Irene reviews a concert by White Hills and Wizards of Firetop Mountain

Now I am recycling Irene's review of a concert I too was at but failed to write about.

The main attraction here was Wizards of Firetop Mountain, a bunch of hairy geezers (ian's voice: "and one woman") who live to rock 24/7. And just as they did at Hunter's Moon, they served up straight down the line ROCK in the spirit of ye Sabbath. Ian called them "beyond irony" and this would appear to be true.

White Hills had more of a modern take on heavy rock, putting together Hawkwindy effects, guitar pedals, slightly acid-y vibes etc (Wizards would have had no truck with that kind of nonsense). But still LOUD. The drummer with White Hills was amazing, and I remarked to Ian that he was almost as good as Oneida's own Kid Millions. Imagine my astonishment when, a few days later, I learned that Mr Millions actually plays on White Hills' album. So, er, was I stood in front of Kid Millions for all that time at the gig, not realising who it was? Probably, but I can't be sure because, in spite of having seen Oneida loads of times, I have no idea what Kid Millions looks like. Hence my question about band-member-specific prosopagnosia, because this seems to happen to me a lot. Does anyone else have this problem?

I have many problems, but I don't think prosopnagnosia is one of them. The only thing I have to say about this concert was that it is hard to communicate just how hard Wizards of Firetop Mountain rock. White Hills also rock hard, but in a somewhat spacier kind of way.

Later testimony suggested that we had not seen Kid Millions drumming with White Hills - suggesting that there are several very good rock drummers in the world.

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"Sacred Music: Polyphonic Voices of Georgia"

Now Irene is talking about music from Georgia. Horky!

This recording of Georgian polyphonic singing by the Anchiskhati Choir was recorded in Tbilisi and put out by a division of Soul Jazz called World Audio Foundation. The choir seems to be all-male, and some of the voices are very powerful indeed. The music in this recording is sung for Orthodox religious services, although the polyphonic singing tradition has pre-Christian roots and indeed there is a large fund of secular songs that are still sung (we learned some at the Georgian singing workshop I was at a while back). The liturgical stuff done here is really beautiful, with the voices singing in surprising combinations of tones.

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Irene reviews Horses of Instruction and some other bands

Irene's takeover if Inuit Panda continues with this little morsel.

A trip to London at Easter found us at an alldayer in the Windmill pub and venue in Brixton, where Frank's APA friend Thom was moonlighting from A Fine Day For Sailing. We can report that his other band, Horses of Instruction, play poppy post-punky music that is very enjoyable. The co-ordinating red guitars were a welcome nod to Tony Hatch's dictum that band members should all wear the same thing "otherwise people will think you're in different bands". I also salute the referencing of William Blake in the band name – it's a much better name than the Tigers of Wrath, which sounds like a hair-metal band (maybe I am thinking of the Tygers of Pan Tang).

We stayed for two other bands, both acoustically inclined (as in, not playing plugged-in stuff). One, possibly called Singing Adams, featured a Zooey Deschanel lookalike who, spookily, even played the ukulele. The other guy, who could have been Y Niwl or maybe Dignan Porch (or maybe someone else entirely), had a very droll onstage demeanour and a set of comedically depressing songs. After a while we toddled off with the intention of paying a late-night visit to the British Museum, but it was closed for Good Friday. Bah.

And now I will write some more, but not in itals because that would make it too hard to read.

My favourite song by Horses of Instruction was the one that mentioned Jean Luc Picard, and not just because it mentioned Jean Luc Picard. Singing Adams I at first thought was the most rubbish thing I had ever seen, but then I moved up closer and away from the crowd noise coming from the event people drinkers at the back. Once I did that I found her music and performance very engaging.

I don't think the third and last act we saw was Y Niwl - Wikipedia describes them as an experimental surf band from Wales, and the guy did not sound surfy or Welsh (or like the kind of person who has a page in Wikipedia).

IN FACT - investigation makes me fairly certain that the woman with the fringe playing the ukulele was in fact Owl and Mouse, while the guy playing on his own was Singing Adams (or Steven from (the?) Singing Adams playing solo. He was funny and depressing at the same time, getting the audience to sing along with songs whose lyrics said things like "Oh my God, this is the most depressing day of my life" or "Clearly my life is over and I can never face my friends again" and suchlike (these are not actual lyrics but were the kind of thing he would come up with). Owl and Mouse were a bit more fey but managed not to head down the road of generic indie nonsense.

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Irene reviews Grouper in a church

Now Irene is talking about a performance by underground sensation Grouper that took place a while ago.

Ms Grouper does electroacoustic noisyambient stuff using an array of switches and wires and tapes and things. We saw her in the Unitarian Church, which seems to have become the default experimental music venue. All of beardy-belly Dublin was out for the evening (a demographic first identified formally at the Hunter's Moon festival, a festival I still seem to be banging on about several months after the fact). She was, it seems, performing her album Violet Replacement - not that I'd have known this. Her set was the electronic end of electroacoustic, with the noise being made up of electronics, guitar, occasional vocals mixed very low, and possibly other stuff (The Wire says she uses Wurlitzer keys, if that means anything to you). The effect was intense, immersive and sleepy, with a same-but-changing, time-standing-still quality. The soothing starfieldy/water under a microscope visuals helped.

I feel that the support act should also be mentioned. I think they were Raising Holy Sparks, one of the groups who played at Hunter's Moon, but it is hard to be definite about these things.

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Irene reviews two albums by The Fall

"Hex Enduction Hour" and "The Frenz Experiment"

I am so short of copy for that I have had to start raiding my beloved's record reviews.

So impressed was I by the Fall's ATP set (hooray for low expectations, probably) I ran to the merchandise table afterwards to buy some of the Fall's humungo back catalogue. Don't worry, I didn't make the same mistake this time as I did last time (there does not yet exist a device fine enough to measure the interval of time between my putting Are You Are Missing Winner on the CD device and flinging it into the discard pile). Instead I bought the much-lauded Hex Enduction Hour from 1982 and, hedging bets a bit, picked out the Brix-era Frenz Experiment on the basis that Brix-era Fall was their commercial heyday. By Fall standards, anyway.

And they're both great, albeit in different ways. Hex is very snarly and spitty and kicks you in the teeth at every opportunity. From 'The Classical' onwards you get a real sense of why the Fall were great: Smith's sense of humour ("made with the highest British attention to the wrong detail" indeed), how on several occasions a cheery jangly Marr-esque riff drops in and spoils the gritty thunk-thunk relentlessness, the combination of Dadaesque lyrics, krauty drone and rockabilly riffs, but mainly just the sheer attitude. And the feeling that, although they'd be annoyed if you said it to them, they were having a huge laugh. Listening to this reminds me that there used to be a thing called the indie charts that was completely alien to my Duran Duran-trained ears.

The Frenz Experiment is from 6 years later and is a poppier, more produced major-labelly affair altogether. In some places they sound like they're channelling Madness rather than Can, so you could see this as sell-out Fall if you were so inclined. And they do 'There's A Ghost in My House' by Holland/Dozier/Holland and an inexplicable paean to a place that serves steak ('The Steak Place'). But you get occasional ur-Fall waywardness in the likes of 'Bremen Nacht Alternative' which goes on for ages to no decipherable end. And it ends with 'Hit The North', so you can't help but love it.

Thus spake Irene. For myself I still find it hard to believe that something as strangely postpunk as 'There's A Ghost in My House' could be a Holland/Dozier/Holland tune (not that there is anything wrong with HDH tunes, they just do not sound like that. I also feel that attention should be drawn to 'Athelte Cured' from The Frenz Experiment, with its riff lifted from Spinal Tap's 'Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You (Tonight)'.

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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

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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