman
performed by Sam Rich (percussion), Kenny Keppel (clarinets), Alex MacDonald (viola), David Framil Carpeno (accordion), Eric Scholes (bass), Peau Halapua (violin)

conducted by Alex Taylor
artistic direction by Alex Taylor

review by Jonathan Mandeno

The Intrepid Music Project is quickly building a fine track record of vibrant and challenging concerts. This one was no different and surely the most ambitious to date, with no fewer than eight brand new works by talented young New Zealand composers.

Opening the concert on a freewheeling high was Glen Downie’s Jive for Giuffre.  The spirit of the influential jazzman’s freestyle playing waxed strong in the piece’s pulse.  Keppel’s clarinet and Scholes’s walking bass engaged in nimble pointillistic and improvisatory exchanges, navigating their way through and around a thick weave of polyrhythms from Rich’s drum kit.  Every so often the players found themselves on islands of stasis amid the rhythm; brief moments of pensiveness shared before diving back in to the fray.  A short but convivial tribute.

Nelson Lam next provided a moody contrast with two short movements.  A sense of ancientness hung heavily around the opening of spectra, violin winding itself around a dark viola drone in tight intervallic knots.  Here Halapua managed to make her violin appear to sob in harsh lament.  Recoil was thorny and tense, with spikey dissonant passages working themselves up into wailing glissandi.

Much of Celeste Oram’s recent work has shown itself to be heavily conceptual – an interdisciplinary synthesis of sound, movement and visuals.  Eye music audaciously subverted one’s expectation of a concert by (momentarily) doing away with the sound part altogether.  Appropriate when considering that it was a setting of a poem of the same name in American Sign Language by Ella Mae Lentz, who in turn subverted perceptions of music itself by drawing attention to the visual side of performance.  This performance consisted of multiple iterations of the same piece.  Sam Rich began standing to one side of a sizable percussion station, sticks crossed as Mae Lentz recited her poem on a projection behind.  For the next reading he began miming on an invisible setup identical to the one on his left.  The choreography was focussed and meditative, with a visual finesse that created an effective dialogue with the sign language.  For the next two iterations Rich moved to his material station and repeated the routine, this time with sound, and finally sound minus image.  Although the many sonorities were highly imaginative, I found myself feeling strangely let down by sound suddenly being pushed into the alchemy.  Was it an attempt to cover all the bases?  A concession on Oram’s part to give the non-deaf audience some music in the manner to which they are accustomed?  In spite of the undeniable intrepidness of the work, I was left wondering if it had betrayed its own argument that music can exist for the eyes alone.

Salina Fisher’s Komorebi created an effective evocation of ‘sunlight filtered through the leaves of trees’ that the Japanese word refers to.  Rich provided an iridescent vibraphone backdrop, tones piling up to create a dense foliage or sonic richness that the clear, lyrical tones of Fisher’s violin pierced through.  The music could have benefited from some relief of the higher frequencies, and a polite little wrapping up by the vibraphone at the end seemed a tad trite, but overall it was a sensuously beautiful duet.

Like the concert opener, Alex Wolken’s quartet also seemed to evoke a jazz scene, helped by virtue of its instrumentation of bass clarinet, accordion, vibraphone and electric bass.  However that is where similarities to Downie’s work ended.  This was dark and gritty, a smoky jazz club seen through an opium haze.  Each chord was a languorous sigh, the creeping threads slowly sliding tautly around each other.  These were interrupted by rude stabs from the accordion, adding an unsettling jolt to the hallucinatory atmosphere.

Callum Blackmore’s Unsavoury Liaisons was conceived as homage to Stockhausen’s Licht opera cycle.  However it seemed to be as much a playful sendup as it was a veneration, taking the grandiloquent pretensions of the original 29 hour behemoth of angels and demons and applying it to the most mundane of characters and actions in a mere 12 minutes.  With a blast from a tam-tam, the audience was antiphonally surrounded with a frenzied jumble of musical cells, vocalisations and activities.  Electric toothbrushes amplified their drones on tom-tom skins while Keppel laughed manically through both clarinet and vocal chords, while applying body spray liberally.  Newspapers rustled as Rich chopped vegetables, then proceeded to feign choking on an apple.  The straight-faced performance along with the pomposity of proclaiming the arrival of each new movement helped elevate the chaos to a statement of gleefully sublime absurdity.

David Grahame provided a more contemplative observation of reality with still life.  Clarinet and viola moved together through slowly evolving chord progressions, carefully balanced dissonances providing suspensions into nostalgic triadic suggestions.  A tiny flutter of movement in the middle of the piece gave a hint of something alive, trapped inside.  The overall effect was that of a faded photograph of some dusty, long-forgotten idyll.

Rounding off the evening Reuben Jelleyman presented a work in two parts of the “In Nomine” tradition (a 16^th century English practice of composers working a plainchant melody by John Taverner into varied instrumental settings).  In Nomine à 5 II, for 6 was Jelleyman’s setting of such a work by Tudor composer Nicholas Strogers.   It was a unique experience to hear antique polyphony emanate from an eclectic modern ensemble, with the added challenge of there being six players but only five parts.  Jelleyman’s response was to allow players the freedom to move between parts in the counterpoint, adding yet more aural variation to the mix. 

In Nomine, Gloria Tibi Spiritus was Jelleyman’s own In Nomine setting of Taverner.  As a depiction of the Holy Spirit, the counterpoint before long began to fragment and disintegrate, coalescing again into abbreviations on a micro-gestural scale to the point of near-imperceptibility.  To me I thought that this fraying occurred too quickly, causing my grasp on the material to slip before I could adjust and fully appreciate the intricacies of the piece’s process. 

Finally, credit must duly go to the wonderful players, who tackled a bewildering variety of pieces and performance styles with equal parts gusto and diligence.  And very special mention must be made of director/conductor Alex Taylor.  Not only did he pull off the gargantuan effort of corralling eight works and six players into an incredibly convincing performance with nary a visible hiccup, but the programming was also some of the most sensitive I’ve ever seen in any concert.  Each piece was placed to be the perfect complement/antidote to the last.  After this concert I am convinced that Intrepid Music is a fundamental “next step” in the landscape of New Zealand music.  It’s a torch that we must keep burning.

Review: Intrepid Music Project presents New Blood - Chris Holdaway

Kerr Street Artspace, Auckland, 8pm 11 April 2014

featuring works by Glen Downie, Nelson Lam, Celeste Oram, Salina Fisher, Alex Wolken, Callum Blackmore, David Grahame and Reuben Jelleyman
performed by Sam Rich (percussion), Kenny Keppel (clarinets), Alex MacDonald (viola), David Framil Carpeno (accordion), Eric Scholes (bass), Peau Halapua (violin)

conducted by Alex Taylor
artistic direction by Alex Taylor

review by Chris Holdaway

Alex Taylor’s Intrepid Music Project series of new music concerts has operated out of Devonport’s Kerr St Artspace for some time now.  He’s developed a rotating cast of preeminent musicians, themselves intrepid enough to tangle with composers intent on creating great music, often well beyond conventional experience—not always an easy task in the world of the classically trained.  I understand the April 11 concert was something of a ‘fringe’ event to the Composers’ Association of New Zealand conference running during the weekend.  It also happened to be the most compelling show of contemporary music in my recent Auckland-based memory.

Every work was superlative in some aspect.  Each contributed to the concert waxing in a way that was—in various combinations at varying times—both wonderfully reckless and luminously crafted.  And I felt like there was a lot of music on this particular evening.  One had only to walk into the hall—perched on the side of Mount Victoria with its open rafters—to get an oozing sense of laboratory madness from the plethora of instruments lurking in all corners.  Like stumbling upon a weapons cache, which, with the North Head fortress just up the road, didn’t necessarily seem all that implausible.  Destruction ne’er too far from creation & all that.

8 works were programmed, for the most part occupying that ‘sweet spot’ of 5 to 10 minutes.  As a poet, this has always seemed to me a tough parameter of necessity for such outings.  We generally understand music as a broadly temporal art, one not necessarily as suited to aphoristic scales as text; one that takes time to unfold and work itself out.  So writing short music is hard; to not feel like it moves on too quickly, but still to ‘do’ something.  The way I have found myself thinking about a lot of the works in retrospect focuses on how they operated in a locative sense, taking that time frame as setting up a particular kind of space, Euclidean or non-Euclidean as the case may have been.  The way their vectors traversed is often what distinguished them for me in terms of scope.

This is true of Glen Downie’s Jive for Giuffre, which opened the concert.  Set up like a trio of the kind that inspired it (clarinet, upright bass, drum kit), I was interested in how the musicians navigated in a manner not immediately obvious, or familiar, to such a system.  Improvisation as an ideal always hints at the group mind in terms of psychology; the ‘all-over’ in aesthetics.  Not that it has to be synonymous with ‘improvisation’, but a lot of jazz music is constructed around individualist solos cutting through the web.  You could hear Glen’s musicians sitting back together like the Jimmy Giuffre 3 did in the 60s albums, to explore a more tempered, less abrasive mode of free jazz.  I was most impressed by percussionist Sam Rich, who, even when playing continuous figures in driving sections, never felt like a ‘drummer’ at a kit laying down ‘riffs’.  The best moments saw the percussion suddenly suck the other two instruments in underneath its dress, or spill like a liquid to occupy every crevice, but there was enough trading & separation so that you really noticed this happening.

I felt similarly about Alex Wolken’s quartet at the end of the first half, which presented the curious assemblage of sharp-edged accordion amidst more wholly mellow timbres (bass clarinet, electric bass, vibraphone).  The accordion’s sound is always excessive; endlessly on the verge of splintering into a thousand pieces.  Yet there’s also a deep, almost geological, drive in the background pulmonics.  If it seemed like the majority were working to take the edge off the accordion, to strip it back to its base, the most captivating experiences were brief revolts into the exact opposite, as if the vibraphone’s round tubes were replaced by spears.  Alex’s work was to me the most hamstrung by its brevity.  I really wanted to see how he could work out the network of flood gates & canal locks around the accordion in that instrumentation, and though what was exhibited riveted me, I’m not sure he really got to do that.

Nelson Lam’s two short movements was in some ways one of the more conservative, in terms of an abstract, string-heavy (violin, viola), identifiably contemporary setup—no programme notes offered beyond I. spectra; II. recoil.  But that being neither here nor there, the formal conceit that cropped up for me was the most interesting of the night; a question of timescales & relative perspective.  Long drones of the 2 instruments shifting over one another recalled for me similar figures frequently used by Steve Reich (particularly in Eight Lines), but isolated from any wider context.  Then, marked by more frantic passages, instead of temporal movement through a sequence, I had a distinct feeling of being projected in and out to view essentially the same structures from different ‘distances’.  The notes are this long only because that’s how close you are to them right now.

A similar duo setup existed for David Grahame’s still life (clarinet, viola), and was probably the concert’s most cohesive and stable piece.  While Nelson’s choice of individual notes came across as more complex, David’s work I think offered more guts by remaining, not necessarily feeling forced or obliged to go anywhere else.  The form of slowly offering successive tableaux of harmony may not be anything radical, but the particular tensions in gaps between snapshots here were able to show, or at least hint at, something beyond itself, without needing to explicitly tell of it, appealing to this reviewer’s particular taste for music that doesn’t require any great telos.  It filled out ideally into its own timeframe.

Celeste Oram’s eye music featured Sam Rich on percussion, alongside a video projection of Ella Mae Lentz performing her American Sign Language (ASL) poem of the same title.  To be clear, this is a poem native to ASL, not one that has been translated from a language of the hearing.  And so Celeste grapples with how traditions of setting text to music may or may not cope under a new strain.  Sam begins away from his percussion station, mallets in hand, playing the air, and obviously mirroring some manual sign actions from the video.  The on-screen poem ends.  He moves into the percussion station.  And it then plays again, mallets this time meeting vibes & blocks instead of air.  It was not until this point that I realised the first section was not just miming playing in general, but miming the exact sequence of actions to be performed on the instruments.  A third section sees musician play without accompanying video.  Thanks to complexity of both underlying concept & practical setup, this work was less seamless or polished than most of the others, but that is in many ways what set it apart, and may in fact have been crucial to its goal.  The silence during the opening mime sequence was a physical weight, like humid air.  You could feel Sam struggling, his movements incomplete, partially because he’s a percussionist, not a dancer (that I know of), but more that he’s forced to ‘speak’ without the apparatus that normally allows for ‘speech’.  Struggling as the hearing struggle to relate to the deaf, as the deaf struggle to simply live in a world that refuses to be built for them.

Interval was chased up by Callum Blackmore’s dramatic Unsavoury Liaisons, an homage to Stockhausen’s Licht opera cycle, reportedly swapping the “divine exchanges” of angels for the “mundane interactions” of the everyday.  Filing back into seats, the hall becomes suddenly set ‘in-the-round’, but ensemble rather than audience are at the periphery: percussion in front, accordion right, clarinet behind, conductor left.  Hemmed in, the audience is subject to an onslaught on all fronts, most noticeably from the conductor’s threateningly frantic gestures, & an accordion that seemed to conceal the power of a full orchestral string section.  Initially it feels like the composer’s theatrical scrutiny is on the audience, as the musicians do seem to just ‘play’ through the first Invocation section, and I can’t help but watch for those who try to defend themselves out of discomfort.  That is until the respective ‘solos’, where antics from opposing stations threaten to entirely derail focus.  For Accordion Solo, clarinet downs instrument to manically jump up, down, yell, spray deodorant on himself.  First, there’s the pressure of a terrified vanity in vulgar scented Lynx™, but also likely an obsessive hypochondria, especially in the viable parity with bug spray.  And so the two complexes become one another.  During Percussion Solo, accordion cackles apocalyptically, shredding newspaper over the instrument’s frame.  In Clarinet Solo, percussion first slices up a carrot, before choking on a bite of apple.  Coming to, he jumps in circles on the spot, feverishly counting, as if that’s what it takes to recover from the apple, or to escape from the nightmare.  All the while clarinet tries to noodle on.  It was completely wild, completely wonderful.  If I have one criticism, it is that the newspaper & carrot actions as actions as such were a bit ‘easy’; a bit Hmm, domestic…Oh! I know!  However, the absorption of these archetypes—complete with colander percussion—into a structure labelled by contextually absurd “invocation”, “tutti”, “coda”, produced a chiasmic projection of the crisis of the everyday as the crisis of existence, and the crisis of existence playing out every day.  I wouldn’t say he completely dispensed with the angels, however.  The Coda, with its delicate bow on bells, & empty accordion breath, gives the impression of suddenly looking upon the same scene from a vast, cosmic distance.  As if Mars were watching the battle.

The night’s final slot was taken by Reuben Jellyman’s pair of In Nomine à 5 II (violin, viola, clarinet, accordion, double bass, percussion), a reworking for six musicians of Nicholas Strogers’ original for five, and In Nomine, Gloria Tibi Spiritus (same except bass clarinet)—the most intellectual exercises of the evening.  The first piece reconfigures the 16^th Century counterpoint towards having more requisite parts than available musicians, demanding increasing sideways mobility from players as it develops.  The steady pulse familiar to polyphonic music from that era remains, but shifting layers & timbres, as instruments manoeuvre into other pockets of the counterpoint, significantly dislocate the music from its time, into the uncanny space where something long-familiar now seems newly odd.  The second piece was of the composer’s own devising, driving the same In Nomine tradition towards a more explicitly contemporary end.  Extended techniques on the strings, & dry breath from the accordion & clarinet make sure of this.  In retrospect I find myself leaning towards the first, where the mismatch between deep source & actual realisation was more subtle; where you could only just feel things starting to change, rather than existing in a more stable zone already well-altered and becoming geologically solidified.  The accordion is an intriguingly odd timbre for music of that texture, and once again Sam Rich was heroic on percussion, his station allowing him to be fully immersed in the counterpoint, not just with the coded pitches on his vibes, but the complete array of his weaponry.

It should be apparent by now, but while all performers were outstanding, Sam Rich deserves a gallantry award for his efforts.  He featured in all but 2 pieces, and was made to leap through fiery dramatic hoops far beyond the job description.  But don’t think that this could do anything to diminish the inspiration of his ‘regular’ playing; an artistry of utilising different mallet weights & bows to have the vibraphone fully articulate variously suspended waterfalls of sound, perhaps mostly notably in Salina Fisher’s meditative painting Komorebi, a singular Japanese term that translates into English as something akin to ‘light that filters through trees’.  As a matter of personal taste, I have never been one to easily accept such uncomplicatedly sweet mediation of ‘beauty’ in nature; to expose only a very narrow view—a vein of naivety that is too easily weak…  I am interested in the grace of a system insofar as that is not the sole property of said system.  However, the programme notes state the piece as a response to the word.  So perhaps there is reason to argue that the extension is not at play here, rather, we explore a more heavenly realm of purely intensional semantics.  The constancy of high frequencies, & fullness of the vibe tone certainly could serve to abstract.

With its balance of wilderness & polish, & just the general tone of setup & proceedings, this concert confirmed emphatically the Intrepid Music Project’s cardinal place more than any other event in the series that I have been to (and I think I’ve been to all of them).  Musicians, composers, & convener are all to be commended.  Let’s do it again sometime.