The Sounds of Silence: Reflections on an Absence Part 2

I have an ambivalent relationship with the Southbank centre, which functions a little like the other side of a Yin and Yang relationship with Cafe Oto. In comparison with the cosy familiarity of Oto, the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and surrounding panoply of chain shops, bars and restaurants can seem paradigmatic of corporate saturated arts entertainment. I don't think this is an inaccurate description, but never-the-less I've undoubtedly had some of my most cherished live music experiences at the Southbank going back over 15 years. Also, as an aside, my university graduation ceremony was held at the Royal Festival Hall in 2003.

One of my earliest memories there was being blown away by a long weekend of performances of the music of Iannis Xenakis - hardcore modernist and erstwhile Greek resistance fighter (against the British I might add) - in 2004. A lightshow accompanied the electro-acoustic dissonances of his long-form tape piece La Legende d'eer, and I witnessed the most physical piano playing I've ever seen for Eonta; an example of the composer's "stochastic" music, with a score incorporating mathematical probabilities worked out by an IBM 7090 computer. In my mid-20s that stretch of the Thames was practically a second home and I'd spend sometimes two days a week roaming between London Bridge and Ralph Downes' post-war Brutalist edifices at the Southbank centre.

It was a more chilled out place back then, a place you could linger with a book and a coffee. Since the refurbishment project in the mid 2000s the area around the RFH has gradually seen the introduction of more chain restaurants, bars and faceless entertainment tat. A near permanent "street food" market is installed along the river promenade and wherever you look there are a dozen ways to be relieved of your cash. The area is now what they call a "destination". So much, so London.

The question I ponder is whether I would have been able to see such a mind blowing event as Karlheinz Stockhausen's opera Donnerstag aus licht, which I did in May last year, if it weren't for all the money undoubtedly generated by the "destination" industry. Who knows, but it's difficult to hold a grudge when you're treated to a such a feast of drama, humour, cosmic energy and maniacal genius. The opera is just one out of seven parts that make up the German composer's vast Licht cycle,  each corresponding to a day of the week and which loosely explore the history of humanity as a cosmic saga. Mostly though Donnerstag (Thursday) is an autobiographical piece of almost unfathomable egoism which casts the composer himself as a semi divine figure on a quest to redeem the world through music.

Named as Michael in the libretto, the composer is shown at three stages of life, from his childhood in the 1930s, during which time his mother is committed to an asylum and later murdered by the Nazi's; through his formative years as an aspiring composer and "world traveller" in Reise um die Erde, though to a redemptive final act in which threefold Michael - seemingly evoking the archangel of that name - does battle with Lucifer, variously appearing as a sort of goblin, a dragon, and a tap dancing trombonist. The last of these three is forced to the floor by the sound of Michael's trumpet and plays the rest of his part from a prostrate position. All of this could come across as a little vaudeville, and there were some genuinely funny moments, but the overall feeling was one of uncommon dramatic and musical force.

This was especially so in the stunning last act where a lightshow involving lasers and giant mystical symbols projected round the hall combined with a fivefold choir distributed above the main stage. The orchestra too was similarly split-up around the performance space. Together this arrangement perfectly showcased Stockhausen's theories of musical spacial dynamics, rhythm and timbre, as Maxime Pascal conducted the choral and orchestral parts into waves of sound, which from the centre of the hall appeared to sweep across the space, combine, articulate and disarticulate in the most mind boggling ways. As I walked out, euphoric, into the warm Spring air, surrounded by tourists and Saturday night revellers, I thought of the strange duality of venues like the Southbank centre, where almost transcendent works of art can be situated within a general atmosphere of stultifying banality and mass consumerism. For how long this tension can continue is anyone's guess.

I should caveat that comment by noting that in few weeks later in July I saw a showcase of the small, independent label Village Green at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (the RFH's little sister venue) which despite being on a much lower budget managed to put on a memorable night of electronically inflected modern classical music. Ben Chatwin's set, drawing on his two albums from 2018, was a masterclass in integrating live electronics with classical instrumentation. The composer/musician orchestrated things from behind his large modular synthesizer in duet with a single cellist seated centre stage. The perfectly pitched dramatic and filmic soundscapes, in combination with a tasteful light show accompaniment brought to mind the best of Hans Zimmer or the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. Despite this seemingly stripped down arrangement the music easily filled out the Purcell concert space.  Much appreciation went to the efficient air conditioning system at the venue, which did fine work on what was the hottest day of the year.

Since I'm covering the better known and funded of London's arts venues I should give a mention to the Barbican centre which I would contend in general has a broader and more radical program of performances compared to the Southbank, and 2019 was no exception. All but one of my four visits were in the last three months of the year and took in Alessandro Cortini and Suzanne Ciani's trippy modular synthesizer music as well as elegiac piano improvisation from Nik Bärtsch. The Bärtsch show, part of the London Jazz festival and titled When the Clouds Clear, was a collaboration with artist Sophie Clements, who created a very Zen performance space within the Barbican's main hall, requiring the Swiss pianist to cross a small bridge across a pool of water to reach his piano stool.

I'd seen Bärtsch at the Barbican some years before fronting his "Zen funk" band Ronin; all complex polyrhythms and nods towards playful Reichian minimalism. Here, alone at the keys, a more expansive, less formally constrained pianist emerged. As a shaft of light projected from above passed slowly across the water surrounding the piano, Bärtsch is leaning inside the instrument, scraping, tapping and plucking at the wires. Passages of free improvisation like this break out into slowly developing rhythmic excursions, vaguely following the images projected behind him. A drifting melodic improvisation accompanies scenes of endless sunlit seas, which as the weather turns stormy transform into a maelstrom of repeated percussive strikes on the keys. These shifts from melodic to atonal and rhythmic playing were particularly affective, never more so as the storm clouds cleared and the light shining down upon Bärtsch's watery performance space was mirrored by an equally bright shift in tone colour and accent.

There was an undoubted romance to some of these scenes of nautical and environmental strife, and Bärtsch's response to them; as if the studied and metaphysically restrained form of his other groups had to be resolutely left behind and something of the human in raw confrontation with nature made to appear. I'd taken the risk of bringing a new partner to the show, perhaps half-knowingly as a test. Though not a regular concert goer or aficionado of the byways of jazz and classical music, she was moved by the uncommon mix of pathos and brute nature that was brought into conjunction during that all too brief hour.

The other performance of note, bringing together two brilliant black multidisciplinary artists and electronic musicians was Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa), who headlined a show accompanied by the London contemporary orchestra and supported by fellow traveller Klein. The former brought to the Barbican's Milton Court Concert Hall an eerie visual and sonic incantation titled The Great Bailout (a reference to compensation paid to slave owners) which the venue described as a free verse poem that acts as a non-linear word map about colonialism, slavery and commerce in Great Britain and the commonwealth. Backed by a giant LED light union jack and flanked by an heterodox ensemble of percussion, strings, and piano, Ayewa riffs on the words to the English national anthem, which in her hands becomes a post-apocalyptic funeral dirge in remembrance of the victims of British and European colonialism in African and the Caribbean. "Has the Queen been saved? Have her plantations been saved?" she intones as short bursts of martial drums cut across string glissandi. 

This was my second encounter of the year with the London Contemporary Orchestra, after a baffling experience in May watching Robert Ames conducting an interpretation of Stockhausen's Welt-Parlament with contributions from avant-techno explorer Actress and his AI project Young Paint. The AI's contribution, apart from fidgeting on a screen to the right of the stage, was little more than firing off the occasional random spoken phrase based on Stockhausen's admitted quite barmy score which uses a choir to stage an imaginary world parliament debating the nature of love (always with the big ideas that man). Young Paint continues the trend of artificial intelligence appearing either terrifying or shit; there appears to be no middle ground. The players performing with Moor Mother raised themselves to the task of improvising around her jittery electronics and powerful poetry, with only the occasional shoehorning of an ascending piano scale sounding a touch out of place amid Ayewa's smouldering and primarily atonal sturm and drang.

Larger concert halls such as these carry with them the risk of audience disengagement. That you are often at a considerable distance from the performers can lead to torpor or estrangement; the mind can wander, and not every audio/visual show can adequately fill such spaces as they have at the Barbican and Southbank. There was something a little forlorn about Alessandro Cortini behind his little table at the centre of that huge stage, hands busy with Buchla synthesizer and sundry audio processing devices. Conversely the small venue or club space remains the heartland of live electronics. There's some music that just doesn't feel right experienced sitting down in the comfy seats. There were no such thing in April last year at Aures, a relatively new space built into an arch buried below Waterloo station next to the famous "Banksy tunnel". What took the Royal Festival hall a hundred musicians and an extensive audio/visual set-up, required just a sound system, a smoke machine and some blue UV lights for Roly Porter.

Porter is an interesting guy whose music came out of the aggressively highbrow post-dubstep of Vex'd in the mid-2000s. Over several albums - mostly released on Subtext Recordings - Porter has patented a lead-heavy form of bass centred electro-acoustic music, something like Xenakis might have made if he'd been brought up on Jungle rather than serialism. The comparison isn't entirely fatuous, both composers have a penchant for grand themes; in 2013 Porter released an album titled Life cycle of a Massive Star, attempting to soundtrack just that, and his latest is inspired by Neolithic burial sites and features vocalists specialising in early Medieval music. The performance I saw was of material drawn from Third Law, his 2016 album on Tri Angle records, which seemed to function almost as a work-out for the venue's immersive 360^o sound system.

Roly Porter at Aures

Earlier we'd been treated to Vaporwave outlier Bruised Skies frying our brains with bass heavy drone music which was like being inside the biggest church organ on earth while a giant played all the pipes at once. Porter's music had more light and shade, well it had different shades anyway. Passages of rolling industrial noise open out into processed choral and ambient electronic sound. There are hints of the sharper edges of Musique Concrete and electro-acoustic music; strings rise up out of the seething mass of low end reverberations only to be crushed by an incoming wave of metallic rhythm. With all the smoke, blue light and pummelling audio tectonics you'd be forgiven for believing yourself part of some military backed psychological experiment in sensory overload.

Round the corner is another small alternative venue to the Southbank, where no such brute displays of multi-sensory muscle are on show. Iklectic is part of a community space which includes an urban farm, a theatre and a couple of tech start-ups. Essentially a reclaimed shed, in April I saw Dave Knight and Steven Thrower's post-industrial psych outfit Unicazurn put on a suitably trippy performance of boiled electronics and saxophone improvisation. Thrower spent a number of years as a member of Coil, perhaps the most celebrated and cultishly adored of the 2nd wave of industrial acts. Their quasi-mystical and often quite subversive music drew heavily on the English esoteric tradition from Aleister Crowley to William Blake. It was a nice coincidence that opposite Iklectic is Centaur Street which has been decked out in mosaics replicating some of Blake's images from works like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Europe: A Prophecy.

The street is located near to the former site of The Hercules buildings (nice for the modern street to continue the theme of mythical figures), where Blake and his wife Catherine lived from 1790 to 1800. I can in some tangential way thank Blake for introducing me to Coil in the late 90s after discovering Norwegian avant-black metal band Ulver's album Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Scandinavian group were Coil fanboys, drawing similar inspiration from the English poet and engraver as a symbol for an alternative notion of England to that which developed out of the Industrial Revolution and Victorian age. It's a countercultural aesthetic that remains very close to my heart.

Reclaimed spaces like Iklectic are very much in vogue, often following in the wake of gentrification. It's unsurprising then that East London has more than it's fair share, repurposing the area's manufacturing and industrial heritage as a playground for Home Counties parvenus, whose taste for all things twee and "local" disguises an aggressive tendency towards exclusion. Next time a white middle class person heralding from Oxfordshire tells you how "up and coming" Leyton or Forest Gate have become, ask yourself 'who is it that is being moved on to make this happen?' This is the dark side of all this chirpy hipster fun and games I've been describing. Iain Sinclair calls London the captured city; captured that is not by this or that corporation or shadowy group, but by the forces of finance, of  "development" itself. Never did so plain a word harbour such significant consequences for those subjected to its irresistible advance.

 

Few boroughs have experienced more of this than Hackney. The Pickle factory, close to the Bethnal Green gas holders, is another reclaimed space now operating as part of a multipurpose arts/entertainment/commerce venture, which in addition to the ubiquitous cafe also includes corporate events space and a creative co-working space for enterprising gig economy types. Demand for the latter seems likely to suffer post-covid (the new PC). In late June I experienced a lovely evening of immersive ambient music headlined by Rod Modell's Deepchord and The Chi Factory (Hanyo van Oosterom) all whilst reclining on pillows distributed around the stage. All these kinds of places are rustic and basic in what they offer; a pop-up bar, little by way of seating, but also the chance to get up close and personal with the artists; that's the sell, that's why I go.

A mile north as the crow flies from the Pickle Factory is the rechristened Victorian public house The Glove That Fits. Another new venture of the last three years, turning what must have been a humdrum boozer into yet another edgy arts venue. Truth be told the sound system is great and the atmosphere in the dank basement (dank in the conventional way) is a tight, improbably shaped space to experience more of the Capital's cutting edge electronic music. I was there to see a fairly unique line-up of "post vaporwave" artists associated in one way or another with the Dream Catalogue label, fronted by alternative scouse rapper and enfant terrible of the "Dreampunk" scene David Russo (otherwise known as HKE, Air Japan, DARKPYRAMID, Martin Smith, Future City Love Stories, Henry Moonchild and at least two dozen other monikers).

 

For an ostensibly internet based music scene the turnout wasn't bad. The music, which takes influences from pathos soaked variants on ambient techno, to trap, dubstep and even Kpop, wasn't bad either and had the crowd of mostly lone hoodie wearing white males dancing along. You couldn't imagine a gig like this happening in any other part of the UK. For better or worse London, and the East End in particular has become a global Mecca for the cutting edge of electronic music, second only perhaps to Berlin.

Practically all the experiences and anecdotes above involve significant proximity to other gig goers. That's part of the fun. A sparsely populated gig is rarely a good one and at least part of the joy of live music is experiencing it  alongside other people as enraptured with it as you are. As long as coronavirus legislation is active then the kinds of intimate venues described above will remain closed. After all, intimacy itself has more or less been banned. Music venues as sites of mingling, where individuals and bodies loosen their boundaries, allowing something of the other to enter are thus under serious threat. Modern power has an innate fear of the kinds of scenes one witnesses at a rave,  rock concert or intimate live performance. From a certain perspective those bodies tightly packed-in, losing themselves in the sights and sounds of the show, are analogous to political protests, the gathered multitude. These are events of noise, crowds, and a certain release, if only temporary from our lives of possessive individualism.

The doors of music venues across London and indeed Europe have been closed for half a year. The larger ones, the Barbicans and Southbanks and Royal Albert Halls of this world may well have the resources and cash reserves to survive, though almost certainly not without shedding a large number of the their staff; a process which is well underway across the arts sector. Smaller venues like those I've described above may very well not survive at all. Many are run on a shoe string, leveraging the good will of volunteers while building links with their local community.

While the government has prioritised getting shops, pubs and restaurants back open, next to nothing has been done to safeguard the arts sector, least of all proposing some way music venues and theatres can reopen their doors. With no end in sight, and indeed a second wave of the pandemic seemingly on the way, the prospects looks bleak. Live music in London is a shining beacon in what can otherwise be a very alienating and unfriendly place. More than that it's an activity that can break down the doors of perception, allowing an escape from the everyday and opening people up to new sensations beyond what is spoon fed to us by the culture industry.  That culture industry - the counterpart to the world of finance and "development" - would not mourn the loss of London's small independent venues. Unless the tide turns and the arts sector is either supported or allowed to reopen then we may emerge with a very different and lamentable live arts landscape.

... the corporate muzak echoing through socially distanced covid-secure bars drowns out the sound of silence from London's once vibrant live music scene ...