Favourite live pig - Bessy, without a doubt. Made me feel real special.
Favourite live gig - Jaitch, Barcelona, Jan 2000. A truly unique
audio-visual
feast...
Arrived in Barcelona, went to the tourist information to check out
happenings & saw a free 'experimental' show advertised at the Metronom.
No kidding. Emerging from the back of the room in slow sliding steps,
head cocked, elbows raised, Jane Rigler made wind instruments do things
I would never have imagined: mixing dynamic aspirate rants through all
manner of wind instruments, speaking, shouting, rhythmically spitting
through the mouthpiece whilst marking melodies on the keys, punctuated
with measured and chaotic conventional playing whilst traversing a
broad spectrum of strange, accentuated body movements. Hannes Giger on
double-bass, tapping, striking, plucking, bowing, damn near love-making
with the thing on the floor in drifting consonance with and departure
from Rigler; improvising some 'instant music poetry' over the top of
insidiously skewed jazz bass lines, fucking with similarities in english
and spanish words, mutating a narrative in successive bilingual tangents
about getting from Marseille to Barcelona to perform. These would give
way to spacial tomfoolery - odd noises would come from different parts
of the room: the ceiling above my head - a length of bamboo filled with
ball-bearings suddenly part-released from its suspense by a length of
wire on stage; wooden blocks dragged beneath the seats in the audience
from the same position; a metal step-ladder falling to the floor at the
back of the room. All the while, Koji Asano sat behind a mixing desk on
stage, twiddling with things, to no apparent effect. After about 45 mins
though, the clever interplay between bass and wind became increasingly
physically torpid, but more sounds seemed to be coming from the
instruments. The layers built and built, but the acoustic musicans, by
this time, were sitting in their seats on stage, vacantly staring
through the ceiling. It soon became evident that the man with the
technology had been sampling the live instrumentation all the way
through. Thus began a totally different sonic journey over another 45
minutes - Asano layering, chopping, bending, weaving, corroding and
restructuring the sounds into completely different melodic and rhythmic
forms. As he gradually stripped it down after a surging peak of immense
noise, the other two performers returned to the foray for a fifteen
minute crescendo of improv with the machine boy. It left my really quite
pregnant partner and I in an compelling euphoria, uncertain as to
whether we were about to laugh hysterically or weep through sheer
emotional drainage. I'm nearly crying over my smile as I type, my
partner and six-month-old son on the floor beside me, emoting heavily in
mutual bleary-eyed reverie.
Has anyone else heard of this group or ay of these people? They sound
like potential darlings of the Wire but I've never spied mention of
them. Don't know what label they record on but, now I've got that out
of my system, I'm damn well going to find out.
luther
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