The Red Bull Music Academy visits a different city each year and presents a series of gigs, lectures and workshops to promote music both new and old. This year it’s Londons turn to play host. Friday 12th February saw techno luminaries, jazz men and classical musicians collaborating for an exciting 3 hours of experimental music at the Royal Festival Hall.
Starting proceedings were Norweigan jazz musician and producer Bugge Wesseltoft and German deep house producer/DJ Henrik Schwarz. As the audience filed in the duo got off to what looked like a juddery start but soon settled into a pleasing, off-kilter rhythm – they obviously work well together and their sounds and approaches to making them are well suited.
Wesseltoft had at his disposal a grand piano and a table of electronics including a MIDI keyboard, a synth and a laptop. He stretched between the two, looping up piano melodies ranging from delicate to grandiose and applying filters and effects as he went. Shwarz, meanwhile, introduced electronic beats, textures and effects via a Macbook and an array of pro-audio gear.
While there were times when the combined sounds built steadily to impressive and interesting peaks, each musician also had time to shine individually – Wesseltoft’s incredible jazz piano being given dominance before Shwarz’s gradually building 4/4 beats took over and had the audience (or me, at least) wishing I was on a dance floor instead of sat in a concert hall.
As the set proceeded Weesseltoft employed various unconventional means to produce his sounds including plucking the internal strings of the piano and squatting in front of an African glockenspiel-like instrument. The set ended here, infact, with Shwarz joining him at the front of the stage armed with a Novation Launchpad (one of my favourite MIDI toys and interesting to me as it implies Shwarz is a fellow user of Ableton Live) for an improvised avant-glitch-rock-out!
Next up were Baltimore experimental duo Matmos. Introducing themselves as ‘the comic relief’ and explaining how they’d fought through the worst snow storm in 90 years to be there, they proceeded to build a slightly menacing soundscape with found objects (whistling through a biro lid, shaking childrens toys previously dug out of a plastic baggie), a high-hat, the obligatory macbooks and various other bits of kit. I was under the impression that they were primarily sound artists so when a seriously fat techo beat dropped I was pleasantly surprised, as were several other audience members who whooped and cheered in true dancefloor style. I liked that they spoke to the audience as well – too many electronic and experimental musicians hide behind an aura of mystery or geekery and remain quite faceless. Matmos were engaging and amusing as well as playing a blinding set.
The main draw of the evening was the collaboration between Carl Craig, Moritz Von Oswald and Francesco Tristano. Carl Craig needs no introduction, being a figurehead of Detroit techno and recently working on increasingly diverse projects. Moritz Von Oswald represents the Berlin side of the techno coin and is a pioneer of the more minimal style. Francesco Tristano is a classical pianist but is also heavily involved in contemporary experimental music, too. Joining them was a fourth musician on saxophone – unfortunately his name escapes me.
Seeing such a diverse ensemble in such a setting (the huge, revered space of the Royal Festival Hall) was quite something and it was thrilling to hear the blending of the elements that each musician brought to the table. For me, Tristano’s piano was the most exciting, particularly because he was armed with a laptop, too, and seems to instinctively think outside the classical box. The addition of the saxophone gave proceedings an earthy soul. In fact the piano and brass sat in perfect harmony with the techno beats that Craig and Oswald laid down, Detroit techno being particularly drenched in soul as it is. To hear it as a live element rather than a sample was fantastic.
Speaking of those beats, again I wished I was on a dancefloor (as did the guy in front of me who got up to boogie by the speaker stack) as Craig skillfully wove waves and washes of rhythm through the live instrumentation, which periodically dropped out for bouts of hard, 4-to-the-floor action.
While this performance was probably the most rounded and polished, it actually lacked something for it copmpared to the others which had an element of rough-and-readiness about them. Varying the strict 4-to-the-floor beats would have been a nice touch and made the electronic elements more dynamic. This would also have been the case if Moritz Von Oswald actually moved during the performance. Stood motionless behind his computer as he was, it looked like he was doing his accounts.
Overall, though, the evening offered up an exciting and inspirational array of music and it was a pleasure to see such diverse musicians coming together. The boundaries between live and pre-recorded, classical and dance, continue to be blurred. On this subject, interesting questions about context were raised in my mind, but I’m going to save those for another post. I’m going to see Steve Reich’s Drumming performed at Royal Festival Hall’s sister venue next week and I’d like to compare the 2 gigs before drawing any conclusions.
I should also mention the visuals that accompanied the concert. A huge screen formed the backdrop to the stage, on to which were projected various visuals from the bizarre and slightly disturbing brain-like ripples during Matmos to the perfectly judged pixel-like blocks and 3D lattices during Carl Craig et al. Since live electronic music is prone to being slightly dull to watch, the projections added a visual energy that matched the music.
Once the concert itself had finished, DJ Sprinkles (aka Terre Thaemlitz) DJ’d some fantastic house music in the Southbank Centre’s Clore Ballroom. An initially trepidatious audience soon gave themselves over to the atmosphere and it was good to see a wide age range getting down to some proper house music in a classical venue!
