Gamelan: our end of year concert

I've been playing with a community gamelan group in the National Concert Hall for a while now, and in June we played an end of year concert. It looked for a while like this would be very ropey, which would be a bit embarrassing given how long some of us have been playing together. But with some extra sessions and hard thought we got it together in the end, or at least so it seemed from where I was sitting. Here's what we played:

• Ladrang Parawisata: this is the one about going on holidays in Indonesia. I had been singing this in Poolewe and was singing it here too, but we were alternating the singing with handclaps and chants in the fast section. I found doing these simultaneously very hard and I'm not surprised I have a look of intense concentration in the one video of the concert that shows me performing on this piece.
• Ladrang Moncer: for me this was the easiest of our pieces in the programme as I just had a basic balungan line to play, something I can pretty much do in my sleep at this stage.
• Jimmy Ward's Gig: an arrangement by Peter Moran, our director, of an Irish traditional music tune for gamelan. We are going to Indonesia next year so the thinking here is that it would be nice to have something Irish to play for the locals. This was a real struggle to learn as it had the standard set of problems for arrangements of western pieces being created for the group, with the piece's score and structure changing from week to week. Also for me the score was confusingly presented on the page, making it easy for my eye to jump to the wrong notes. I found this a lot easier to play when I retyped the score and thanks to that and extra rehearsals I feel like I didn't make a complete mess of this and it all came good in the end. It has this terrifying second part where the piece breaks into harmonies and everyone seems to be playing something different but as fast as is humanly possible, and it's a great feeling when that all lines up. Top marks here however need to go to Lora and Camen, our bonang players, who were delivering the jiggiest part of this jig (and having to play at speeds that were multiples of everyone else's).
• Ladrang Nuswantara: I was playing peking on this, which is similar to the balungan instruments (i.e. it has seven keys) but is played twice as fast as them in Irama 1 and twice as fast in Irama 2 (I will discuss irama in due course). Peking is hard because you have to play more quickly than everyone else but also keep pace with them and not find yourself getting confused, especially when the balungan are repeating notes ("oh balls have I played 5 6 three or four times?"). The Irama change from 1 to 2 is also tricky as you have to first slow down as everyone else does and then start playing more notes but without falling into the temptation to go out of synch with them. I think I managed this OK, with the notes I played mostly lining up with the gong at the end of each round.
• Lancaran Majemuk: A fun piece that saw me playing the kanong, one of those structural instruments. I sometimes find these a bit tricky as I find it easy to lose my place, but for this one I had to play on every second balungan note, which meant less in the way of gaps to get lost in. Kanongs people generally play with a stick in each hand and it took me a while to get the hang of which hand to play which note with, but once I had that this was pretty easy piece to play.
• Wake Up: I disliked Arcade Fire when it was neither profitable nor popular so you might think I would hate playing this arrangement of their big tune by Des Egan, but actually it was fun, once you allow for the usual problems involved with trying to get the hang of western pieces being arranged for gamelan. Maybe all Arcade Fire songs would sound a lot better if they didn't have yer man singing and were being played on a gamelan.

And that was our last song. One of my buds made a recording of the concert and we sound pretty good but I was a bit disappointed at not being able to really hear my peking on Nuswantara or vocals on Parawisata, so I can't evaluate my own performance on the pieces I was most concerned about. Not being able to hear myself on Parawisata was particularly irksome as I was doing my best to belt the tune into the microphone placed in front of me.

The beginner's group played before us and they have some great tunes too, most notably Esuk Esuk, which is insanely catchy. They also had Marta from our group doing shadow puppets (and nearly didn't because just after our last rehearsal I almost stepped on them).

It would be nice if someone posted the short videos of the concert on YouTube, but that's not my decision to take. There is also one long video of whole thing which might also be worth watching on YouTube if it were ever posted there; it's a continuous static shot but it would mean that people at home could see the shadow puppets.

My one big gripe with the concert was that there were a lot of empty seats. And that's not me complaining that philistine Dublin is not queuing up to attend performances of niche music from central Java, because the concert was notionally sold out. The actual target of my ire is the ticketing practices of the National Concert Hall, which gave every participant in this concert two complimentary tickets, notionally selling out the concert in an instant but then leaving some people with tickets they didn't want and others with less than they required. It would be far handier if the concert hall allowed participants a pre-sale period when they could book two tickets if they wanted them and then put the remainder up for the general public (I probably should suggest this to them rather than moan about it here on my blog that is largely devoid of readers).

And now we break for summer, but we are playing at an Indonesian Independence Day event in August at which there might be over a thousand people present. My face appears on the poster (as do other people's). And then we have a gamelan birthday party in September, at which I am hoping some of my Scottish gamelan friends will make an appearance (but will understand if they don't as people with lives). And then classes begin again later in September, except from then we will be counting down to our trip to Java next year.

Archipelago: a fusion of Javanese and Irish Traditional Music

Danger, fusion. This was a concert in the National Concert Hall's Studio by the UCD Traditional Music Group and the UCD Gamelan Orchestra. For anyone reading this who is not familiar with Dublin institutes of higher education, UCD is an abbreviation for University College Dublin. The two student groups here both operate under Dr Peter Moran, who is also the director of the gamelan group I play in and of the NCH Gamelan Orchestra. The concert was a game of two halves, with the two groups playing separately to show off their work, but it was still Irish-music dominated for reasons that will be discussed.

The first half saw the UCD Traditional Music Group playing together on pieces they had been taught by Paddy Glackin (celebrated fiddler known for his solo work but also his sometime membership of The Bothy Band) and learned themselves through field work. They also played their own original compositions. I was struck by how the pieces the students had learned from Paddy Glackin saw them playing together in a large group, while the student compositions all involved solo rather than group play, with the exception of two pieces where each composer played with the other (but in this case the two had previous and were well used to playing together). It was very enjoyable but I don't really have the vocabulary to say too much about the pieces apart from expressing my admiration for them.

Then we had the UCD Gamelan Orchestra, playing the archipelago project with some special guest stars: Mark Redmond (uillean pipes, tin whistle), Viktória Sinkarová (guitar) and Liam Ó Maonlaí (bodhran, vocals). The pieces (or was it one long piece broken up into sections?) were composed and arranged by Moran and Sinkarová with Anon Suneko; Suneko unfortunately could not make the concert because the Trump War had disrupted travel from Indonesia. This half saw the UCD Gamelan Orchestra play gamelan arrangements of Irish (and occasionally Scottish) traditional music (or new music derived therefrom). I'm a bit suspicious of this kind of fusion and whenever I hear of it my first thought is always "why?". There's a question of perspective here. Some people really like exploring what gamelan instruments can do, and part of that is seeing how western pieces have to be adapted to be playable on them (as previously noted, gamelan tunings do not line up with notes on western scales); for many people this is the answer to my "Why?" question. But I am more interested in exploring the repertoire of central Java.

Nevertheless, it did feel like a lot of thought had gone into this piece and overall it worked for me. Crucially it felt like a serious cross-cultural engagement and not a semi-colonialist imposition of western musical forms onto gamelan instruments. The students are going to be recording this as an album and I think it would be worth picking up; it might even be a free download on Bandcamp like the UCD Traditional Music Practices' Seven Springs album (see: here).

The only real quibble I would have with this concert was that they didn't include a traditional Javanese gamelan piece in the programme, as I think it would be useful to give people a sense of what unfused Javanese music sounds like. It might also have been interesting to arrange a gamelan piece for performance by the UCD Traditional Music Group. It feels like people are always arranging western tunes for gamelan instruments but it is far less common for people to try things the other way round.

Liam Ó Maonlaí was an interesting presence here. To people of my vintage he is very famous as the lead-singer of the Hothouse Flowers, who had a monster hit with "Don't Go" after performing it at half-time during the Eurovision. I'm unclear as to how famous he is now with the young people but to me he was the most famous person I have ever seen at a gamelan concert. I was impressed by how he just got on with things and didn't turn proceedings into the Liam Ó Maonlaí Gamelan Experience.

A short review of a Stereolab concert

Blahdiblah, Stereolab, very popular band, went on hiatus when the two of them who were a couple stopped being a couple, now they're back, best album is Astral Weeks etc. This was a sold out concert in the National Concert Hall's main auditorium, which is a bit of a soulless barn that arguably is not well-suited to non-classical concerts. Emma Tricca (interesting folk-adjacent support act) seemed a bit lost in the place, or maybe that's just me in my almost right-at-the-back seat talking. Stereolab filled the space a bit more (the fact that people forsook the bar and took their seats for their set helped). They didn't play many songs I recognised (but that's on me as I own surprisingly little of their music despite having seen them live a gazillion times) but it was all pretty enjoyable. Laetitia Sadier made everyone stand in their seats and dance, which in some ways was nice as it made the concert more engaging but it did mean I wasn't able to get a relaxing snooze in. I did like how Sadier and Tim Gane came on from opposite sides of the stage, echoing the Beach Boys in their "We hate each other" period.

There was also a distinct sense of people out for their one gig of the year about the event, which probably is a feature of acts like this who have been around a long time. The queue for the merch stall was phenomenal, as was the range of stuff the band was selling to soak the last euros out of the audience (ranging from sensible stuff like nice t-shirts, tour singles, albums etc. to items of more questionable utility, like commemorative beer trays (which nobody was being forced to buy)).

Still broadly enjoyable but it was hard to escape the nagging feeling that instead of attending I have should been at home either resting or preparing for the interview I had the following week.

Maria Somerville / Nashpaints (Whelan's)

Maria Somerville is the neo-shoegaze sensation who has been attracting much attention of late. I went to see her at this sold-out concert, accidentally buying two tickets so I had to bring my beloved with me. Whelan's is pretty unpleasant when it's full and we found ourselves stuck over to one side. I also had an amorous couple press in beside me while they attended to each other, but fortunately they moved away before too long.

The support act was Nashpaints. I do not remember them in detail but have a sense of having broadly approving. Two things though:

• My beloved thought they were a bit like the kind of band you might get playing at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks: The Return
• Their music was at least somewhat shoegaze adjacent, particularly as they went on.

Both of these are good things obviously so maybe I should take a punt on their album Blindman the Gambler, available for a fiver on Bandcamp

I was there for Maria Somerville, but I found her performance a bit unengaging. That might partly be that this music does not go down so well alive (she is more Slowdive than Ride) but also I think the venue didn't suit it: this kind of relaxing semi-ambient shoegaze isn't really suited to a hot crowded club venue and would work a lot better somewhere seated. I did think that I have enjoyed it more if I had pushed my way up to the front like some kind of Nietzschean overman, but I wasn't finding the music compelling enough to do that.

Before going to the concert I was thinking about how I didn't really know what Maria Somerville looks like as all the pictures of her are "arty". As I left the concert I realised that I still don't really know what she looks like thanks to backlighting. So she could be anyone I walk past on the street. Anyone.

Her album Luster is still great for home listening and is also on bandcamp.