sixteenth annual festival of EXPERIMENTALIST music

Ooh I'd love to go see Charlemagne Palestine, I've only heard Strumming Music but it is mesmeric indeed. And I have no other plans for tonight.

JimD would be up for it as well probably.

I went last night. Missed the first 2 acts as I was held up elsewhere.

Yasunao Tone - aged Japanese guy on a laptop, playing his "wounded CD" stuff which pretty much reminded me I have to sell that album of his I own. Extreme noise but without much development, got one-dimensional after a while. Great vocal interlude in the middle, all too short though.

Taku Sugimoto - uhhhh, look I love a minimalist approach but this was a bit too much. One guitar note, endlessly repeated in various octaves with lengthy pauses and the occasional harmonic. Around half the audience bailed out before the end. Maybe someone from the I Hate Music board can explain it to me? Shame, as I really like the solo albums I've heard, and his contributions to one of those Otomo Yoshihide pieces on Tzadik elevated the whole thing, but on its own it sounded more like a comment on the percieved tastelessness of anyone else reaching for emotional affect of any sort. If that makes any sense.

£15 not well spent. Can't make it tonight or Saturday due to work commitments unfortunately, Charlemagne Palestine is something else going by the previous times I saw him.

"mesmeric minimalist legend Charlemagne Palestine". ridiculous self-naming = effective

This is actually a genuine way of saying his real name, no?

Yeah, more or less.

Discussion here

Anyone go to Friday or Saturday then?

Oh yes indeed, I went on Friday with not much in the way of hope or expectation.

The first act was awful. Two women using video, electronics, and a recorder. The video was just various random staticy patterns and was used to generate the music, lo and behold an uninteresting assortment of staticy noises. The recorder was a six-foot tall homemade looking top heavy monopod with various flaps and wholes. I don't know what I was expecting it to sound like but I did not expect it to sound like someone sucking through a didgeridoo.

The second act was awful. Two men, one with a tuba and one with a trumpet. They also seemed keen on sucking, or at least blowing so as to produce the quietest and yet least tuneful noise possible. The trumpeter had various tricks such as using a small drum as a mute, or turning his instrument sideways and somehoe blowing straight into the valves. Incredible.

These pieces went on for 45 minutes, I should say.

After an unnecessarily and interminably long - well half an hour - interval the curtain rose, and there was Charlemagne Palestine. I had been expecting a black-clad, sombre looking guy - but sat between two harpsichords was a large American hippy, with a cartoonishly colourful shirt, a cowboy hat with a yellow scarf tied around, and on the floor, a suitcase containing an extremely motley collection of stuffed toys. He had a brandy snifter, and he was stroking the rim to make it sing, occasionally pausing to take a drink. Suddenly he launched into a random anecdote.

"37 years! It's all changed in 37 years. I tell you, when I first did this it was in a convert hall in California, in Los Angeles. It was still being built, and so it looked just like a giant gymnasium. And I was there in this giant gymnaisum, and my brandy snifter was this big! [indicates a shape roughly the size of a basketball]. I had a whole bottle of Remy Martin in there, and I went round and offered it to people... I tell you what why don't we do that again!"

So he got up and offered his glass along the front row, exhorting people not to drink too much as there were a lot of people in the audience and he wanted some left at the end. When the front row was done he realised that perhaps there wasn't enough in the glass for *everyone*, so he asked who wanted some, various people put their hands up, and so he walked up and down passing the glass out. Someone next to me got the glass and so as it went passed I grabbed a sip of Charlemange Palestine's brandy that he had been liberally dipping his finger into. When he had almost returned to the stage he started off on another anecdote [I kind of zoned in and out a couple of times so may have missed some crucial exposition that might make more sense of the whole thing... but the spirit is there]:

"When Morton Feldman started he was playing pieces that were twenty minutes long. I was living downtown at the time and someone asked Morton whether his music was part of the "Downtown style." "What Downtown style?" he said, "I don't know anything about any Downtown style.". And so I wrote him a letter, in my own hand, and I said "Moreton, you take your finger, and you shove it up your ass! And then you take your finger back out, and you sniff it. Signed, the Downtown Composers community." And when Moreton saw me, whenever he saw me after that he would say [a very affronted tone] "No-one! No-one has ever said anything to me like that!" But after that, when he played with John Cage, and whenever he would play, his pieces were two, sometimes three hours long! So you can thank me for that!"[*]

So then he went back to the brandy-glass singing, and he started accompanying it with with his own thin falsetto, he could have been singing a Hebrew chant, it could have been Hopi Indian for all I know. This was obviously something of a private ritual, a precursor to the performance.

Eventually he got around to the harpsichords. He started banging out a couple of notes on one, then added a few more. The rhythm was inconsistent, the chords were dissonant, the harpsichords didn't seem to produce the same kind of unusual overtones that he gets from the piano on Strumming Music - perhaps I just wasn't listening properly or closely enough but it seemed distinctly lacking in any mesmeric qualities. Anyway he carried on banging out clusters of notes, going back and forth between the two harpsichords... at one point the lid of the harpsichord he was playing, that had been folded back and was lying along the top of the instrument, started banging up and down. Whether this was from the resonances of the instrument, or just because he was hitting the thing so damn hard, I have no idea. The sound had moved in the opposite direction from mantras and mesmerism, towards tension, and even fear - I was afraid for the structural integrity of the instruments! He started playing both harpsichords at once... and by the end he was hammering down the whole flat of his hand across the bass notes of both instruments, the lids were banging up and down, he was bouncing up and down on his stool with a maniacal grin on his face. For all I could tell this was just some crazy old guy hammering away on two harpsichords for his own senile amusment - but the sound coming out was very loud and very terrifying, and the whole performance reached a climax of strange and extreme intensity.

And then he was followed by some guy making loud scary noises with electronics so I left.

[*] I found something that makes a little more sense of the story - http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2007/11/when_geniuses_collide.html

Sounds like the last bit of "Murder Mystery" Velvet underground.

"on its own it sounded more like a comment on the percieved tastelessness of anyone else reaching for emotional affect of any sort. If that makes any sense."

I've enjoyed Sugimoto's music quite a bit in the past, its like they've all decided that it isn't possible to get a life-changing performance out of 4'33"...so they 'amp it up' to an incredibly single minded pursuit (he's still at it), a puritanical disdain toward anything like an affect - often wonder if it too easily goes to polarize mode, and "where can he go?" is a chilling question when it comes to Sugimoto and Malfatti. To extend what ppl are saying in that IHM thread not only ws Sugimoto/Tone a bad piece of programming (Tone is awful), I'd actually have a whole evening (or all three) of that kind of stuff, just so as to subject it to a more rigorous scrutiny, if you like - and should he be heckled bcz someone loses patience, so what?

But I didn't attend -- keep missing Palestine.

Palestine is a character, a friend took his seminar at SFAI last year and said his first assignment to the class was for every student to provide him the name of five good local bars