claus van bebber & others

Following his performance last week at the text festival Claus van Bebber was at Islington Mill yesterday for the latest in the Salford Concerts Series. Also performing were Mick Beck, Ben Gwilliam, Sonic Pleasure and Matt Wand. Partly as a result of the Bury performance a number of poets who were there also attended this event. James Davies spent some time flyering the venue for the next The Other Room on 3 June - that's Alex Davies, Allen Fisher and me - so there may be the beginnings of an interesting cross-fertilisation of scenes if enough people turn up.

The evening consisted of a series of collaborative improvisations between various configurations of the performers. Really there were way too many different pieces for me to talk about any specifically, and it was only partway through the evening that I thought to try and write down the different configurations. So my notes will be fairly impressionistic and general.

Matt and Ben were on recorded sounds and assorted wires/electronics, Mick played bassoon and saxophone, Sonic Pleasure made use of bricks, tiles, metal pipes, plastic etc, and Claus had two turntables and a box of electronics. The first collaboration was between Matt and Ben. At that stage I was still trying to make mental notes of what happened, and I made a contrast between this improvisation and the one between Mick and Sonic Pleasure which followed. Matt and Ben seemed to disarticulate the idea of music more thoroughly into an abstract field of sounds organised in shifting dynamic structures of volume, pitch and texture. Mick (on bassoon) and Sonic Pleasure, despite her use of unconventional materials, played what you might broadly classify as jazz. Although a skeletal, simultaneously contemporary and primitive jazz.

I'll try to make observations about all the performers as I go along, starting with Sonic Pleasure. Because of the materials she used, and because all the other performers except for Mick Beck were behind desks, she was frequently the visual centre of attention. What she did was of course far more than banging bricks, there was scraping and dropping of objects too. And the banging varied from loud to soft, from widely spaced to flurried scatterings, from the obviously regular to the more asymmetrically placed, at various pitches, and from the stony to the metallic. I was pleased to see such a wide array of dynamics and techniques in play, especially the softer scraping sounds which added a greater level of flexibility to the interplay with the other musicians. Haphazard as the materials may have seemed she performed with a lot of control and subtlety, and it was entirely possible to forget about what might have come across as a gimmick.

There were two more combinations in the first half, Claus and Mick (on saxophone), and Claus with Sonic Pleasure and Matt. In both there were moments of interesting ambiguity where it wasn't entirely certain who was making a particular sound. It struck me that among the many approaches to this kind of improvisation, one of the strategies available is to play with exactly this tension between the possibility of matching your various sound sources, and on the other hand emphasising their differing distinct properties. After his previous collaboration I expected Mick and Claus to again produce something quite jazzy, but the sound was much more abstract. This may in part be down to a simple limitation inherent in the sounds Sonic Pleasure was able to produce, and the fact that in comparison Claus was able to generate sustained sounds, opening up the possibility of playing with an interplay of sonorities as well as rhythm. The trio improvisation generated some subterranean sounds, like an abandoned industrial building - although as I'll explain later I don't really like this kind of analogy. I also remember Claus providing additional percussive effects by tapping a disc as it played - although this may have been during the quintet at the end. This was one of the more visible techniques used by Claus, but I'll also return to this later.

Writing about both Matt and Ben is going to be tricky because it was hard to see exactly what either was doing, so there's a possibility of my being hilariously wrong. Matt seemed to use both recorded sounds that were then processed and distorted, and which often sounded like they might originally have been commercially available records, and what sounded like a tone generator, although again with a lot of supplementary processing added. The sounds ranged from muffled songs through to electronic tics and howls. Ben also seemed to use recorded sounds, although they sounded more like field recordings, and various electronics. While Matt appeared to use his electronics for percussive purposes quite frequently, I got the impression that Ben's were used more as instrumental rather than percussive sounds. There was also an impressive array of crackles and buzzes.

I really hope that anyone reading who knows better than I do about anything I say here will comment and put me right. I'm genuinely interested and I don't actually want to mis-describe anyone.

There were a further four different collaborative configurations in the second half. Ben, Claus and Matt started, followed by Claus and Mick, then Ben and Claus, and finally all five performers as a quintet for an extended collaboration. The first trio of Ben, Claus and Matt were again able to match their sounds and textures quite closely before breaking apart again. I'm sure I also remember them generating enormous volume at times. Again there were moments that were quite subterranean, and sometimes almost suggestive of topography or architecture. But as I mentioned before I'm not generally very keen on this sort of analogy. For one I've never found music or sound art especially descriptive in that literal kind of a way, and for another I think it's just plain crude. Sound art is capable of much more than just describing or indicating a space, and with music is capable of being wholly abstract, existing solely with its own terms. Of course it can suggest actual sounds and spaces, but I'm wary of that kind of narrow and directive reading.

Although Claus was the headliner of the night, and present in all the collaborations excepting the first two, he was relatively unobtrusive. Because for the most part from where I was I couldn't see what he was doing, it was often hard to pick his contributions out from what the others were doing. There were some noticeable techniques, such as tapping the record. There were also moments when records, which often appeared to be making nothing more than hisses, surface noise, or other ambient sounds, were audibly sped up or slowed down. And there were odd snatches that were recognisably music or speech, as well as the percussive effect of a needle being stopped and thrown back by an obstacle. Claus also used lifting and dropping of the arm for percussive effect. In fact that torrent of different techniques suggests that I took a lot more in that I first thought, and that while his contribution was discreet it was far from invisible. This is a lot more than playing records, or even scratching, although there was even a brief burst of that.

I'll skip to the end now and the quintet collaboration which followed the template of the evening in building up to several fierce crescendos before dropping back again, then building slowly once more. Once again in their varying ways Sonic Pleasure and Claus appeared to be acting as support for the others rather than taking a lead in creating the improvisations. But watching from the outside it's really not possible to say with any accuracy. Very much at the centre, as he appeared to be a lot of the time, although not always leading the others, was Mick. I was especially interested in the quieter passages, some of which were structurally held together rhythmically by Claus.

For me the most interesting performer of the night was Mick Beck. I hadn't seen him before but his technique was amazing. I was reminded at times of film footage I've seen of Derek Bailey, where he appears to be doing almost nothing yet generates an astonishing array of sounds. Mick played his instruments without reed, he played the reed on its own, he blew into reed and bassoon simultaneously creating two distinct sounds. He made sounds just by clattering the keys of the saxophone or tapping the reed on its mouth. He played phrases where unplayed notes were suggested but not necessary, he made noises that sounded superficially as though they were being made by someone who didn't know how to get a sound from the instrument, but which were clearly intentional and controlled. In the final quintet section he pulled out a balloon which he inflated and scraped with his hands to create sound, as well as stretching and letting go the deflated balloon. I'll have a look later to see if I can find film of him playing online. If you get the chance to see him then take it.

No posts now until at least Sunday - I'm off to Lancaster of the weekend.

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