LIO on the water

This sunday 29th of november sees the annual LIO end of the year bash on board the HMS president, moored along side the embankment near Blackfriars bridge.

8pm

 

about an Interlace gig

By Richard Pinnell |

 ”The last piano/strings/electronics trio was made up of visiting French pianist Marjolaine Charbin, bassist Guillaume Viltard and the electronics of Grundik Kasyansky, and althogh really very different again, it was another supremely moving and darkly humorous performance. Just recently Grundik Kasyansky seems to have turned into a magician. I say this because he sits behind a blank, grey box of tricks, occasionally throws his arms about in the air, and somehow, without seeming to do anything (and I’ve been watching carefully!) odd disembodied little second long grabs of pre-recorded material somehow jump out from the otherwise abstract electronic music. He also dresses in a top hat and a cloak.

One of the above statements isn’t true, but one thing Kasyansky does for certain is use a small clip -on microphone (I described it incorrectly as a spanner last time, I’m probably wrong here as well) as his main focus, dramatically rubbing it around the floor at one point, using it inside the end of Charbin’s piano at another. Even just waving it violently in the air seemed to create light crackles, and all of this resulted in a set of sounds used sparingly enough, and at just the right moments to bring bright colour to the music. then there are the little bursts of sound that come out of nowhere and seem completely unrelated. There are specks of classical music, some kind of odd singing in a foreign tongue, a passing car etc etc. These always appear at a low volume and literally for a fleeting moment, buried in the otherwise fluid exchanges of the music. When the first few appear you wonder if what you heard was something else, such is their nature, close enough to perhaps be mistaken, but oddly out of place enough to stand out.

Viltard played less than he did when I saw him perform with 9! on Tuesday, and his lighter, more spacious touch, much of it without a bow worked well when combined with the bold strokes of Charbin’s purely acoustic piano, a mixture of inside techniques and straight-up, sat-down playing. On occasions the two French nationals tipped things into jazzier areas, never quite falling into free jazz structures, but hinting at it, though never for long enough that Kasyansky’s interventions wouldn’t pull things right back. The trio played with suddenly contrasting dynamics, as had the group before them but not the same extremes, and instead sounded the most cohesive and musically assured group of the night, working as a unit to create shapes in the music that kept things bouncing about, but also ensured a strong sense of structure. The wild card moments from Kasyansky, whether they be sudden assaults on the stage floor with the clip/spanner mic or the rabbit from the hat additions of the prepared sounds were regularly humorous as well, not laugh your head off funny, but smile across face cheek. Too often the value of humour in improvised music is overlooked or underestimated. It worked really well on this occasion.”

 

9! @ the ICA

Drummer Eddie Prévost cofounded the experimental music improvisation ensemble AMM in 1965; the group were pioneers of free improvisation, consciously aiming to play outside of existing musical structures. Since 1999 Prévost has convened weekly improvisation workshops which attract a huge range of international players. 9! sprang out of these workshops; a group of nine musicians with a diverse approach to instrumentation and electronics. Tonight’s players are Paul Abbott on electronics, Jamie Coleman on trumpet, Ute Kanngiesser on cello, Grundik Kasyansky on electronics, Ross Lambert on guitar, Sebastian Lexer on piano and computer, Eddie Prévost on percussion, Guillaume Viltard on double bass and Seymour Wright on alto saxophone. 

 @ the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Tuesday 17th November 2009, 7.30pm as part of Calling out of Context  14 November 2009 - 22 November 2009

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