On a particular Friday afternoon in October I was walking home from work in rather a hurry. This in itself is unremarkable - any journey to or from somewhere I wouldn't usually volunteer to be will make me irritable and my pavement-hopping speed far too brisk for most of Brighton's meandering pedestrians. On this particular Friday afternoon, however, I needed to get home quickly because a friend of mine was playing the early opening set of Brighton's experimental music and sound art festival, Colour Out of Space. One of the meandering pedestrians I cut past was a squat, bald old man speaking very involvedly into a dictaphone. He was looking into one of those shops that sells trinkets and crystals and chakras and lots of holistic nonsense, and I walked past him thinking, "Weirdo." You see, when I'm in a hurry, everyone blocking my path is insane.
Skip forward a few hours, and I see him again. This time he's onstage at the Sallis Benney Theatre, sitting at a table with miscellaneous bits of noisemaking debris and hidden little boxes to manipulate their sounds. He's playing an empty Coke can with a horsehair bow. Four other middle-aged gentlemen are sitting at tables onstage too, playing an array of unidentifiable things, creating an acoustic/electronic collage that totally enraptures a full venue, myself included. This, as it turns out, is Friday night's headline act: Morphogenesis. They are veterans at this kind of thing, and it is a special occasion. Looking them up today, I noticed that one of the albums I recommended on this blog last year actually came out on their record label.
The Jim Morrisons hassle the awkward Volks crowd, May 2007:
You may have guessed what I'm getting at here. I saw a man on the street who I decided was a weirdo and it turns out that I happen (at least loosely) to be a fan and patron twice over. Obviously it means I judged him unfairly by his appearance, but does that then mean he isn't a weirdo after all? Not necessarily. Does that then mean I am also a weirdo? Or, perhaps, actively pro-weirdo?Every so often I find myself kneeling on a stage, howling into a microphone and looping together the sound of my voice into huge cavernous drones of faux-mantra harmonic gibberish. Four other people do similar things around me, with keyboards and laptops and dozens of assorted effects pedals, and then we fade out and fuck off after a maximum of twenty minutes. I suppose at these moments, when I am doubled over, sweating and grinning in my workshirt, I also look like a fucking weirdo. This is, of course, the world of "experimental" music, where nothing is at is seems or should be or looks like it's going to be. Where trendies and hermits collide. Where chin-stroking anti-musical theorists can still be genuinely confused by what they're hearing and seeing. How did I stumble into this? One day I was listening to Slayer, then what? Contact microphones, cathartic ramblings and a suitcase full of mangled electronics. Fantastic.
It's what we do - Plurals at Komedia, Feb 2010:
There are so many ways into this huge meta-genre that it surprises me how obscurist and esoteric it is perceived to be from the outside. But then again, when you're presented to something from the more aggressively strange end of the spectrum it's difficult to make the link, to somehow connect it with the more formal musical styles it may relate to only in theory. For instance, the stuff I'm talking about is almost all improvised around an idea or setup, and roughly the same can be said of process music*, acid rock or a 12-bar blues solo-swapping jam. All of these are fundamentally restrictive but allow for something unexpected to occur; indeed, unexpected things are bidden to occur, and made an equal partner in the performance alongside whatever is prepared for that performance. I'm not claiming that it all works in this way, but certainly the stuff I like does.
Merzbow (drums) and Keiji Haino's erratic and extremely noisy set at Supersonic 2008
And I think that's what drew me in to begin with. Music is exciting when chance is allowed into the room, but in reality chance is always in the room - what we do with it as part of a collaborative event is down to the receptiveness and willingness of both parties, the performer and the audience, and of all the individuals within them. Musicians who are only satisfied with 'ideal' levels of ultra-professionalism/perfectionism are often on the sticky end of chance as a result. But when people get it right, it's often exhilarating. For example, I went to see the psyche rock band Comets On Fire a couple of years ago and they played such a brilliant show that we wouldn't stop calling for an encore. The house lights had gone up and people were filing out, but we did manage to get them back onstage for another song. Somehow the fact that the band played on in a fully lit room, and clearly against the curfew, made the performance change. A psychological barrier broke down. People were sitting on the edge of the stage and the distance between the players on the wide, deep boards of the Scala made it seem surreal. The amps and the drum kit were tiny towards the back curtain. For the first time, it felt more like we were in the same room as the band rather than just at a gig. It seems like an obvious point, but it made a huge difference.
Petals has a waistcoat and a suitcase full of noise:
A lot of the avant-garde stuff and the noise and the sound art I've seen (which is nowhere near enough for me to be speaking as anything more than an intrigued punter) essentially multiplies many times over this receptiveness to chance. The majority of the players are kind of tinkerers too, and many homemade devices and sound manipulators abound. The sonic probabilities and possibilities unfolding are so endless that every set is kind of... bespoke, in a way. Myriad slabs and scrawls of sound can be magicked out of virtually nothing at all. Another example: at the Old Blue Last in Shoreditch a couple of years ago I saw Sutcliffe Jugend. At one point in their set it was so ear-piercingly, unbearably horrible and nasty that I decided to find the source of the noise. I followed the chain of effects pedals, metal boxes, laptops, endless wires wires wires wires amps switches tables chairs, to find that it was all coming from a humble jack lead, held nakedly in the air and touched, on and off morse-code-like, at the very tip.
Some of this stuff is borne of extremity and catharsis and perversion, and some is playful and dadaist. This is no different from any other creative art. What is different, though, is how it forces the audience to decide almost straight away whether or not they think this is a valid expression. It almost grabs you by the collar and demands, "Is this really a performance? Does it tick your boxes? What would you prefer this to be?" This is not really what happens at an alt rock show. Looking around the room, I occasionally notice people bemusedly unwilling to allow their faces and behaviour to answer those questions. You can tell it by the way they glance at friends and strangers as if to ask, when the sound from onstage has finally died down, "Do We Clap Now?"
A dutch lunatic in a posing pouch destroys a toy laptop to the deafening strains of Michael Jackson's "Earth Song"
Tim Cementimental's most renowned circuit-bent creation: The Ghost Box
*I know that process music is quite fundamentally not improvised, but it does allow for unintended things to happen as a result of the processes themselves, the room, the equipment, etc. I'm thinking about the Pendulum Music thing as an example.
