Anyone going to this year's Instal?

cool pics dude - hope you'll be snapping this year

Anyone anticipating/particularly recommend any of the other names?

Exhibition is now up. Anyone sees it let me know what you think.

ang again?

'and again' that should have said.

i'll be there

i think i'll come on saturday to see joan la barbara. i'm not really interested in seeing/hearing this type of music any more though.

Me too. Although I think you just have to choose your shows right. I saw Otomo Yoshidie/Sachiko M together as a duo last week and it just didn't hold my attention at all. It was the second night of a three day residency, so perhaps they were trying something different to keep it original for folks with three-day passes, but it was all a little to restrained and barely-there without any kind of pay off. Having said that, later that evening they were joined by Christian Marclay as a trio and it knocked me out.

Yoshidie=Yoshihide obviously. I'm scared to type anything more.

prob the weakest instal line-up so far - kinda excited abt herman nitsch, even w/out the blud and guts, but other than that nobody to compare w/ maryanne amacher or hijokaidan - but a £20 'early bird' ticket for the whole weekend still = incredible value for money, and i usually find that one or more of the performances ambushes me w/ unexpected emotion

I'll be there.

Nope. Good luck to 'em, and I really enjoyed the ones I was at, but they've kind of left me behind the last couple of years. I'd like to be able to say I'd seen Nitsch perform, but this isn't going to be the full Schloss Nitsch experience.

tell me about it. the festival has become nothing more than a platform for one man's pretty narrow musical tastes imo. i'm quite amazed he continues to get public money for it.

I'll probably go next year.

i'm quite amazed he continues to get public money for it.

it kind of infuriates me. i could rant about this for days.

Ask Keith at The Herald nicely and he might even give you some space (eg the arts blog?) to do just that ... not sure, but I think it'd be fun.

please do, haha.

xpost

the "kicks vs contemplation" on the website says a lot for me. The proportions for each artist are near-unanimously %10 kicks to %90 contemplation. Is that supposed to be somehow enticing??

"kicks vs contemplation"

i can't find this - could you link it?

To be fair, the few I happened to choose at random had such percentages, but I see now that's not the case throughout. Here's an example:
http://www.arika.org.uk/instal/2009/artists/view/15

There's also a 'sound events per minute' measure.

the publicity etc for instal is always fucken terrible - apologetic and smug at the same time - but i think ppl are o/wise some of yous are being a bit harsh - can't think of another UK event that would bring over Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Hijokaidan, Nitsch, etc etc. the first year i attended, 2005, still ranks as one of the best fests i've ever been to (prob matched only by thurston moore's nightmare before christmas), and i can think of many worse arts grants uses/abuses of 'public money'. aren't all festivals a reflection, to some extent or other, of someone's (narrow) taste - i think, on the whole, the ppl of glasgow shld be proud of Instal and what it represents. i don't know the organisers personally at all, btw, but my suspicion is that they are not getting rich or famous out of it.

pl excuse the errors above, typed in haste at work

worse: every urban music/graffiti workshop ever. i agree the tone of the publicity is general, mocking the high seriousness of the music negates the effort being put in, the layman should not have to figure. I'm not sure we really need another publicly funded sachiko/nakamura outing though, an awful lot of Uk artists could benefit from the money spent on flying them round the world 4 times a year

i think i hit breaking point 2 years ago when i sat watching a (specially flown over) japanese dude hit 2 metal rods together a couple of times then wander out of the space to get the plastic beads he'd forgotton to put in his popcorn maker then come back and turn it on then attempt (unsuccesfully) to hover a ballon over a household fan. totally fucking terrible.

Yeah, my impression is that kicks haven't really been on the agenda at all for the last couple of years.

But, as I say, good luck to 'em. There are umpteen things I resent having my taxes spent on, but subsidising small left-field arts festivals isn't one.

haha jed, yes i remember that guy, total fucken loser - at the same instal, the guy rubbing the blocks of ice (slowly, lightly) to no great effect, plus the two geezers exchanging blank surrealist verse while pedalling on exercise bikes and, the previous year, tom bruno's bad drum solos and fifth rate cecil taylorisms on the old joanna, were also lowlights. esson totally has a stupid soft spot for novelty over music, but sometimes these things work too - i remember loving the set by the bohman brothers right after keiji haino + tony conrad - silly british improv inventiveness at its v. best, perfect aftertase/antidote.

this evening i attended the first of phil minton's choir workshops, free at the arches. recognised a few familiar faces, inc. stew beard mag, bushy bearded noise dude big bloke and that friend of a friend who dresses up ladies as men. also - i think - a guy who used to work at the jazz cafe in london and once got me on the guest list for the art ensemble of chicago, gd man. it was fascinating and inspiring to see and sing up close with minton

and to CAP IT ALL at the bus stop afterwards, after a barren spell since xmas in london, i managed to score a lid off a guy smoking a j, so i'm set!

great stuff ward.

tom bruno was confusingly awful i remember.

i won't be going, as it turns out. i'm going to see some dance at the tramway and it overlaps with joan la barbara, which was the only thing i actually wanted to see so i've nixed it.

spaking of the tramway, Jan Fabre's "Orgy of Tolerance" is on there on the 11th and 12th of april. you might be into it:

http://www.tramway.org/performance/101/orgy_of_tolerance/

http://www.troubleyn.be/page.php?pageID=113&parentID=4&lingo=eng

but its the rest of the stuff on their belgian theatre fest that i'm more excited about.

I'm being a very good boy and putting my photos up super early this year: Instal 2009

For your viewing pleasure and my self-promotion purposes... no slacking in 2009!

tell me about it. the festival has become nothing more than a platform for one man's pretty narrow musical tastes imo. i'm quite amazed he continues to get public money for it.

who is the man?

Barry Esson is the curator of Instal, and I think that's he's The Man referred to here. I'm actually OK with the idea that if he puts in the work to put it together, he gets to decide what he books. However, I used to go to Instal for face-melting guitar/noise acts; he's obviously moved on from that, but I haven't.

Be interested to hear if I missed anything good this year, though.

Krakow, great pics, esp. of Nitsch, who was invisible to us mere mortals in the pews

like soukesian, i missed the lack of rock action at this year's Instal - far too many 'new reductionist' borefests for my liking. filament = biggest letdown of the whole thing

but - some surprises - steve mcaffery's mesmerising sound poetry reading, excellent set by nakamura and an organist (it helped that they were preceeded by an excruiatingly tedious single note organ 'investigation'), some of the local groups that set up in the small studio space weren't afraid to laugh at themselves, Tamio Shiraishi's piercing sax and throat blasts and, best of all a maximalist set from Jerome Noetinger & Jean-Phillippe Gross, the only two geezers to truly bring the noise this time round

oh, tetsuo kogowa's dexterous radio set was also a big highlight

Yup, Kogowa was splendid. I thought the vocal strand was a success - Steve McCafferty was fantastic - but the reductionist stuff was really boring. The extra piece with the four guys in the chapel on Friday was actually ok. There was a weird kind of tension as you anticipated the next barely perceptible move. It was like a chess match. But that was lost in the Arches. Nitsch was pretty cosmic, and the no-input feedback/church organ battle before it rocked.
Filament were a huge disappointment. Sachiko M has done some interesting stuff at other Arika fests, but this was a total bore: contact mics scrunched in her hand, while a turntable with no cartridge and no record spun round. Zzzzz.
Thought the cello piece was utter bollocks. The cellist had made a recording of all the notes he could play. It was a dense, and not particularly interesting, mass of drones. He played it back while destroying the cello, the idea being that having done all he could with the instrument, he could only grind it into dust. Hmmm, I smell bullshit. What made it worse was how deeply boring a performance it was. If you're gonna smash up an instrument on stage then make it cathartic, theatrical. I want deranged looks as they stuff the neck into the wood chipper. I want to see splinters flying.
The Feral Choir was great fun, really liberating to be part of. I think your going to see a lot of Glasgow bands doing a kind of primitivist sound poetry in a few months time!
Beardy noise dude - do you mean my friend Matt, aka Guanoman? He was in fine voice. We're starting a band, working name: Ballcupper: :?
There was some fine stuff this year, but nothing truly mindblowing. As Krakow said to me on the Sunday, Instal used to change your life. Stuff that didn't work didn't matter, cos there was always something completely amazing to balance it out: Mary Anne Amacher, Marginal Consort, Jandek's two appearances, Arrington De Dionyso, Oshiri Pen Penz, Hijokaidn, Haino and Conrad, Richard Youngs... I think this year there was too much emphasis on near silence, although in terms of curatorial consistency this made sense.
That said, I still think it's an amazing festival and one that deserves to be supported. Barry and Bryony do an amazing job in making such a success of what is an uncompromising festival and I don't doubt their sincerity and passion. There wasn't room for all this in my List preview, but Barry was quite open about elements of the festival that haven't worked in the past, such as the Cherry Blossom Ball, so I certainly don't think there's any arrogance in their curatorial decisions. Overall, this was the first disappointing Instal for me, which isn't to say it didn't have some really good stuff. But I've not been put off it in future. Who knows what we'll get next year? I look forward to finding out.