Hurry on Down to Music Town (The Complex)

Music Town was a series of concerts taking place around a weekend in various venues within The Complex (a new-ish venue just off Jervis Street). It was billed a festival, but each event was ticketed separately, making it easy to cherry pick the concerts that most appealed to your taste.

The first event I saw a concert on the Thursday evening saw a collection of acts that would not have been out of place at the greatly missed Hunter's Moon festival. First up was Aoife Wolf, who was probably the person on the bill I was most interested in seeing, as her recorded work suggests she is an artist of great promise. Unfortunately for me, her set started at 7.00 pm and I arrived at 7.20, which meant I missed most of her short set. I did at least catch her doing a song written on a haunted piano and an impressive cover of Sinéad O'Connor's "Mandinka". Check her out on Bandcamp.

Next there was Natalia Beylis and Eimear Reidy. Reidy played cello while Beylis played keyboards and electronic stuff. This was an amazingly immersive piece of work that I would have happily listened to all evening. From chatting to other attendees I sensed that this collaboration had a strong impact on everyone who heard it, even those who were unfamiliar with the previous work of each musician. "Oh my God, that was amazing, what was it?" was a typical reaction. Their album Whose Woods These Are is worth the time it would take you to investigate it.

Then came Adrian Crowley, playing on his own but with some pre-prepared accompaniment. He is an odd figure: a fixture on the Irish music scene but someone who has neither become very successful nor slunk away into the margins as an embittered eccentric muttering about how the business failed him. Instead he just keeps going on, playing to his fans and popping up at events like this. To some extent I find the idea of Adrian Crowley more interesting than the music he makes, but it's not as though I have ever properly investigated it. His stage demeanour is intriguing, an odd but appealing blend of nervousness and confidence. He has an extensive back catalogue.

And finally Anna Mieke. She sings songs and plays guitar and she had other musicians playing with her. For me she suffered from being so late on the bill at a point where I was a bit *tired*, but I think her work might replay further investigation. Her guitar playing in particular is very impressive. She is also on Bandcamp.

I should note that I was somewhat star struck during the above concert as I think I was sitting across an aisle from Cormorant Tree Oh, hardly a household name but an artist of singular talent who would have fitted well onto the night's bill.

I sat out Music Town on Friday, but did go to another concert on the Saturday. This turned out to be a mistake as instead of the Hunter's Moon adjacent stuff of the Thursday this was all entry level music for young people. The draw for me was I Dreamed I Dream being on the bill, as I found them entertaining when I saw them supporting the Wormholes in the National Concert Hall. They are an all woman punk-influenced band from Cork with terrifying hair and an appealing art-rock ethos. I quite enjoyed their set but after they finished I felt increasingly out of place and left for the comfort of my pipe and slippers.

On the last night of the festival I saw Crash Ensemble performing Philip Glass's Glassworks. This is a six movement piece from 1982 written by Glass to push his music to a wider audience. The individual movements are fairly self-contained and the piece is album length (originally the cassette release was mixed specifically for Walkman listeners). The opening piano piece sounded familiar without feeling like it was doing the Philip Glass fast-slow thing, and was then echoed by the closer. The middle sections were doing the fast-slow thing, combined with non-verbal vocals and the like. The instruments used by the small ensemble involved both traditional instruments and synthesisers; I would love to know how the scoring worked for the latter.

Maybe now when you know Koyaanisqatsi backwards this all feels almost cosily familiar in style terms, but you can see how Glassworks would have blown people's minds back in 1982. Even with the familiarity Glass's music enjoys now this still packed a punch, making this a candidate for live performance of the year.

So that was it for Music Town. I felt I only scratched the surface with the festival, as there were other evening concerts I missed, as well as ones happening in the afternoon. There was also a whole jazz strand that I completely failed to engage with, for all that I wuv jazz. I'm not sure Music Town entirely gelled as a festival, feeling more like a series of disparate gigs with not much of an overlapping theme. I would be curious as to how much overlap there was between the audiences of the separate concerts; my impression is not much. That might perhaps be addressed in future Music Town festivals by the introduction of all-in ticketing, though that might lead to its own complications.

More concert photos

[Live] New Music Dublin

Wow, someone has managed to get the funding together for another modern composition festival in the National Concert Hall, truly the Celtic Tiger is back. But they are still not selling any kind of season ticket to this so going to more than a coupe of events is unaffordably expensive if like me you are attempting to live within your means. Thus I made it to just three events this year. The handy combination of my bad memory and time constraints means that I will not say too much about them.

The first event was a concert in the John Field room by the Arditti Quartet. These are the string quartet of Mr Arditti and they play the modern composition. I have no memory of the composers of the pieces they played on this occasion, but I do remember quite a few of them being of the scratchy scrapey variety. As a person of forward thinking tastes this was right up my alley, but when one movement of one piece suddenly went all melodic (I think representing snowfall or rainfall or something) I found myself thinking that maybe melody is a bit underrated in the world of modern composition, which made me wonder if I was turning into Geir Hongro (Mr Hongro is this fellow I remember from the I Love Music message-board, who used to post about how melody is the only important thing in music and that music without melody is not worth listening to, always advancing this extreme opinion in a very polite and courteous manner regardless of the critical brickbats that would be thrown his way).

Then on Friday I went to a concert by the Crash Ensemble who were playing in what used to be the Engineering Library of UCD in Earlsfort Terrace and has now been annexed to the National Concert Hall. I was amused by the idea that the musicians were sitting where once bound volumes of the International Journal of Sludge Disposal once were shelved. The pieces played were by Michael Gordon and Gyorgy Ligeti and were enjoyable. I think maybe the chamber concerto of Ligeti was the most enjoyable piece as it made the fullest use of the ensemble.

After that in a mysterious room (but not the old Medical Library as claimed by the programme) we were treated to a "performance" of Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'Oktphonie'. I put performance in scare-quotes because this was one of those electro-acoustic events where it is all pre-recorded and you could basically be sitting at home listening to it if you had good enough sound system. This was played in room with four speakers (not 8, unless there was an extra four I failed to notice) and the music did proper quadrophonic stuff, moving around the corners and all that. As this was on quite late and I had had a little drink I did get a bit puppy tired and nearly nodded off once or twice, which was most enjoyable.

One final interesting thing about the Friday concerts was that I recognised a lot of faces I am used to seeing at the kind of avant-garde musical events I associate with the Skinny Wolves-Joinery-Hunters Moon axis. I tend not to see that kind of people at events associated with the Crash Ensemble, Ergodos or Kaleidoscope. Could it be that the musical barriers are breaking down and the separate worlds of weirdo music are merging into one unstoppable force?

image source (Wikipedia)

New Music Dublin website (check out all the things I did not go to)

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"The Intelligence Park"

I went out to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, where Crash Ensemble where doing a concert performance of Gerald Barry's fascinating opera The Intelligence Park. This is set in the past and is about a puppet-fancying composer who becomes obsessed with a star castrato. It was on the same night as the UK Queen and Prince Phillip were going off to some posh event somewhere, which meant that it was horrendously difficult to get around the city, with everything being under lockdown. We found ourselves stuck on the wrong side of the river while they closed all the bridges before the Queen drove up the quays. This was a bit annoying, but it did mean that I caught a glimpse of the royal car and its inhabitants waving* – and of some guy being carted off by the cops after he shouted "Fuck off back to England" at our visitors.

The worst bit of all the delay was that the concert performance was to be preceded by a wine reception – or so we had been told. When we arrived, it was not so much a wine reception as a wine bar – as in, you had to pay for your drinks. I don't know what Prince Philip would have said (which might just have happened – he and the Queen had apparently been given a compilation CD of contemporary Irish music**; having given it a listen you could imagine the Prince making his excuses and leaving whatever ghastly event he was attending so that he could catch some of this contemporary music in the flesh).

Anyway, the opera. It begins with a boy soprano singing a song. I've never really got boy sopranos before, but there was a beauty to the vocals issuing from this young fellow. I found myself almost understanding the fondness of certain people in the past for castrating boy singers so that their voices would develop an adult's strength while retaining the ability to hit the high notes. Maybe that was the point of the boy soprano's appearance – he did not seem to have anything directly to do with the rest of the action.

As I was saying, the opera was about this composer who also makes puppets and who becomes obsessed with this castrato singer. He starts mixing up the puppets and the real people and eventually loses all sense of reality, particularly after the cheeky castrato runs away with the posh bird he is meant to be marrying. I seem to recall hearing that, back in the day, castrati were very popular with the ladies and could be surprisingly saucy, so this twist was not entirely ridiculous. To the extent that the composer character was really aware of what was happening, he seemed more bothered by the loss of the castrato rather than the disappearance of his lovely fiancée and the rich inheritance she promised. Such is love.

I think a fully staged performance of this would have been fascinating. I also was interested by the way Barry worked against gender and voice stereotyping in giving lines to the characters – you might think that the castrato character would be sung either by a woman or by a counter-tenor – not a bit of it, the part was sung by a man with a singing voice that did not even hint at lacking anything in the meat-and-two-veg department. I did like the way he acted the part, however, as he did a great castrato-face***.

Gerald Barry himself was knocking around at the event. He seems to be a bit of a roffler, quite far removed from the stereotype of the austere contemporary composer. Given how enjoyable The Intelligence Park and the pieces by him on the CD IMMA gave away with Boulevard Magenta (their art magazine), I cannot but think that he is someone whose work I must explore further.

*I'm not proud – I waved back.

**including actual music by Gerald Barry.

*** Opera singer's voice: "Do you mind, that's the way I always look".

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