Goldsmiths College,
London March 9, 2002
This review first appeared in Coda No. 304.
By Tom Perchard
This was the first in a series of concerts of (mostly) improvised music at Goldsmiths College, an institution which is known in the UK for its commitment to experimental art of all kinds. The evening was organized by pianist and Goldsmiths graduate student Sebastian Lexer , and he brought together a group of performers with a number of shared associations: two thirds of AMM were here - pianist John Tilbury gave a realization of a John Cage piece, while drummer Eddie Prévost brought his trio - and most almost all of the other performers have been members of the informal improvisation workshops that Prévost has been running in South London for the last couple of years.
One workshop member is John Lely. On the night, he gave a solo set, sitting at a table that was piled high with instruments - little Casio keyboards, a reed-organ, turntable, and various other objects, including an electric toothbrush. While, in the end, the only role that the toothbrush played was to fall on the floor, it was easy to see how the sound of its motor might have fitted into the music: Lely built his performance by stacking up layers of microscopically detailed mechanical noise, and, showing minimal interest in "instrumental" gestures, he left the technology to run, and to sound like itself. As if in anticipation of the prepared piano sounds that would feature later in the evening, Lely provided a sort of low-culture alternative, ripping open and short-circuiting his keyboards so that they emitted uneven but static loops. These were joined by loops of static from a doctored turntable, whose needle Lely set skating over a 7-inch record. After assembling this quiet, texturally complex structure, the performer set about dismantling it, and the music ran itself down into silence.
Next was Lexer, whose piano and electronics were joined by Li Chuan Chong's laptop and Denis Dubovtsev's soprano saxophone. As a collection of improvisers, their formal strategies were inevitably less focussed than Lely's had been, but the push and pull of the trio was interesting in itself. Dubovtsev kept a low profile, largely limiting his soprano to percussive effects and high-wailing false tones, occasionally beginning and then shying away from more complex lines. He established a relationship with Lexer, whose approach was in direct contrast to Dubovtsev's: the pianist's playing was often flowing and melodic, eminently traditional, and he processed his sweeps and arpeggios into an electronic murmur that hid under the main body of sound. It was Chong, though, who defined the performance's emotional pitch. His laptop created complexes of glitches and faults that threatened to overpower the acoustic instruments. Musically, Chong's was a rather eccentric presence (and physically - he sat resplendent in what looked like some sort of national dress, but turned out to just be a dress), although the music was all the more stimulating for it. Chong and Lexer worried their electronics into a mass of paranoid noise, but the sound eventually dispersed into isolated radio hums and clicks.
Marianthi Papalexandri contributed a short, semi-improvised performance. Wearing a labcoat with contact microphones attached, she circled the room and audience in stylized movements, exploring sounds inherent to the performing space. Brushing her amplified hands over the room's features, and over various sound-producing contraptions that she scattered around, Papalexandri produced isolated sounds that were entirely of the context, yet seemed oddly decontextualized through amplification. She seemed to want to outline the acoustic presence of the space itself; however, acoustic presences of other spaces interjected, including the club next door and the practice rooms down the corridor. But that, I suppose, was part of the point.
John Tilbury performed Cage's Electronic Music for Piano , with the technology provided by Lexer. We watched and waited in silence while Tilbury prepared the piano. As he placed dampening objects under the instrument's strings, at the same time conferring with his technical assistant through muted and sometimes perplexed gestures, the operation took on something of the character of the Beckett plays that Tilbury has recently been performing. The piece itself was similarly ineloquent, centring as it did on the processed decay of solitary notes. If the music had a rather fragile character, that was rudely challenged by two ear-splitting screeches from the electronics, which may or may not have been entirely intentional, and by Tilbury's scraping a drumstick across the piano's lid. The resultant banshee wail helped the performance reach a surprising level of intensity, given the piece's economy of material.
Eddie Prévost came with his main working unit (outside of AMM), a trio that features soprano saxophonist Tom Chant and double bassist John Edwards. This date marked the trio's fifth anniversary, and they have grown into a remarkably powerful and intelligent force. The group's first performances tended to root themselves in a latter-day free jazz style, catching speed with nets of saxophone notes, cymbal figurations and running basslines. These days, though, the group rarely works itself up into the headlong rush of free jazz, and it now thrives on quickness of ears rather than fingers; the complexity of the musicians' interaction generates its own pace. This evening, the trio's sheer collective confidence was apparent from the first second, when Edwards dug in and was answered immediately by both saxophonist and drummer. The group's approach centres around this sort of quick-witted trialogue, but the players are rarely directly imitative of one another. Instead, they often seek to temporarily occupy the same sort of sonic space as one another, approximating each other's soundworlds on their own instruments. Prévost has long been a master of this sort of communication, and he adapts his regular jazz kit to converse with the high and low instruments, scraping his toms with a mallet, sometimes bowing bowls on his snare. While the drummer's identity is pretty much in place, the strategies employed by Tom Chant, a much younger player, seem to be changing very quickly. In the space of a year, he has abandoned his formerly sweet tone and Lacy-like tumbling, as exciting as they could be, for something much more nebulous and decentred. At times tonight, he seemed to be exploring the difference between the extremes of a full-bodied tone and pitchless air, investigating different enunciations of the same sound. Several octaves beneath Chant was John Edwards, whose playing was about as elemental as it possibly could have been. Characteristically, the bassist's bodily involvement with his instrument is total, and yet the impressive physicality of his music is matched by the mobility of his mind; Edwards never seems to repeat himself or resort to bass idiomatics, and communicates with the other musicians by striving to reinvent his instrument with every passing second. Like the trio in general, his instrumental command goes beyond the virtuosic, as the extreme complexity of his approach always remains subordinate to formal logic and shape. Nearly all of the evening's performers will be featured during the freedom of the city festival, London, 3-6 May 2002. Details can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3.
Selected discography:
Lely/Charaoui/Wright, 396 , Matchless Recordings MRCD42
John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew Piano Music 1959-70 , Matchless Recordings
MRCD29; Morton Feldman - All Piano [END ITALICS], London Hall do 13
Eddie Prévost Trio, The Virtue in If , Matchless Recordings MRCD43;
Touch, Matchless recordings MRCD34
© Tom Perchard, 2002