went to sydney on the weekend to see the final show of the luminous festival, which was curated by Brian Eno.
as a finale to the festival he had brought together a bunch of extremely talented, highly respected and innovative musicians; Karl Hyde, Leo Abrahams, Jon Hopkins and The Necks. they also had Toby Vogel doing some projected visuals. oh, and Eno himself performing - first time in Australia apparently.
they were performing three concerts in a row and were slated as being improvised. i would have loved to see all three to really get a sense of what they were doing. and it fits in with the impression, comparison, perspective ideas on performance improvisation that jacob and i have discussed. simply put, experiencing improvised work three times gives you a chance to triangulate and develop your understanding of what those particular artists are doing (in terms of performance at least). the first performance only gives you an impression of what they do, seeing a second allows you to have a comparison, a third time gives you perspective. unfortunately, i could only really afford one show, so my experience is limited to the first show.
the concert hall at the sydney opera house was almost full. probably about 2,000 people there for the first concert I’d say. Karl has put up some photos of the stage on the Underworld blog, which will give you an idea of what it looked like. he seems very pleased to have been involved. we were sitting in the second row, very close to the main speakers - which initially worried me but the mix was excellent and not too loud at all. the audience seemed weighted towards people older than 45 or so, with a smattering of kids and a bunch of 20 and 30 somethings. i imagine Eno himself would be the main draw card and given his longevity in the music industry there would be a wide range of ages interested in his work.
so… the work.
i can only really comment on the first concert, which was a continuous one and half hours of minimalist, ambient, soundscapes and songs, with grooves and rhythms providing anchors to the interactions of electronic and acoustic instrumentation. they also played a short encore as well, almost pop really.
at the bottom of this post there are links to some reviews that describe the work, so i’m not going to do that. what i thought a lot about though (as i often do) was the process. according to Karl they’d had two days together to devise the work. at the end of the set Brian suggested that they were songs by saying something along the lines of “i bet you weren’t expecting us to play songs. you thought we were just making it up.” and there were clear indicators of scoring used to define the different sections of the work. Brian would write things on scraps of paper as instructions to the musicians, as well as providing cues through gestures and visual contact. so essentially it was a structured improvisation with Brian as the band leader. sometimes the audience was shown the instructions via projection, and sometimes not.
there’s a nice quote from eddie in a blog post about the event:
When I closed my eyes I experienced — more than listened to — the sounds; it became less about being an audience member and more about participating in the event.
this encapsulates the idea that in an improvisation there is such a vital link to audience - of course it exists in all performance, but i like how eddie has exposed it in this instance.
if you’re keen to read more, there’s an ad-hoc review from a punter, and a review in the australian newspaper.
there are some videos of the event on youtube as well.
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