Sonic Boom Live
Queen Elizabeth Hall
South Bank Centre, London
4th May 2000
Presented in conjunction with the excellent Sonic Boom exhibition of sound installations at the Hayward Gallery, the line up for this event features three groups and artists who have also been selected for inclusion in the gallery. Project Dark are the first onstage, lurking behind a bank of samplers and sundry equipment, with the audience decked out in 3d-glasses for the presentation of the Disc Continued film – and handily, that universal promoter of all things vinyl and experimental, John Peel pops up in the movie’s intro to remind everyone to slip on the red and blue filters. The film and soundtrack are used by the three members of Project Dark as a template on which to build a really quite slick presentation of their various works of deconstruction meted out to the very idea of needles, grooves and music.
So in tri-dee detail biscuit bases are spun and rewound on a variety of record players, their three PD wind-up gramophone exhibits are depicted in a variety of settings putting saw blades and wooden discs to use as needle-fodder, making the cartridges and amplifiers screech and crawl with a blend of agony and delight. In front of the screen, Kirsten Reynolds swaps textured discs for each section of the film, while Ashley Davies and Tony Pattinson shuffle electronics and keep themselves busy on the interface of processed sound and more extreme tonalities of diamond in contact with a variety of surfaces, both realtime and synched to the screen antics. Sparks literally fly too, from arm to steel disc (on film – if they’re frying the sawblade live, as included in one of the Hayward gramophone exhibits, it’s not readily apparent), while 7″s and other analogues for vinyl grooves spin both on and off the platters at various depths of projection overhead. For the finale, after an extended, pounding post-Industrial sequence of cheap turntables blowing their perspex lids under a sutained barrage of re-looped exposives and groaning pickup noise, four real-life decks meet the same fate in a whiff of gunpowder and just a little touch of fun, if not especially Avant-garde, theatricality. But who needs experiment and theory when there’s explosives involved?
With the reek of fireworks still hanging in the air, a quick stage shift swings the Project Dark paraphenalia out of the way for the crush barrier-framed sheet steel and suspended bass spring of FM Einheit, while Pan Sonic‘s mixers and tone generators are even more easily set up. For this performance, Einheit, Vaisanen and Vainio are joined by Caspar Brötzmann on guitar, and they settle down to their improvisatory mix of oscillator pitches and clicking pulses with an exploratory sussurus of electronics, feedback and tweaked and teased metal. Einheit is the central focus of his perfomance, and his bulky figure and unruly mop of hair still show the same tendency to violent explosions of lugubrious pounding and scraping of the sheet steel and waving expressively in the wake of a particularly energetic rhythmic moment respectively as in the heyday of his time as the powerhouse of Einstürzende Neubauten.
For an hour, the various parameters of reverberating spring and swooping glitch are intertwined with guitar scrapes which even occasionally veer off into the old-school noise poses of Hendrix, but without the Bluesy melodies to interfere with the production of erratic, almost gleefully invasive swatches of electronic interference patterns and acoustic half-rhythms brought clanging and groaning from Einheit’s minimalist percussive set up. Sometimes he seems uncertain, bouncing slowly on his eventually bare feet, but always able to evoke the joyful sound of metal on metal at just the right moment in the swelling reaches of Pan Sonic’s clicking, whirling brushes with white noise, sine waves and the hermetic buzz of overdriven tone generators. It takes quite a while for the back-projected visual readout of the ensemble’s sound waves to shudder under the characteristic Pan Sonic oscillator thud and boom, but by the time it does they have managed to set their stage monitor smoking under the strain of it all, with noxious plastic fumes merging with the residue of Project Dark’s firework antics.
With sight, sound and smell covered, and the bass frequencies giving a fair go at reaching out to touch the chest walls of the audience (though it must be said at not quite the level expected from these most booming of boomsters), this show is all in all turning into a multimedia spectacular seemingly of its own free will. A requisite few patrons slip out under weight of the sonic assault, and when the quiet comes it leaves a not unpleasant residue of tingling in the ears and the fragrance of burnt-out and bombed-out musical equipment in the nose – the odour of experiment? So after the interval, it’s sad to report that Scanner‘s set is a dull anti-climax of repetitive beat loops and mildly interesting sound scribbles from pocket composer and Theremin alike, backed up with his Powerbook projections of Directorscapes of limited worth and quite dated feel. Electronica in its one-man band form, it is hardly Robin Rimbaud‘s fault that his previous raison d’etre, the analogue mobile phone, has been made obsolete leaving him with nothing to scan – but he now produces workmanlike digital rhythms and unremarkable tones to little effect instead, provoking little and signifying less along the way.
-Freq1C-
