No photos this time - I asked permission and even signed a form they had in case I ended up getting some of the displayed artwork in any shots, but when Essendon Airport started up I was stuck way up the back (as I've mentioned previously I think, I'm too shy to push my way through a crowd for the sake of a few photos. But anyway, they were really good - Graham Lee's pedal steel added a nice extra dimension over some of the tracks we know and love. Robin Fox put on a great show with his glitch-oscilloscope visuals - one of the bits I liked the most seemed to look like a spinning armchair being slowly destroyed by falling rain. or something. David Toop finished up with a very quiet piece, working under cover of near-darkness (barely lit by his Powerbook) so it was a bit hard to see exactly what he was doing. A flute popped up at times, though given how quiet it all was it was as if it was merely a conduit for breathing sounds, with a few electronic tones burbling along in the background. It certainly seemed to tie in with his most recent(?) book, Haunted Weather and you wondered if he was attempting to recontextualize some of the background noise of people shuffling in chairs, passing traffic, and such - I'm not really sure. Certainly, it's an odd feeling listening to sounds like these when you're in a room full of people - normally it's all so personal.
22:59
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Comments (1)
Toop's stuff was interesting, but interesting as ideas rather than as a developed music for me. There seems to be a well-established vocabulary of sounds - the quiet click, the chatter, the rustle, the pulsing phased swell - but it's hard to find any necessity for any of those sounds to go together, i.e. there's not much of a grammar for the vocab. I know that that's sort of the point (after Stockhausen we're not meant to insist that everything should be patterned and repeating), but at the same time it's not particularly involving.
As Toop himself says, music criticism is mostly about rationalising subjective responses. Subjectively, one of the limitations I find with the sort of work Toop did last night is that it's not so much introspective as insular. The sonic democracy promised by small sounds, the possibility of allowing other environmental and audience sounds to take their place alongside the performance, is lessened in effect because none of those other sounds are engaged by the performance. The results tends to be an auditory positivism: all of these sounds, performed and otherwise, just are and don't have too much to do with each other.
But all of that isn't to say it wasn't interesting. It is, intellectually, just rather affectless.
Posted by Darren | December 7, 2006 10:19 AM
Posted on December 7, 2006 10:19