Matt and I were at Kings Place last night with Filipa and Ian to watch a recreation of Yves Klein’s Monotone Symphony, a rather avant garde concert given in Paris fifty years ago, curated by Theatre Nomad who are currently doing a series of blue projects based on Yves Klein’s work.
The original concert saw a ten piece orchestra play a twenty minute single note while three naked women made body prints in blue paint on pieces of paper. At the end of the twenty minutes, there was a meditative twenty minute period of silence.
Matt and I joined in with the spirit of the original, when the audience were all in black tie, and dressed up. Hardly anyone else did though – do these people have no commitment to the avant garde?! The orchestra were a diverse bunch, some of them looked like they were trying not to burst out laughing at various points, must have been strange playing a concert of one single note for twenty minutes. Their music provided this strangely comforting drone, but the real interest was in the three naked models. We got a bit of a frisson of excitement when they first came into the room, we immediately all stared at their pussies for the first five minutes, well I did anyway. Then we got used to it.
They painted themselves and each other and then rolled around on various bits of paper making body prints. Filipa was disappointed because it seems they didn’t use International Klein Blue, which is the very intense deep blue paint that Yves Klein patented in the 1950s. It was designed to have the same colour brightness and intensity as dry pigments, which it achieves by suspending dry pigment in a clear synthetic resin. Perhaps that would have been quite expensive to use so they used blue poster paint instead?
This concert followed the same formula as the original, ending with the cry “The Myth is in the Art!” but they added an extra twenty minutes where two models did some more body painting while the orchestra played a very discordant descending tune and two singers in black tie and cocktail dress made sinister yelping noises over the top.
Afterwards, we spent some time at the bar upstairs getting a little too drunk and merry for a Monday night. But such is the way with the avant garde.
Just got back from the second part of our two-day Noah and the Whale excursion. They played a gig at the ICA, which was really lovely. The new songs have been growing on us, they build on the quiet-loud quiet-loud folky dynamic of the first album, with gentle faltering songs that build up to lush, rich and massive crescendos! Sparse but rousing, as I saw one review describe it.
It was quite emotional because Doug Fink, the drummer, is leaving the band to become a doctor and this was his last gig. It made for a moving finish.
Matt and I both fancy Doug. He is very handsome, and also has an amazing manner of drumming, where he opens his mouth emphatically with every drum beat. Check out Doug in action around the 4:05 mark at the end of this video!
We saw the new Noah and the Whale album/film combination, The First Days of Spring, at the ICA last night. According to Charlie Fink, one aim in making an album/film combination was to compel audiences to digest the album as a whole, rather than pick and choose songs in the iPod fashion, a sentiment I’m very favourably disposed towards. It’s definitely a concept album, a melancholy meditation on heartbreak and loss, with musical themes repeatedly taken up throughout it, instrumental bits and one really jaunty cool song calling for “the love of an orchestra” in the middle, also corresponding to a particularly fun surreal moment in the film.
It’s quite different from their first album, and I’m enjoying it a lot.
Last day of work this week, I left the office and hopped on the Oxford Espress last night. Opening my laptop I was pleasantly surprised to find that the coach has free internet access on it these days! How cool is that?
Arriving in Oxford I wandered up the high street, enjoying a solitary moment of reflection and fond nostalgia for this town I used to know so well. Then to The Cellar, to see Foxes! and The Hot Toddies near the end of their rock’n'roll two-week UK tour.
It was a splendid gig. I enjoyed listening to The Hot Toddies. They are four sassy girls from Oakland, California who sing lovely doo wop beach rock, with impeccable harmonies, feisty drums and interesting lyrics. They play like they are having a really good time and invite the audience to enjoy themselves too.
And Foxes! were as good as I’ve ever seen them. They’ve been recording their album with Matt producing it, and Matt has come along on tour to boost Kayla, Adam and Alan’s sound. They are loud, confident, powerful and tight at the moment! Properly in control of the music, Kayla’s voice soaring over the top of everything, all of them moving round stage having fun and swapping instruments. I’m full of hope for them!
Foxes! came to stay last night after their London gig, including Alan and Dymphna, who drove them around. Kayla had some salvia divinorum with her. I was really interested in trying it so we smoked some. I had tried to take it before, to no effect, so this time I inhaled lots and kept it in, and got hit quite hard by the psychedelic experience!
I suddenly felt I was flying backwards through the room and my vision became fuzzy, and then everything started breaking up into floating rods of reality. I just about held it together to stagger from the room, though it felt more like I had become the room and I was ejecting this piece of consciousness out of it.
What was left of me fell on to the bed and at this moment I felt I was in several places at once. I was the bed, I was floating in little rods through the air above the bed, and some of me was within this human body too. Most of all I felt like I was the bed and I remember thinking: what will those others say when they come in here and find that I, the bed, have become conscious? I won’t be able to walk or talk for one thing. I knew it wasn’t a good thing.
Then Kayla popped her head round the door and I returned to my human self. It had all lasted just a few minutes. I staggered back into the living room. They had taken some in my absence. Matt felt like he was rotating inside a giant pine cone, made of up spikes from the rapid drums of the Nina Simone version of I Did It My Way that was playing at that moment. He had to put out his legs and hold one finger up in the air to rotate with the pine cone. Kayla pressed her face to the floor and had to shift objects through some sort of carpet house that she found herself in.
Kayla and I took a second milder dose and this time it was more of a mushrooms experience, lots of giggling and amplified cartoon reality.
It’s a really interesting drug. The effect is so intense, but then it’s over so quickly, and the high is quite different from anything else I’ve taken. The sensation of fragmenting your consciousness and actually becoming objects around you is quite an extraordinary feeling.
Matt and I visited Firsts 2008 at the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House last night to see the Modified Toy Orchestra, who are part of this cool circuit bending movement, taking children’s toys and wiring them up to amps and playing weird catchy calculator doll bleep music. They were very good and great fun to watch, deploying their little plastic toys in dramatic deadpan guitar feedback poses, with funny kawaii visuals projected up behind them.
I love this kind of thing. For me it’s all about the startling creativity that can be induced by strict parameters and limitations. What kind of music can you create with a load of plastic kid’s toys? These guys will show you! It’s like Braben and Bell’s Elite, but for music instead of cool space exploration computer games!
I saw this interview somewhere else with Brian Duffy, the humorous lead man in the orchestra:
“It’s much harder to perform live than anything I’ve ever done before,†Duffy says. “When it comes to playing tiny plastic mushrooms, you’ve got to be Âincredibly Âaccurate – it takes months to get it right. I’ll be teaching a new member a part, and Âsaying, ‘No! It’s Âfencepost, fencepost, mushroom, mushroom, daisy, sunflower – you’re playing it all wrong!’â€
We also saw in support a pair of very fit hip hop dancers from The Impact Dance Company, and then an intriguing dancer called Claire Cunningham who danced with her crutches while narrating her life growing up with legs that don’t work normally. Her piece of physical theatre was called Evolution and it seems to be partly about describing how dance has come to be a form of physical therapy for her, increasing her bone density and height as she says at one point, this is perhaps part of the evolution for which she has named the performance. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” she says near the end, and you have this sense of her being a growing changing amalgamation of crutches and person. “But I like it.” She finished with this amazing dance to Singing In The Rain which echoed the dance in the film really pleasingly, including sweeping the crutches around like the umbrella swinging around over the puddles.
Saw Leonard Cohen again at the Royal Albert Hall with Maffs, Rachel and Chazza last night. So good. He repeated all the same jokes like the showman he is, the Webb sisters did a back flip, and he did lots of skipping on and off stage. This time when he played Democracy Is Coming To The USA, everyone cheered when the chorus came round and I got a second wave of drunken post-Obama elation.
Matt and I attended three concerts this week at Kings Place, the new mixed used building and concert venue by Kings Cross, part of its opening “100 concerts in five days” programme.
It’s right next to where I used to work, and I recall I was quite annoyed when they started building it because they knocked down a classic, though somewhat grotty, riverside pub – the Waterside Inn – to do so. Nav, Mel and I used to bunk off work early and sit with our pints of beer in the afternoon sun by the canal until the good bit when Nav got too drunk and started spilling the hardcore gossip.Â
But Kings Place is rather splendid, and it’s amazing that they’ve fitted a theatre, two concert halls and several floors of office space all on this patch of canalside where once there was just one pub. It is the latest wave of the ongoing gentrification of Kings Cross, which meant the sad demise of Fiction and The Cross, but is largely making a patch of noisy busy road urban wasteland into something much more pleasant.
Kings Place is a little soulless, but there is a pleasing restrained style to the architecture. The main concert hall is lovely, very functional, very simple, wood panelling and straight lines, and buried in the basement and supported on rubber pads to protect it from the noisy traffic of Kings Cross.
On Thursday we saw Juldeh Camara playing West African fiddle with Justin Adams who is like Chas the roadie from the 1970s, along with mad ethnomusicologist Salah Dawson Miller on a range of percussion instruments. On Friday we subjected ourselves to a challenging programme of avant-garde twentieth century music on wind instruments, some of the pieces almost entirely without melody, the musicians making strange white noise sounds or letting out violent flute shrieks. There was a nice moment after one piece – Salvatore Sciarrino’s Quintettino No.2 – where they finished playing, looked at the audience, and then musicians and audience all laughed sheepishly as we realised just how absurdly avant-garde the music had been.
In Jordan’s brother’s house in Bristol right now, just having got back from seeing Manic Street Preachers in a leisure centre hall in Newport. Fabulous little gig, they were on good form. They opened the set with Faster, did a storming A Design for Life, got in some La Tristessa Durera, and did a couple of covers: Pennyroyal Tea and Umbrella.
Meanwhile there were middle aged women doing water aerobics in the swimming pool next door. Marvellous.
Newport was good friendly Wales. Two emo girls ran up to us when we were stood there looking lost after we arrived. They asked if they could touch my hair (it’s pink at the moment) and gave us a hug. They directed us to a Wetherspoons – we needed cheap quality beer and food.
A late night at the Old Queen’s Head in Angel, to see Mark H perform two of his own songs at an open mic night. It was good fun, with a jolly shambolic ending in which Mark and various others all got up on stage and sang Hey Jude and various other classics. Everyone kept plugging their MySpace profiles, it’s amazing how all bands in the world are on MySpace.
I enjoyed Nathan Watson and Nightmare Arcade, which is an online virtual band, incarnated in the real world on this occasion by a nice goth girl with a serious rock guitar way about her.
