They also make music in Ireland: three Irish records reviewed

Michael McHale Moonlight (2022)

This release on the Ergodos label sees pianist McHale tackling Beethoven's Appassionata and Moonlight sonatas, interspersed with shorter pieces by Linda Buckley and Áine Mallon. Despite my interest in contemporary music, I mainly bought it so that I could have a copy of the Moonlight Sonata to listen to. McHale's performance of this feels a bit non-standard, with the playing seeming to be a bit more delicate than other versions I have heard. I am not familiar enough with the Appassionata to judge this rendition, but the playing seems a good bit more in your face than on the Moonlight Sonata. The two short contemporary pieces meanwhile function effectively as introductions to the Beethoven sonatas, with Buckley's piece played with the diffidence of the Moonlight Sonata, while Mallon's "Raindrop Prelude" has the more aggressive playing of the Appassionata; it could also be said to have notes invoking falling rain.

Overall an enjoyable listen but I think I would need to listen more closely to a standard performance of the Moonlight Sonata to appreciate the deviation here. You can check it out yourself on Bandcamp: https://ergodos.bandcamp.com/album/moonlight

Cormorant Tree Oh Cormorant Tree Oh [2018]

You will recall how impressed I was by Ms Cormorant Tree Oh, the mysterious balalaika playing lady who played support to local gothgazers A Ritual Sea. It turns out that Cormorant Tree Oh is actually a stage name, and her real name is Mary Keane. On stage she came across as a bit of an outsider artist weirdo, albeit one with clear musical talent and application, but here we have a record that is much more form the world of spooky weirdo folk, with songs about werewolves and stone circles, while the music is a mix of electronic and acoustic instruments. There is not much in the way of credits on her Bandcamp page, but I suspect this is something she knocked up herself, and extremely impressive it is too. Its eerie, ritualistic sounds have been on repeat here in my brane and I suspect they would be in yours too if you give this a listen. I see she is releasing another album in September… which may mean that she will do another live show. Exciting. Check out her stuff on Bandcamp: https://cormorant-tree-oh.bandcamp.com/music

Fears Oíche (2021)

Fears is the recording name of Constance Keane. I bought this after liking a track on a friend's compilation of their favourite tunes of 2021. This album, whose title must surely be unpronounceable to anyone who has not been through the Irish education system, is a collection of downbeat electronic sounds over which we get Keane's delicate vocals. The lyrics touch on Keane's mental health issues, which on occasion saw her in psychiatric institutions, but just letting the beautiful music wash over you stops this being a harrowing trudge. You can listen to it yourself on Bandcamp: https://fearsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/o-che-2 images:

Moonlight (Bandcamp)

Cormorant Tree Oh (Bandcamp)

Oíche (Bandcamp)

Guest Star Irene talks about Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope Night, Dublin, 2nd November

And now we have a special treat for all readers – a guest post from the mysterious lady who goes only by the name "Irene", talking about an event back in November that I also attended but failed to write about.

"Transformation, musical alchemy – this is my theme, as Kaleidoscope dips in and out of time commemorating and celebrating all the living and the dead, the new and the old, old-new and new-old-invoked, empowered, charged: a kind of sonorous hexing. Yes, hex: to bewitch. German and Swiss immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania in the late 17th century spoke a dialect of German known as Pennsylvania Dutch. In this dialect hexe was the equivalent of the German verb hexen, "to practice sorcery." The English verb hex, first recorded in the sense "to practice witchcraft" is borrowed from Pennsylvania Dutch, as is the noun…."

Thus spake Bernard Clarke, presenter of Nova on RTE Lyric FM and general modern music guru. Yes, he does go off on one occasionally, God bless him. But we let him rattle on, knowing that eventually he'd shut his yap and let the musicians do their thing. 2nd of November is All Souls' Day and has spooky pre-Christian roots, hence Bernard's shiteing on about witchery.

Kaleidoscope Night has been going for nearly two years, and seems to be based more or less on the old salon idea where people gather in a small, informal group to dig some live performances of new music. It also echoes a sort of 1960s beatnik "happening", only with classically-trained musicians. The people involved are from the classical avant-gardey end of Dublin's music scene – there's a big overlap with the Crash Ensemble (Ireland's Bang On A Can or Kronos) and the Ergodos lot. We went along with our friend Tim, who plays some music but is more from the trad/bluegrass end of things. The venue is a rather plush upstairs room with bar, low lights, groovy 70s décor etc. Nice.

First up was guitarist/composer Enda Bates and his hexaphonic guitar, or as I like to call it his Fucking Hexaphonic Guitar. I don't know why I'm so exasperated by the idea – it might just be that for me it is indistinguishable in appearance and sound from any ordinary electric guitar. So I don't see why the "hexaphonic" element merits any mention. Enda Bates would probably differ. In his own words, the hexaphonic guitar "provides six discrete audio outputs, one for each string. This multi-channel output can then be processed and spatialised to a loudspeaker array, transforming a standard electric guitar into a new instrument for the performance of spatial music." Which sounds great, but srsly, it sounded just like a normal guitar to me. He did two pieces, one of which was slightly ambient and pedaltastic and the other of which was picky and John Faheyesque. Maybe he needs to do a double-header with some guitarist with a normal guitar so we can tell the difference.

Next we had clarinettist Paul Roe, performing Stravinsky's Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet, which were composed in 1919 (i.e. post-Rite of Spring). They were all quite short and varied, two out of three using a low clarinet (one slow and haunting, one a bit more improvvy and jazzy) and the last one pitched higher and sounding a lot more up for it and vivacious and complicated. I don't know if Stravinsky was listening to jazz at this time – I think Paul Roe said one of the pieces was a follow-up to his Russian Songs), but there was a lot of jazz there to my ears. I liked these.

Then the Ergodos Musicians, largely composed of familiar faces from various modern music collectives (boy, do these fellows love to collaborate), did some rather beautiful and appropriate-for-the-encroaching-winter vocal liturgical music. The first selection was from Léonin, called Viderunt Omnes Part 1, from 12th-century Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The second was the "Kyrie" from the Messe de Nostre Dame by 14th-century composer Guillaume de Machaut, which is apparently very famous if you know about such things. The two lady singers Michelle O'Rourke and Nora Ryan did that glacial medieval counterpoint thing, and the cello and clarinet accompaniment was suitably understated. The pieces were in some way arranged by Garrett Sholdice, another composer who pops up a lot on this scene. Why don't I listen to more of this kind of music?

After the interval, the beatnik-happening quotient was upped by a performance by poet Dave Lordan. I approve of this mixing up of artistic endeavours and didn't find the poetry completely fatuous or annoying. This is surely a result. Matters were helped by the fact that I know Dave slightly from my political-activism days, and he's a top fellow.

Finally, well almost finally, we had the Quiet Music Ensemble. As their name suggests, they specialise in … quiet stuff. There is probably a very elastic definition of what constitutes "quiet", because surely you can't just play Morton Feldman all day. Or maybe you can. Anyway, they did two pieces, one an improvisation and the other by Susan Geaney called Vacuum. I found both pieces quite similar in that they both reminded me of Salt Marie Celeste by Nurse With Wound. Maybe amplified creaky cello noises and minimalist electric guitar and saxophone will do that. Anyway, a nice spooky finish …. Except that then all the various musicians (or those that weren't occupied at the bar) got up on stage for a bit of a jam. It pretty much followed the template of all jams, in that the musicians probably got much more out of it than the audience.

And that was it. Not bad for a dank, dark Wednesday night in November.

bye bye Irene

An inuit panda production

flyer image source (which is actually the Kaleidoscope website... watch as they trace the link back and then send Enda Bates to get hexaphonic on my ass)

Bernard Clarke image source

Trio Scordatura "Dubh"

The Scords are this classical three piece comprising Elisabeth Smalt on viola, Alfrun Schmid on voice, and Bob Gilmore on keyboards. They play music inspired by the ideas of Harry Partch*. One problem with this record, however, is that it comes with no sleevenotes or anything like that. So I know from a fascinating radio interview with Bob Gilmore on Nova and things he has said when playing live that the trios' music is inspired by the ideas of Harry Partch*, but I cannot not really tell you what those ideas are.

Anyway Dubh features a load of tracks by people like Judith Ring, Linda Buckley, Garrett Sholdice, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, etc. And nothing composed by Bob Gilmore, which surprised me. I know that Gilmore is a musicologist and an expert on this kind of music, so you would think he would be able to knock something together to include on the record, but nothing appears. Maybe he is a hard-line non-composer, or maybe it is considered bad form to record your own compositions. I do not know. The actual musical pieces sound like they come from the dark ambient tradition rather than anything obviously "classical", using either electronics or funny viola sounds to create a disconcerting atmosphere. I recommend this highly to people who like that sort of thing.

Later: I wrote the preceding embarrassment of a non-review some time ago for Frank's APA. Let me try again to make one more attempt to get across some idea of what the music on this record sounds like. The tracks are mainly driven by the combination of Schmid's largely wordless vocals and Smalt's playing of the adapted viola. I think of the defining characteristic of this record as being slowness – we get pieces where notes are held for long periods, perhaps with very gradual change. This reminds me, of course, of the performance of James Tenney's In a Large Open Space that I saw a year or two back, with which this lot were involved. Some of the other tracks are more from the world of, eh, scratchy viola music, while some of the others use electronics as well as instrumental music. I am curious as to how the composer-performer relationship works with the pieces that use a lot of electronics, as my basic idea of how musical notation works does not comprehend how a composer would tell a performer what to do in this area. Does anyone have any ideas here?

Anyway, I hope that gives a better idea of what to expect with this record. I continue to recommend it highly, but I accept it is not for everyone. That said, I have started to imagine an alternate universe in which this kind of music suddenly becomes amazingly popular, with the Trio Scordatura playing sold-out concerts in the O2, contestants on X-Factor performing covers of tracks from this record and Paris Hilton bringing out an album inspired by the music of James Tenney. Would this be a better world than the one we have?

Should you wish to acquire the Trio Scordatura record, it can be purchased in the Winding Stair bookshop (ask for "the CD", as it is the only one they stock) or online from Ergodos.


*Or maybe it's James Tenney – it's so hard to remember things.

image source (Ergodos)

An inuit panda production

The Ergodos Festival – Trailing Thoughts

I have been thinking a lot about how few people were at the performance of In A Large, Open Space, the James Tenney piece where the audience walk around a large open space while the scattered performers play the same not over and over. I remain undecided as to whether the low attendance resulted from a failure of publicity on the part of the festival organisers or an essential lack of interest in forward thinking music in the people of Dublin.

In some ways, though, it was just as well that not too many people came along. Things could have got a bit awkward if even a couple of dozen had made it – we would all have found ourselves getting in each others' way as we walked around, and fights would probably break out when people bumped into each other. I suspect that when Tenney wrote the piece he had more in mind a completely open large space – either a warehouse, say, or a church with the seating taken out – and you would need somewhere like that if you were having a large audience.

It was a bit of a shame that the Ergodos people did not ask us along to the massive kegger they obviously must have had on after the festival ended… I mean, there were so few people at the last concert that it would not have made much difference to how quickly all the booze ran out. It would have been great to hang out and discuss double-barrelled name issues with the organisers, and to discover what the various other attendees' games were.

ERGODOS Day 9: In a large, open space

This was the last event in the Ergodos festival – a performance of a conceptual piece by James Tenney, taking place out in St. Bartholomew's Church out in Ballsbridge (just across from the Embassy of the Great Satan). This was happening under the direction of Bob Gilmore and Elisabeth Smalt of the Trio Scordatura (see last time), and the performance was by the Ergodos All-Stars, basically a selection of the people who had been around during the week – Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, Garrett Sholdice, Jonathan Nangle, and many others. Sadly, they were shy one musician, so they had to perform with less than the twelve minimum the score requires, but we would not have noticed the difference if they had not told us.

In a large, open space is a rather unusual piece of music, challenging the conventions of the form in a most radical manner, both in strictly musicological terms and in how the audience relate to the performers. Usually with musical pieces there is some kind of sonic development, or at least a change in what the musicians play. With this, though, each musician pretty much plays the same note forever. And as I mentioned previously, the norm with classical music (and its heirs) is to make the audience sit as still as possible while the music is playing, but with this the audience are encouraged to walk around the venue while the music is being played. This is because the players are not all concentrated in one place, but scattered around the venue. If you stay in one place you will hear the same thing, more or less, for the entire duration of the piece. As you move around, though, the sounds of different instruments become more salient, and in different parts of the church the manner of the sounds' resonance varies. Basically, by walking around, you create the variance in the piece that normally comes from the musicians themselves.

I should mention the instruments. They were all ones capable of playing a sustained note, so we had violins, violas, guitars, organs, keyboards, clarinet, and so on. One feature of the concert was that you could approach much closer to the musicians than would be normal. This was interesting for a non-musician like myself – great opportunity to see how they actually do stuff, and to look at their sheet music (which seemed, even to my untrained eye, to not have too much written down for them).

So yes, this was incredible stuff, something that anyone with the slightest interest in drone music or forward thinking music generally would enjoy. I might even lean towards describing it as the musical event of the year, though I do that for most concerts I enjoy. It was a bit of a shame, therefore, that the event was so criminally under-attended. No one I knew was present (apart from my beloved, obv.), and there were not even that many people I did not know. I am not sure why this might have been the case. Maybe the market for genuinely forward thinking music in Dublin is actually not that great. I suppose the non-standard venue, located outside the city centre, would also have been a factor here. I suspect, though, that more people would have come to this if they had known about it.

And that's that for the Ergodos Festival. Not everything in the line up was brilliant, obviously, but that is the way of festivals. I hope they have another festival next year, and put on more concerts in the meantime. Maybe see you there.

The Final Panda

ERGODOS Day 8: Trio Scordatura

Again in the Unitarian Church. Trio Scordatura formed itself to explore the world of unconventional tunings. It comprises Bob Gilmore on keyboards together with Elisabeth Smalt on viola and Alfrun Schmid on voice. Gilmore was giving a talk earlier in the day on microtonality in music. I skipped that on the basis that it would probably just go over my silly non-PhD-in-music head, but I kind of regretted my decision when I heard Gilmore's introductions to the various places his trio played. I am still not sure I would have understood fully what he was saying, but he has such a pleasant speaking voice that it would all have been delightful. He also looked the part.

From the first piece (Conturador, by Flor Hartigan) you could tell this was going to be a bit special. As well as singing in a most unusual manner, Schmid was slowly twirling a pair of shaker devices that looked oddly like an opium poppy. The sound was as odd as the visual effect.

My limited musical vocabulary and lack of any real understanding of what alternate tunings and microtonality amount to in practice mean that I can only say so much about the Trio Scordatura concert. What I can say is that they were for me the find of the festival, playing the kind of music you get when the avant-garde gets it right. What they played sounded like nothing else I have ever heard, but it still sounded like music, albeit of a most unusual kind. One fascinating piece (composed by Horatiu Radulescu, a man sometimes lumped in with composers of "spectral music") featured Smalt playing an oddly tuned viola over a recording of others playing two grand pianos – grand pianos that had been tipped on their side and were being played by having threads rubbed against their inner strings. I would love to go to a concert where someone could do this for real.

I Remember was another piece, by some Alvin Lucifer fellow, saw Trio Scordatura joined by Garret Sholdice and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, with the whole lot of them intoning wordlessly into jugs and then individually breaking off to say something they remembered. Sadly, no one remembered dancing in stilettos in the snow.

The other pieces were Enclosures by Peter Adriaansz (the trio playing to a programmed accompaniment of computer generated musical tones; spooky), Harmonium #1 by James Tenney (the trio playing over recordings of themselves playing, with the long sustained vocal notes and the ebb and flow of the viola being the most striking features), some Chinese poems set to music by Harry Partch (apparently very hard to sing; they certainly sounded strange enough, and interestingly this was the only vocal piece that featured lyrics) with accompaniment on prepared viola (a strange instrument of Mr Partch's devising), and …hush by Judith Ring (more prepared viola, playing over samples of prepared viola). The last piece was by Al Margolis, who also records and performs as If, Bwana. From Gilmore's description, this Margolis fellow seems to be a bit of a roffler, and this piece was here to present the fun side of progressive approaches to tuning and tonality. The trio played over a really bizarre musical backing.

My one big regret with this concert was that the trio did not have their debut album with them for sale. Apparently it was meant to be ready but certain unfortunate events prevented its appearance.

Panda Scordatura

ERGODOS Day 7: Expressway to Yr Skull

More Unitarian Church action. Expressway to Yr Skull is what the festival organisers and their pals call themselves when they are playing music with electric guitars. The first piece was written by Brian Ledwidge-Flynn and performed by him with (I think) Benedict Schlepper-Connolly. It was enjoyable enough, but I kind of ruined it for myself by looking at the programme notes before they started. Ledwidge-Flynn said that this piece was meant to sound like a recreation of some of that "shoegazing*" music that was popular in the early 1990s, and was divided up into four movements to recreate one of the four track vinyl EPs you used to get back then. The problem was that I found myself focussing on all the ways the piece deviated from the shoegazing paradigm, as opposed to appreciating the music in and of itself. The crucial missing elements were: ethereal vocals, extreme volume, drums, and the general all-enveloping nature of the shoegazing sound. The last is something that two blokes on guitars cannot really recreate. If anything, the actual music sounded a bit more like Durutti Column (a band of an earlier vintage) than anything from the shoegazers themselves. That said, the third and fourth sub-pieces sounded like they could have been turned into a Ride b-side if given the correct instrumentation.

One funny thing in the programme was that Ledwidge-Flynn mentions that he deliberately made the guitar parts simple enough that a beginning player could play them. I interpreted this as a dig at the musical abilities of the various stars of the scene that used to celebrate itself. I could not but think, though, that even Chapterhouse were able to play live without looking at sheet music. This was a bit of a problem with all of the pieces performed tonight – the combination of electric guitars and sheet music is just wrong. If nothing else, when you are looking at sheet music you are not gazing at your shoes.

The second piece was composed by Brian Bridges and featured some fellows on violin and viola playing with a guitarist. They managed to create an impressively droney sound, though I reckon their performance would have been improved by the addition of capes and dry ice (surely an opportunity missed, given that they were playing in a church).

After that there was a piece composed by Simon O'Connor, performed by Garrett Sholdice and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, doing a kind of call-response thing on their guitars, and then a piece by Larry Polansky that BSC performed on his own. For that one he did that thing of playing things, sampling himself playing them, and then playing back the samples while he played more things, but he was not doing this to create ever more complex layers of sound (i.e. no wall of hundred guitar lines by the piece's end). Rather, the replayed samples were used partly to cover him retuning his guitar to the funny tunings required for the next bit of the piece. As with a lot of pieces that use live sampling, you would have to wonder whether you could just get the same effect by having several musicians playing the piece. Still, I liked this piece a lot, it was rather enveloping and I could imagine it making great music to, you know, relax to. It also sounded a bit like Sonic Youth (whose work was referenced by the title, a lyric from the song 'Madonna, Sean and Me', which, as you know, appears on the album E.V.O.L.**).

The last piece was composed by Garrett Sholdice. Now, do you know the story about Ravi Shankar and the time he played at George Harrison's Festival for Bangladesh? He came onstage, played away on his sitar for a bit, and then took a breather. Everyone applauded, and then Shankar said to the crowd: "Thanks… well, if you have enjoyed me tuning up so much then I hope you will really like the actual concert"***. This last piece (Electric Guitar Quartet) was a bit like that, and was preceded by all four of said guitarists doing a lot of retuning. No one applauded when they stopped, because we're not stupid, but when the piece actually started it all sounded astonishingly similar to the noises being made while they were tuning up. It did get a bit more involved as it went on, especially once Dennis Cassidy on drums joined in, but it still seemed maybe a bit hampered by its contemporary classical sensibilities. You can do a lot of rocking out if you have four electric guitars on stage, but there was none of that tonight. Of course, you might not want to rock out, but… no, that's crazy talk, why would anyone not want to rock out?

* I understand that in the USA this music was known as "Dream Pop".
**Note deleted.
*** A true story rather than a KFR, as it is apparently included on the live album of the concert. Or so a guy I know once told me.

Dream Pop Pandas

ERGODOS Day 6: Morla

We were back to the Unitarian Church for this one. Morla are a trio (sax, guitar, drums, plus electronics and televisions) playing music that seems to come form the world of jazz. Like with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, having them play in a church as part of a weirdo contemporary music festival did create odd juxtapositions. That said, their music seemed a bit more experimental than normal jazz, using electronics and stuff like that more than is usual.

I found them a bit slow to get going… their early pieces did not seem to have much to them, but technical problems may be a factor here. I did like the long piece that reminded me in part of Ravel's Bolero. The penultimate piece, a rather drum heavy little number, and the fairly straight down the line closer were also rather enjoyable.

Jazz Pandas

ERGODOS Day 5: Liminality

I missed this because I went to see the band EARTH, forgetting that I had already seen them. I did read a review of this concert by the guy who writes classical music reviews in the Irish Times. He thought that two of the pieces were "numbingly dull", so I wish I had been there.

Critical crotch city Pandas

ERGODOS Day 4: Judith Ring: Portrait

More back room of the National Concert Hall action. Before I get to any discussion of the music performed here, there are some meta comments to get through, so if you do not like meta then skip through the next couple of paragraphs.

This was a concert of primarily laptop music. I have two real problems with this kind of thing. Firstly, you can never really see what the musician is doing, so I always find myself wondering how actually live any of this is – everything could be pre-programmed, with the musician hitting one key to set it all going. OK, so the musician might still be sitting their behind their laptop, hitting the occasional key or moving the mouse, but the suspicion must always be there that they are just playing Tetris or updating Facebook.

The other problem with laptop music is that it is visually very boring. I know it should be the music that matters (maaaaan), but the mind craves stimuli, and even with the best music in the world a lack of anything visual to engage with makes it easy to drift off into thinking about all kinds of things other than the music in hand.

I think these problems are not insurmountable. In performances of laptop music by people coming from what might broadly be defined as an electronic dance music tradition, there is a tendency to combine the music with projections of visual images. That gives the eye something to engage with. It does not solve the first problem, but it might distract from it. However, the visual images so served, while interesting enough in themselves, often do not really have that much to do with the music. Indeed, they may ultimately serve as a distraction from it. So I have been looking for a better way forward.

I think I might have something. Basically, at laptop concerts they should project whatever is on the musician's screen onto the wall behind them. That way people can watch how the music is being made (or how it is being triggered, or whatever). If the musician is just playing Tetris then the audience can vicariously feel their excitement as they slot the little blocks in place.

The other thing about this concert that got me thinking about how we consume music and so on was the introduction by one of the festival organisers. He made the usual introductory comments, and then said that although the performance would comprise several individual pieces, we were not to applaud between them but to wait until the end. This got me thinking about how classical music (and events like this that come from that tradition) take for granted that audiences are there to be regimented – told when to applaud, made to sit still, and so on. This contrasts with other forms of music, at concerts for which people are allowed to applaud when they wish and can wander off to go to the toilet or get a drink whenever they feel like it. I am sure there must be sound musical reasons why audience control is vital in classical music, but I suspect that factors relating to how high and low cultures are perceived are also important here. Audience control emphasises that classical music is a serious business, one requiring total audience concentration, unlike the frivolous music emanating from other traditions. The different audience requirements must work as an effective barrier to entry into the world of classical music, both old-school and contemporary.

And so, following that long preamble, to the music. Judith Ring was today's guest curator, playing mostly her own music (on a laptop), but handing over to a couple of guest stars for some of the pieces, and having them join her for some of the pieces. Ring's first piece was rather striking, being based on a load of samples of mezzo-soprano Natasha Lohan's voice. From the programme notes I understand that the samples were treated electronically, but Ring layered and combined them to produce an odd overall effect. I was not so gone on the ensuing collaboration by two of her guest stars. It was an improvised piece, with one of them on piano and one on laptop, but it all seemed like the wrong kind of experimentalism – people dicking around on stage, creating a sound that is not going anywhere.

One collaborative and improvised piece was a lot more enjoyable was this avant garde hoe-down that had Judith Ring playing with Linda Buckley, Jonathan Nangle, and David Bremner, the first three of these on laptop and the last on piano. It might be that having a load of people on laptops gets around the visual problems of the instrument, particularly if they are all staring at their screens with the kind of looks normally seen on the faces of worried stock market traders. I have no idea what any of the three laptoppers were doing, but it looked very difficult.

Laptop panda

ERGODOS Day 3: Prism

This was again in a back room at the National Concert Hall, and again featured the Gamelan Sekar Petak orchestra. I think this was billed as Prism because one of the pieces performed (a composition by Francis Heery) had that name. There were a couple of Gamelan pieces today, but most of the pieces either used a very stripped down set of Gamelan instruments or different instruments entirely. The Gamelan pieces enveloped the show, both traditional pieces that used vocals in an evocative manner. One good thing about tonight was that I was sitting near enough to the front to be able to see the stage properly (the non-tiered nature of the seating and the musicians sitting on the floor made the players rather invisible to those seated further back). With live Gamelan, I love the way the musicians look like clockwork automatons as they bang away at their instruments, their movements forming odd visual patterns.

The other pieces included three by Salil Sachdev – two in which the percussion genius performed solo on a miniature metal flying saucer and then a metal mixing bowl. He mentioned that he had discovered the musical properties of the latter after eating popcorn out of it while watching a film at home with his family. I thus found myself wondering what having Mr Sachdev round for dinner would be like – would every inanimate object in your home be tested for conversion into a percussive instrument? Just to show that he is not solely about the percussion, Salil Sachdev also wrote a piece for clarinettist Jonathan Sage to perform at the festival.

The other pieces included some an original and a composed piece (by Johanne Heraty) for the shakuhachi, a flute-like Japanese played tonight by Joe Browning. The instrument's sound reminded me a bit of the pan-pipes from Aguirre, Wrath of God, so when I closed my eyes I almost found myself on an raft with Klaus Kinski and a load of squirrel monkeys. The various pieces for the redux Gamelan orchestra were in and of themselves fine, but godammit, if you have brought a full Gamelan orchestra over to Dublin you would think you would want to get a lot of full Gamelan music out of them.

One final thing deserving of mention: in the foyer area, they had this astonishing looking contraption, which seemed to be emitting a load droning noise. It had bits hanging off it, and if you poked at them they made a noise, something very vaguely like that of a harpsichord. This turned out to be an installation by Jonathan Nangle. As well as making the harpsichord-esque noises, moving the device's appendages also affected the way the central drone sound developed, so as a musical instrument the device's output was dependent on how passers by interacted with it. One day every home will have one of these contraptions.

Prismic Panda

ERGODOS Day 2: Gamelan Sekar Petak

As you know, Gamelan is this type of music from Indonesia that involves people banging away at bamboo xylophones and what look suspiciously like upturned pots and pans. The various instruments meld together to create an overall sound that sounds almost electronic, despite being played on acoustic instruments. While we use Gamelan to describe this type of music, and also the type of ensemble that makes it, I have the idea that out in Indonesia the term actually just denotes one of the instruments.

One of Gamelan's special features is that it is the only non-Western music to transmit serious influences into classical music. This might say more about the nature of Western classical music than about the intrinsic worth of Gamelan. Some other non-Western forms of music have the kind of structure and complexity than makes them akin to classical music, but they are heavily based on improvisation by solo performers (I am thinking here of Indian or Arabic music). This makes them unappealing to those weaned on our classical music's traditions of one person composing for others to play. With Gamelan, ensembles play pre-existing pieces of music, with relatively little scope for improvisation, so it is that bit more conceptually familiar.

Tonight Ergodos was giving us Gamelan based music, and had brought over the Gamelan Sekar Petak orchestra from York to play it for us. Unlike the Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh concert, this was in a backroom of the National Concert Hall (something that looked suspiciously like a small UCD lecture room). The programme started with a stroke of genius, a conceptual piece called 'Anyone Can Play', credited to Jody Diamond. One of the festival organisers invited random members of the audience to come onstage and play with the crazy Gamelan instruments in any way they could. This led to a veritable stampede of music students, the survivors of which got to bang away in a manner that evoked the Langley Schools Music Project, until a member of the orchestra came up behind them, tapped them on the shoulder and said "Thank you". Once the impostors had all been disposed of, the orchestra launched into a Javanese Gamelan piece about the joys of fishing.

After that, the orchestra played a number of pieces composed for Gamelan by various composers. These were all enjoyable, but a fundamental problem emerged. Basically, the best music for Gamelan seems to be traditional Indonesian compositions, and the modern compositions tended to be most interesting when they were most closely aping the sound of traditional Gamelan. The Javan pieces sound like nothing else in the world, while crazy modern compositions played by a Gamelan orchestra sound not that different to crazy modern compositions played by the more usual Western ensembles. This led me to think that a concert where a Gamelan orchestra played loads of Javanese tunes (with a couple of Balinese ones thrown in for the weirdos who prefer that school of Gamelan) would be far more enjoyable than one based on new compositions by Whitey.

One of the modern pieces I did especially like, however, was Jody Diamond's 'In the Bright World'. This was partly an arrangement of the American folk tune 'Wayfaring Stranger', and it featured beautiful vocals from local mezzo-soprano Michelle O'Rourke. It also went into a Gamelan workout towards the end that sounded very like one of the pieces from the Nonesuch Explorer series record The Jasmine Isle: Gamelan Music.

Gamelan Panda

ERGODOS Day 1: Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (with Salil Sachdev)

Ergodos is this organisation run by Benedict Schlepper-Connolly and Garrett Sholdice, dedicated to the promotion and performance of strange new music. The title reportedly comes from a term invented by the late James Tenney; he apparently used the term 'ergodic' to describe a "static, homogenous environment, out of which complexity naturally abounds".

The Ergodos Festival (strictly speaking, it was called Ergodos: Off Grid) seems to be a continuation of the old Printing House Festival that the Ergodos guys had previously curated. Sticking with past practice, they took a somewhat minimal approach to publicity. The only advertisement I saw for the event was in the Journal of Music (and on the Journal's website) – highly targeted marketing. But the ad worked for me. They were selling a pass to the whole nine days of the festival at the cost of four individual concerts, so I decided to go to everything, hoping that this festival would fill the gap left by the mysterious disappearance of the Living Music Festival. Did I make a terrible mistake? Read on and see.

The first concert took place in the Unitarian Church on St. Stephen's Green, an unusual venue for a concert by a fiddler. The lighting suggested something out of the ordinary for music of any sort: instead of being bathed in strong, harsh lights, the stage area was faintly illuminated in a spectral blue. Ó Raghallaigh comes from the world of Irish traditional music, but from an interview I read with him he is intent on moving beyond the genre's strictures, with the unusual setting and the laptop onstage throwing down a marker before the concert even started. New ideas and technical progression in traditional musical forms can often go horribly wrong – witness any number of folk and traditional acts who have tried to "fill out their sound" with cheap synthesisers – but Ó Raghallaigh talked a good game in the interview, so I was looking forward to seeing him.

Ó Raghallaigh turned out to be a bit of a roffler, with an easy-going charm that belied his status as a trad iconoclast. To be honest, his music did not seem that beyond the pale of normal Irish traditional music, but there could be subtle transgressions that someone more familiar with the form would be shocked by. He did use technology a bit, doing a bit of sampling himself and then playing over it. He also used some rather odd looking fiddles, but to my untrained ear it all sounded relatively traditional. The non-transgressive nature of the music should not however be taken as indicating any kind of compromise in quality – this was all very enjoyable, with the spooky atmosphere making it seem much more of an Event than it would have been to see Ó Raghallaigh playing in a pub.

Ó Raghallaigh was joined for his last two tunes by Salil Sachdev, this percussionist bloke from India. He proved to be fascinating character, tapping out the most amazing percussive rhythms with his bare hands on two different sets of instruments. The first was a fairly straightforward West African drum (from Mali, I think, or maybe Senegal) – straightforward in appearance, but not in the sounds that Sachdev was able to get out of it. His other instrument, possibly also West African or maybe something he had just made up, was some kind of water drum. He made this with a bowl of water, and held another bowl upside down against the water; by changing the upper bowl's angle he could adjust its sound. Sachdev's playing went well with Ó Raghallaigh – he ended up sounding like a bodhran player, albeit an one of most uncommon ability. And he managed all this without having the kind of demeanour one associates with percussionists, instead coming across like an urbane musicologist (which is, in fairness, what he is).

Ergodic Panda