Concert: Byron Wallen's Boards of Canada

I know Boards of Canada are very famous but their music largely passed me by and I am almost completely unaware of what it sounds like. This concert was meant to be jazz trumpeter's tribute to their famous album Music Has A Right To Have Children, but not the kind of tribute where he slavishly reproduces the tunes. He also had some gamelan players in his line-up, which was what pushed me over the line up into picking up a ticket for this National Concert Hall event.

But first the support act. These were local outfit the Glasshouse Ensemble and they were performing the music of the Aphex Twin. Their core seemed to be a small string section, but they also had a drummer and someone doing stuff with electronics. They were reproducing tunes by the Aphex Twin, which for me made the presence of the synther problematic: creating a simulacrum of electronic music on acoustic analogue instruments (plus drums) is impressive, but if you are also using electronics I am not going to be quite so impressed. Still, it never felt like the synth was doing the main work here, with the concert coming across pretty much like it was an arrangement of the Twin's work for strings. Most of the tunes seemed to be from the Selected Ambient Works albums but I think they also threw in one or two from Drukqs. The drummer put in great service reproducing the beats from the records, to the extent that I had to keep reminding myself that they had not just sampled the Twin's programmed drumming. And they finished with "Windowlicker", impressively realised on the strings.

As noted above, Byron Wallen's Gayen Gamelan Ensemble included some gamelan musicians, playing on the National Concert Hall's own set. His gamelan group was relatively small, however, and they did not play prominently on all of the tracks (and they skipped a few entirely). It was also quite striking that Wallen himself abandoned his trumpet and took to playing one of the gamelan instruments on the pieces that were the most gamelan-heavy. The gamelan stuff was the highlight of this for me, both the Javan piece and the couple of new compositions. What I liked about the new compositions was the way they served up what I most like about gamelan (lots of people playing at once in unison), when it often happens that when I see people playing new western pieces on gamelan they go all experimental and just have one or two guys dicking around instead of playing to the instruments' strengths.

Wallen himself comes across as an amiable gent, which is half the battle, and I also enjoyed his jazz parpings. I must get a copy of Music Has A Right To Have Children now, and indeed explore Byron Wallen's own work.

images:

Music Has the Right to Have Children (Wikipedia)

Byron Wallen's Gayan Gamelan Ensemble (Trinity Centre, Bristol: "Byron Wallen's Gayan Gamelan Ensemble")