Of all the things which vanished beneath the influx of Coronavirus in March, live music is the one I miss most of all. In the warmer months I can do without the stuffy interiors of London's pubs, to say nothing of their elevated prices and near ubiquitous bad taste in piped music. In the 90s and early 2000s London was awash with what used to be called "stand-up drinking" bars. An apt description for bare rooms blasting out bottom drawer House and Garage as a soundtrack to high speed alcopop and cheap lager abuse.
The premise was simple and still holds true, that if you deprive the punter of their capacity for discourse - principally somewhere to sit and the ability to converse with others without spittling directly into their ears - then they tend to fall back onto swigging whatever beverage they happen to be holding. This greatly increases both the house's revenue and work for the door staff and local constabulary. Those days are largely gone from the London area, but the tendency for pubs and bars to pump out garbage from their licensed speaker systems has sadly remained. Hence my frustration at the prospect of yet more months deprived of London's live music scene.
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| London's Astoria just prior to demolition |
The shutdown came at a time when I was spending more of my unlaboured hours at London's music venues than ever before, with 2019 having been an especially memorable year for shows. Many of the city's larger and medium sized venues have gone the way of the dodo over the last 20 years, with rapacious developers, Crossrail and general mismanagement being the main causes. Of particular regret was the loss of the Astoria on the Charing Cross Road where I enjoyed many a sweaty night during the late 90s and early 2000s, watching bands like Pitchshifter, Katatonia and emo-cybergoth darlings VNV Nation. I'd never really enjoyed arena gigs, the sound always being such a disappointment. Repurposed warehouses like the thankfully demolished Docklands Arena and the O2 Arena (housed in Tony Blair's Great White Elephant the Millennium Dome) are little more than airy placeholders around which cluster the usual dour set of main-street eateries and overpriced corporate booze vendors.
It was only last year that I had my first experience of the latter as a venue for live music, having never before had occasion to fork out the entry price for an uncomfortable seat up in the Gods of the O2. Massive Attack's reprise of their truly classic album Mezzanine was what had me trekking round Greenwich Peninsular that mild February evening, past the concrete factory and recycling centre. And then, emerging out of the gloom, in the midst of all that dust and grime is a driving range, floodlights glaring out across the Thames towards Canary Wharf. Coming across its high boundary fence rising into the dark winter sky was most disorientating. This is an area which symbolises the piecemeal way much of the East of London has been developed over the last few decades. During the 19th and much of the 20th century it was home to the Capital's heavy industry, including an asbestos plant and Europe's largest gas works.
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| The O2 Arena |
The opening of the Blackwall tunnel in 1897 connected the by then heavily contaminated soil of Bugsby's marshes with the docks on the north side of the Thames. Even with the arrival of the London Underground in 1999 it still has the feel of an isolated place to me, somewhere you put things out of way. Massive Attack's set, 150 yards ahead and below my position was a fug of incomprehensible bass and juddering percussion. All the finely crafted dynamics of their dark dub-rock masterpiece were lost in the acoustic illiteracy of that giant tent. Thankfully the shear sonic force needed to fill such large spaces naturally excluded a lot of the music I was getting into in my 20s. By my 30s I naturally tended towards the city's numerous intimate venues.
2019 had started auspiciously with a week-long festival at Cafe Oto dedicated to the music of the late French composer and electronic music pioneer Luc Ferrari. I've written about him before where I talked about his capacity to craft sensual - dare I say sexy - tape compositions, brimming with desire. The four shows I attended in the second week in February took in every facet of Ferrari's oeuvre, from his "anecdotal" tape compositions, scored and improvised instrumental works and some of the wilder examples of his musical imagination. Now, Cafe Oto is one of those places that gets under your skin. It was opened in 2008 by Hamish Dunbar and his partner Keiko Yamamoto and has since then forged a deserved reputation as London's premier venue for experimental and improvised music.
I first started going around 2011, though I have no memory of what I saw on that occasion. What sticks in my mind from that evening was the shock at having boarded a London Overground train at Richmond to step out 45 minutes later at Dalston Kingsland into what looked like another city. This was prior to the shockwave of gentrification emanating from Hoxton and Shoreditch reaching that far up the A10. Whatever it was I saw that evening was the first of countless gigs I've attended at this most cherished of venues. Last year was a record at seventeen visits.
As the name indicates, Oto is a cafe during the day, a single low ceilinged room with no obvious stage, peppered with a few small marble-topped tables and distinctly uncomfortable wooden chairs. At one end is the bar and at the other the sound system, rigged up upon a gantry, hanging from the ceiling, speakers pointing out in three directions above an otherwise unremarkable area of concrete floor. At night the place is transformed. The little tables and chairs are arranged around the ostensible performance area, which can be anywhere in the room, not just between the speakers. Recently they've taken a leaf out of the Boiler Room's book and started having the more dance orientated acts perform at a table in the centre of the space, allowing the audience to surround them. Hiro Kone's set which I saw in November was run this way.
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| Jenny Hval at Cafe Oto 2015 (picture - tim@encosion.com) |
The first night of the Ferrari festival I witnessed had French turntable wizard ErikM deconstructing the late composer's concrete sound archive with help from Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) and Thurston Moore; yes that Thurston Moore, who is apparently a denizen of Stoke Newington and makes the occasional appearance at Oto. He was around all week, owing to his involvement with a large compendium of Ferrari's scores and writing that was being published to coincide with the festival. Based on the recordings I'd heard I'd not expected ErikM's set to be quite so physical. He positively wrestled with his equipment, hurling out jagged fragments of sound like shrapnel. A looped phrase in French is sundered by a distorted slam like a boot on a metal panel. Pieces of incidental field recordings, animals, the rustling of leaves, morsels of glossolalia like half remembered thoughts ricochet between the speakers. Where Scanner chose to frame this hailstorm of sound against a gossamer of ambience, Moore amped it up further, intervening with waves of distortion from his electric guitar.
By far the most unusual and memorable of the four nights I spent that week amid the candlelight and craft beer of Cafe Oto was the third where I saw Aine O'Dwyer & Graham Lambkin perform one of Ferrari's most mysterious compositions, Unheimlich Schon (1971). The subtitle to this work - or is it in fact the score? - asks "how does a young woman breath when her mind is elsewhere?" There must have been something in the water in Paris that year as in 1971 Ferrari also completed Pornologos (of indeterminate duration, for private individuals or groups) for which he produced a score which he admitted was "almost unattainable". He also began work on one of his masterpieces, Danses Organiques (1971-1973) a remarkable expression of erotic power borne through the medium of tape manipulations, which follows two women - as the composer reveals in his notes - who meet for the first time and make love. Something of this erotic tension and mad attempt to fill the often sterile medium of concrete music with desire was present in the performance that night at Cafe Oto.
The realisation of the score of Unheimlich Schon is on the surface remarkably simple. It involves only microphones and a means of generating feedback on the signals they generate. The 1971 recording of the piece released in 1993 by the Metamkine label in France featured a single female voice repeating the title, her voice subjected to the most subtle of electronic manipulations and beneath which - sometimes around or above which - comes the breath which bears the erotic charge. This charge became a explosion in ultra slow motion in the hands of Aine O'Dwyer & Graham Lambkin, who, taking the basic premise, twist and turn this most pared back of performances into a tense shadow play of bodily and linguistic intensities. The key to the realisation was the use the duo made of mobile phones, which connected to each other allowed cunning use of feedback as the phone speakers were moved around the microphones, and when brought into proximity with each other.
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| Luc Ferrari with his wife Brunhild |
A delicate physical balance was on show where the repeated phrase of the title was joined by the question "how does a young woman breath when her mind is elsewhere?" This "elsewhere" was the unnameable void around which the two performers circled, entwining themselves and their equipment into an uncannily beautiful (which is a literal translation of the title) and perfectly poised display of erotic tension, which could actually be heard in the building of layers of controlled feedback between the human voice and its technological mediation. We, the audience sat in silence, voyeurs, captivated by this spectacle taking place a few feet in front of us. This is the magic of live music when experienced at a venue like Cafe Oto, where the intimate proximity between performers and audience can give rise to profound moments when the gap between the two seems to blur.
Dalson has no shortage of independent venues. During the year I visited two others within a few hundred meters of Cafe Oto, different in their own ways but similarly catering for more off the beaten track musical experiences. Evolutionary Arts Hackney (EartH) opened a couple of years ago, taking over the derelict site of the Hackney Savoy Cinema; a sumptuous venue that includes two performance spaces and a kitchen. It was in May that I visited for the first time, passing up through the renovated, modern and rather spartan dining area before emerging out into what was formerly the large cinema auditorium. From the street you'd have no idea that such a gem of a place existed, as the bulk of the building lies behind a discrete entrance on Stoke Newington road flanked by Turkish restaurants and a barber shop.
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| The Necks taking the applause |
Whether or not they agree beforehand some direction for their live performances the result is always a unique and powerful expression of three musicians entirely in tune with each other. Long passages of raga like melodies can be followed by wild percussive interludes, droning improvisations with Abrahams scraping the strings of the piano, or Swanson firmly redirecting the piece with carefully placed interventions with his bass. All of this somehow comes back round to finish, often where they started, with those beautiful phrases from the piano. The acoustics at EartH were divine, and in the decayed splendour of the art deco cinema a different concept of time seemed at work. Moments were stretched or compressed according to the logic of The Necks. A single bass note could last an age, only to be followed by passages so full of musical life that you'd be convinced you were experiencing them at high speed. The distinctly unmodernised interior of EartH only added to the sense of being somewhere else, somewhere better.
A little further East from Cafe Oto, along Dalston Lane and you'll find a very different type of venue. SET Dalston is part of a multifaceted arts and community organisation with sites around the city. Visually it resembles a converted cafe or small restaurant with a performance space to one side. The roster of events is resolutely DIY with nights dedicated to poetry, modern folk, free improvisation and electronic experimentation, often featuring local artists. In October myself and a friend - admittedly "three sheets to the winds" enjoyed the wild sounds of the Chinabot label; a pioneering imprint, who in their own words are attempting to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music. Their roster includes artists based in Thailand, South Korea, India, and China itself, as well as a "digital diaspora community" based in Western countries, combining the sounds of traditional Asian music with European experimental styles.
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| Ohyung |
My memory of the night is a little hazy but the standout act for me was New York based Ohyung who performed an energetic set of noisy trap and synthesizer variants held together by witty socially conscious rapping, often touching on themes of racial injustice and the historical experience of the Asian diaspora in the United States. His track Park Slope is a case in point, with the repeated refrain of "Park Slope moms got black babysitters. Park Slope moms got yellow babysitters", highlighting the cosseted life and double standards of the liberal middle class in one of Brooklyn's most hipster districts. Playing to the crowd he called out for suggestions for a similarly 'BoBo' neighbourhood in London. He seemed surprised that most thought Dalston itself most fit the mould, but he happily swapped out the lyrics as my friend and I listened from a sofa in a darkened corner, close to where an upright piano had been stored out of sight beneath a black sheet. At some point during his set I began accompanying Ohyung with a few hammered low notes from out of the dark. The craft beer flows in these places.
I'd originally been turned onto Chinabot after researching around the work of Lawrence Lek, the filmmaker and multimedia artist whose remarkable Geomancer film I'd seen at the Bomb Factory near Archway earlier in the year. It's symbolic of London's dynamic underground arts scene that Lek later turned up at Cafe Oto playing guitar and electronics while operating his "open-world" game 2065, as it was projected onto the back wall of the performance space. The concept on the "game," like much of Lek's oeuvre, draws on themes around big-data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence to imagine a world where digital technologies have eliminated work, leaving people free to play video games all day. His films are startling CGI generated worlds which combine the artist's formal education in architecture with a gamers sensibility for space and possibility; all bound up with a vaguely apocalyptic and dystopian atmosphere.
The night's performance included a walk through a virtual reality Dalston, complete with Cafe Oto rendered as a post Brexit war torn landscape. In November I saw Lek pull a similar trick at Somerset house using the room's neoclassical features as a canvas to mash together footage of Extinction Rebellion's London actions with his futuristic post-work urban environments. There seemed to be an implied criticism of UK arts institutions for their close financial relationships with major fossil fuel companies such as Shell, who under pressure from activists had earlier in the year ended their relationship with the Southbank Centre. The British Museum and Tate Galleries have come under similar pressure in relation to some of their major sponsors.
