St. Giles in the Field, London
1st June 2007
I hit the church shortly after opening time, still muddleheaded from work, the sun only just beginning to slip it’s way behind central London’s monstrous office monoliths, and St. Giles’ church is already packed, a situation not helped by the decision to close off the balconies.
I succeed in grabbing a pew toward the back though, and bear happy witness to Islaja’s helplessly ineffable drone-pop as it soundtracks my fellow cultured punters politely pushing past each other, negotiating seating arrangements as if boarding a longhaul flight. All I can see in the direction the music’s coming from is the bobbing torso of a stern bass player who seems to be generating much of the gorgeous tonal rumbling, of which there is a whole lot goin’ on, whilst vocal stylings akin to Bjork auditioning “CONTENTMENT” for a demanding movie director and some so-so keyboard meandering emanate from somewhere to his left. Abandoning my attempt at viewing the proceedings, I concentrate instead upon the sunbeams flickering through stained glass and shadowed tree branches. About half an hour passes. I seem to recall that they cram a lot of overtly poppy and rocky elements into their psychey droniness, but nothing too jarring. Well… that was quite nice I suppose.
Glasgow’s Richard Youngs has quietly amassed an astonishingly varied body of work over the past decade or two, encompassing improv, noise and psychedelia, contemporary composition, folk-based singer-songwriter material and full-on technical prog-rock with his group Ilk, and is name-checked by many as one of the British avant garde’s….. yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, you know this, or else don’t care. Richard stands before the altar this evening, alone save a microphone and music stand, and it seems he intends to present us with a solo vocal set. The couple of shots of complimentary aniseed vodka I picked up at the door are starting to feel like pretty inadequate preparation as he opens his lungs and lets rip. But Mr. Youngs is a man who approaches his music with a rare spirit of humility, good humour and openness of both heart and mind, and doubts about the novelty of his chosen format are soon dispelled.
“That was an old one”, he says after wordlessly hollering at us for five straight minutes, understandably prompting some chuckles, and from thereon in his set is a revelation. Appropriate to the location, he launches into a post-Blake/Ginsberg rhythmic declaration of everyday holiness, pounding his music-stand with some kinda metal beater(?), establishing a steel mama-heartbeat with caveman intensity. For his next piece, Youngs tries out a bit of audience participation in place of a broken ebow, instructing the congregation to hum a drone on a particular note. But the accompaniment is soon forgotten as his voice alone fills out the church, soaring high and lonesome on an awe-inspiring and endless ode to joy, a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting melodies, evoking fragments of distant FM pop as much as it does the Scottish balladic tradition of Shirley Collins et al and the vocal mantras of Indian raga, whilst his words speak of the bricks of tenement housing, of sunlight through the windscreen of a transit van, as much as they do the seashores and hills of yore. A brave and beautiful, genuinely challenging performance, and undoubtedly the best thing I took from this evening.
And if I thought I needed more vodka earlier on, by god, wait until Paavoharju take the stage in this house of the lord. Simultaneously convoluted and cack-handed, Paavoharju seem to resemble the kind of stoned music student jam band that helped give The Grateful Dead and their fans a bad name for so many years. Buried somewhere is maybe a hint of the kind of shimmering, psychedelic cacophony Sunburned Hand Of The Man routinely dish up, but I think that’s maybe just because their playing is really slack-assed rather than through any deliberate intention, and an excess of utterly unnecessary baroque electric piano wig-outs seal the deal for this lot I’m afraid, casting an unsavoury whiff of failed Eurovision Song Contest contenders over proceedings.
For the first few songs they have a female singer, whose purrs and shrieks are best things on offer at this particular sonic stall, but then she soon makes way for a middle-aged dude in a baseball cap and gigantic shades who strums a classical guitar and throws new age dance moves to the band’s terminally unfunky grooves, looking for all the world like the Finnish Free-Folk Roy Orbison. What the HELL is going on here…? Who booked these guys? Maybe there are cultural differences at play or something, maybe they’re suffering from a bad sound-mix, I dunno, but whatever point it is Paavoharju are trying to make, it’s not coming across too well tonight.
Tony Conrad’s set begins with some impressive low budget dramatics; a bedsheet stretched across the church’s knave, electric fans and bright lights. A lone silhouette of our man, be-hatted, looms over us. He raises his violin, brutally scrapes out an open-stringed roar like a charging dinosaur, and the drone is awakened.
Conrad’s current music remains true to the intentions of that which he helped create as part of LaMonte Young’s Dream Syndicate / Theatre of Eternal Music back in the ‘60s, channeling a pure, unified sound which shifts and expands at a geological pace, exhibiting a crushing, pre/post-human density. In a similar spirit to H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, this sound seems utterly ambivalent toward, or uncomprehending of, a human audience, drawing itself down from a whole other plain of being entirely. It’s a deathless cliché when approaching this kind of music to say that the sound has no beginning nor end, and that the musician seems to simply tap into its frequency for a while and channel it for us, but that Is very definitely the feeling created by a performer such as Conrad.
So, the spirit of “Eternal Music” is alive and well on one level, but any stargazers in the audience here in search of a good evening’s celestial tripping have another thing coming, for something at the heart of Tony’s drone has gone very wrong somewhere along the line. Utterly lacking in the kind of bodhisattva bliss embraced by contemporaries such as Young and Terry Riley as an aesthetic backdrop to their music, Conrad seems to have been drawn instead to the opposite extreme, mapping out a space that is very, very dark indeed. A place more likely to draw admiration from, and comparisons with, the contemporary noise and power-electronics scenes than with anything a damn, life-loving hippy like me might be liable to enjoy in the comfort of my own home.
With a lot of the violin tone quickly submerged within a powerhouse of brutal, unseen noise machines, Conrad presents us tonight with an hour or so of unremitting, apocalyptic dread. Building from a starting point eerily reminiscent of the crumbling beauty channeled by Birchville Cat Motel, Tony wastes no time In taking things to the next level, whether we want to follow or not, the sheets of sound straight from his instrument bringing forth the majesty of towering infernos, collapsing skyscrapers, charred cityscapes with all the bombast of a Hollywood disaster epic, whilst a cacophony of electronic demons shriek and babble beneath.
Through the majority of Conrad’s set there’s a sound going on exactly like a skipping CD – whir, whir, whir, whir – that CAN’T be deliberate, can it? But if it isn’t, surely he would have turned it off or fixed it by now? But on it goes, and after a few minutes I see the point – it provides a solid pulse to the sound, a fixed, hypnotic spine amid the deluge of looped overtones that nonetheless refuses to give in to the compromise of an organic/animalistic ‘beat’. I’m getting quite into it. Then the sky splits in two and all is lost beneath a storm of Merzbow-esque insectoid global death agony… which goes on, and on, and on.
Astonishingly powerful, astonishingly pure in it’s inhuman tonal vastness, but, I mean… shit man… the clock is ticking down to a time when we’re not going to need some geezer with a violin to make us feel like everything in the world is dying, assuming some of us don’t feel that way already. And it’s FRIDAY NIGHT, y’know? What am I doing here? What are YOU doing here? Put your head between your knees and wait until it’s over.
Queuing for the toilet after the show, I watch Tony Conrad, still behind his curtain, packing up his gear. A grinning roadie hands him a couple of CD-Rs. “That’s the last time I trust these damn things!” says Mr. Conrad good-naturedly.
Draw your own conclusions.
-Ben Haggar-
