Counterflows 2017 - Festival review.

Counterflows Festival. Glasgow. April 2017

Over several years now Counterflows has established itself as a regular event on a crowded calendar of music and performance in Glasgow. Showcasing experimental, marginal and DIY music from all around the world the number of performances this year which were sold out in advance shows that there is a healthy audience for this music in the city. In part that is due to the efforts of curators Alasdair Campbell and Fielding Hope and the many other people involved in organising the weekend, whose obvious enthusiasm for what they are doing holds the whole thing together. 

This year, for their sixth edition, the music was as varied and eclectic as the venues used to host the events. Over four days we visited Glasgow University Chapel, The Centre for Contemporary Arts, The Glad Cafe,  Garnethill Multicultural Community Centre, Glasgow School of Art, Langside Halls and Queens Park Bowling Club. That's before we even get to a performance at the Laurieston Arches, just across from where my great-grandparents lived in the Gorbals. Going between places of learning, community halls and contemporary art spaces is a good metaphor for the success of the festival, where performers are always part of the audience. Sociable, entertaining and always an education.

Day 1 - Thursday 6th April 2017

University of Glasgow chapel

The opening concert of the festival this year was in the old chapel of Glasgow University. The high space here was filled with birdsong as the five performers of Pancrace Project started their performance. Using everything from the church organ, to Uillian pipes, "piano paysage" (the belly of a piano) and Hurgy toys (which looked like hurdy gurdys) the spectacle was as integral as the sound created. It was nice to hear the organ given a good work out, as sometimes I have attended contemporary music concerts involving a church organ, where the aim seems to be to get as little sound out of it as possible when really what everyone wants to hear is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. 

Pancrace Project

Their performance may have benefited from some trimming, but in part this was my impatience to get to the second performer of the night, Japanese composer and percussionist Midori Takada. She held us spell-bound from the moment she entered the hall, proceeding up the chancel of the chapel accompanied by her chimes as she stalked through a passage of cymbals. Whether giving an extended solo on the gong, playing marimba or on the drums her performance was hypnotic and utterly captivating. With echoes of the music of Steve Reich often in my mind, her performance itself was really like nothing I had seen before. Unique.

Day 2 Friday 7th April

Carnatic music is a form of Indian classical music from Southern India. Usually accompanied by the drone of a tambura the music goes back hundreds of years and is associated with Hindu worship. Last year the festival ended with the Carnatic Music Ensemble and this year there is a deeper exploration of this form of music. This included traditional musicians working alone and with contemporary artists to produce new music. Mark Fell's electronic piece at the CCA based on the rhythms of Carnatic music was enjoyable but the best parts of the performance were when the Indian musicians were playing their own combination of improvised and composed music, accompanied by the rhythmic drumming of Mysore Vadirajmore on his mridangam.

A Carnatic Paradigm

A short walk round to Garnethill followed, always nice to come back here for the cheap bar prices, where Sue Tompkins was first on the stage which faces the wall of Chinese dragon heads high on the wall opposite.

Garnethill Multicultural Community Centre

A visual and sound artist she merges borders between concrete poetry, visual and performance arts. Flicking through the pages of a magazine she emits phrases and snatches of song in a rhythmic manner whilst bouncing about on stage. The nearest thing to it I have seen is Dutch performance artist Jaap Blonk. I enjoyed seeing him perform whilst my kids nervously snorted in derision and that was the kind of mixed reactions the audience gave Sue Tompkins.

American musician and composer Ashley Paul is the featured artist of this year's festival and her first performance of the weekend was phenomenally good. Accompanied by Stevie Jones and an ensemble of musicians of percussion, keyboard, double bass, tuba, saxophone and clarinet it felt improvised but looked tightly composed. A remarkably impressive collective effort. Her floaty singing and energetic musicianship on saxophone and electric guitar was engrossing and reminded me of Julia Holter's performances but with more jazz, more texture and energy. I look forwards to seeing more performances by her over the coming days.

Ashley Paul Ensemble

Day 3 Saturday 8th April

There were many events over and above those which I am writing about here, late into the evenings and on Saturday afternoon, but sadly I was not able to see everything. As I was working at Firhill on Saturday I was not able to see Takahiro Kawaguchi and Utah Kawasaki or attend several of the talks and films on show that afternoon. However as compensation I did get to see Partick Thistle reach the top six of the Scottish Premiership for the first time in a few decades so, swings and roundabouts.

Glasgow Art School

I was able to get to Glasgow School of Art to see the "anti-performance" by Farmers Manual, an electronic and visual arts group from Vienna. This is very much my cup of tea, three guys messing around on laptops and a room filled with pings, buzzes and drones. How much is live and how much is just pre-loaded in their laptops is very much up for debate, like any club DJ nowadays, either labouring away mixing or alternatively twiddling the screen brightness control on his laptop whilst the music plays on.

Glorias Navales performing

Away from the Art School and back to the faded comfort of the Garnethill Community Centre for a quite different performance. Glorias Navales gave a beautifully unpolished performance, a group of Chilean musicians that had the whole room tapping their feet along to the tunes. Their name suggesting the Chilean anniversary of a glorious naval victories, with imagery projected behind them of Chilean ships, Chinese Socialist Realism and Pinochet's coup recalled Chile's turbulent history. With one of the musicians sporting a t-shirt with Victor Jara's face across the front, a folk singer tortured and killed by the Chilean junta, I was taken back to my childhood. My parents had friends who, as Communists, had been forced to flee Chile after the coup and had come to live in Glasgow. I had totally forgotten that I have held onto the small Chilean flag I had been given by them, but I've dug it out now after speaking to one of the musicians about his hero, Victor Jara. My parents used to often play an album of Jara's songs by a group called Inti-Illimani, who lived in exile in Germany as they were touring Europe at the time of the coup, when their music became banned. A warm and intriguing performance by Glorias Navales.

Les Filles de Illighadad

Moving across the globe the next stop-off was Niger. Les Filles de Illighadad are from the Alabak region where they sing and play their Tuareg music. Starting with the melancholic sounding voices of Fatou Seidi Ghalia and Alamnou Akrouni accompanied by tende drum and the wonder that is a gourd water drum, weaving complicated rhythms. For the the second half they donned electric guitars for a more familiar, dreamy Tuareg sound, the music being shaken up by being performed by scarf wearing women, smiling, laughing and enjoying their performance.

Day 4 Sunday 9th April

In Langside Hall in the late afternoon Svitlana Nianio from Ukraine was performing. Svitlana Nianio and her band played twinkly synths accompanied by the percussive sounds of an electric guitar, constrained at times by having a polythene bag weaved under the strings. Above this Svitlana's haunting vocals rose, making each song sound like a dark, cautionary nursery rhyme. Not many smiles were cracked on stage, their music-making a very serious business. Or maybe that was because she had to play in the chill of an April afternoon in Glasgow, in a council hall where the heating system wasn't working.

Mark Vernon in Queens Park Bowling Club

Up and over Queens Park to the next venue, Queens Park Bowling Club. I accidentally indulged in some orienteering as I headed in error to the council bowling greens in the park, before I found my way to the venue. Glasgow's Mark Vernon opened with a perfectly incongruous deck of cables, laptop and cassette players beneath the names of decades of bowling champions. His mixing of field recordings and found sounds from old tapes bought in a Portuguese market was delightful start to the evening.

Ashley Paul was back on stage, this time with German based electronic artist Rashad Becker. From Ashley Paul's squealing sax and bowed and bashed electric guitar, to Rashad's thrumming, dystonic sounds it was an energetic and woozy sonic sparring session.

Langside Hall

Hoping that some heating had been located, we returned to Langside Halls to be sent home warm by the uplifting music of Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force. A collaboration between German dub-techno musician Mark Ernestus and a group of Senegalese musicians, they had the hall bouncing from the start. No band this weekend made a more chic entrance on stage, as the musicians came on one at a time, many wearing big shades in the dark hall. Once all six musicians (four of them on percussion) were on stage, singer Mbene Diatta Seck and dancer Fatou Wore Mboup took centre stage and got everyone dancing. Their acrobatic dancer on stage and dancing into the audience was a real crowd-pleaser.

Another exhausting and entertaining four day weekend from the Counterflows organisers Yet again they managed to bring enthralling and disparate musicians from all corners of the globe to Scotland. They seem to be growing the audience, with bigger halls used and many gigs sold out. If you haven't attended any of the shows over recent years, I would heartily recommend looking out for the 2018 version.

Death and the Poet

Review: The Events by David Greig, Traverse Theatre

Review: The Poet Speaks, Philip Glass and Patti Smith, Edinburgh Playhouse

I took my first Edinburgh festivals trip along the M8 this year to take in Patti Smith and Philip Glass, but before that managed to squeeze in a visit to the Traverse to see David Greig's new play. On a late summer evening Edinburgh was looking very handsome I have to say.

Edinburgh

The Events deals with the aftermath of a mass shooting, where a survivor, played by Neve McIntosh looks for answers to the inevitable question - "Why?". There appears to be an understandable searching for a reason after these events (I'll use his word), people asking "why did it happen?", desperate to understand, to find some meaning in a pointless act. On Channel 4 just now the drama "Southcliffe" follows the lives of the perpetrator and the victims of a mass shooting in a fictional English market town. However when we get specific in this fiction, the close up attention to the detail of their lives in this TV drama, it begins to feel unreal, manipulative and fake as many real people have gone through these terrible incidents in the real world in their own individual ways. You end up thinking "that pub looks too busy" or "would you really say something like that?". You cannot help but think that the feelings that people affected do experience are unique to them and just unimaginable to someone who is not them. I'll watch Southcliffe to the end but it seems unsure what story it is trying to tell.

Rather bizarrely David Greig took a trip to visit Norway, researching the aftermath of the Anders Breivik shootings whilst writing the stage adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This led to some alarming (and incorrect) reports that he was writing a musical of the events which occurred in Utoya that day. What he did write was this play, The Events, which is showing just now at the Edinburgh Fringe before transferring to London. It does feature singing, but in the form of local choirs playing a Greek chorus to the story. The Events used similar devices to Southcliffe with flashbacks and different characters, played with gusto by Rudi Dharmalingham, flitting in and out. However the story here was more focused than the TV drama and the amateur choristers gave a stumbling feeling of real life to it all. The play worked well whilst walking a tight-rope of the sensitivities around the issues raised within it.

As Allen Ginsberg said in Father Death Blues,

Suffering is what was born

Ignorance made me forlorn

Tearful truths I cannot scorn

 

The many faces of Neve McIntosh

One last aside. Neve McIntosh's twitter profile reads "Actress and part time Lizard Queen!!!!". Is she at risk of being typecast? One minute she's tortured, guilt-ridden, lesbian vicar, Claire. Next she's Victorian sword-wielding, crime-fighting, lesbian Silurian, Madame Vastra who she plays in Doctor Who. Well, maybe not.

The other performance I'd specifically wanted to see in Edinburgh tonight was Philip Glass and Patti Smith's "The Poet Speaks", an evening in tribute to Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg. He died in 1997 and was a friend to them both. They've been doing these evenings together for a while now and it was the concept rather than any of three constituent parts (Glass, Smith and Ginsberg) that drew me to this show. The work of Philip Glass I have enjoyed without ever feeling particularly engaged by it, since I first heard it in Glasgow in 1990 (1000 Airplanes on the Roof - the projected backdrops is about all that I remember from that night). The "Beat Generation" is no more my generation than the flappers and Anita Loos were the generation of Ginsberg, Kerouac and William Burroughs. Their work has never grabbed me particularly and I find their books a bit self-obsessed.

Likewise, Patti Smith I think you either get or you don't get and I'd probably put myself in the latter camp (in much the same way that I "don't get" Jim Morrison). I struggle to see her as the "Godmother of Punk" that she is sometimes painted as. I like "Because The Night" as a Bruce Springsteen song rather than as a Patti Smith song and wouldn't be surprised to hear "People Have The Power" on a soap powder advert. It just doesn't seem to have any fire in its belly, the way a Gil Scott-Heron song or poem just does. My personal perception of her is more of a rather humourless, self-important individual who was in the right place at the right time to be part of a scene which on the whole generally leaves me a bit cold.

Patti Smith and Philip Glass

So I came to the Edinburgh Playhouse, which was filled to capacity, hoping to be proven wrong. Despite Ginsberg looking down on us from the projected photographs of the backdrop this was mainly about Patti Smith and Philip Glass. The meaningless, shamanistic ramblings of the shooter in The Events were rejected by Claire's choir for the gibberish that they were. Patti Smith however is someone who still appears happy to embrace the shamanistic affectations and eastern mysticism. She started the evening with her own poems which meandered through vague Earth-mother and Buddhist tropes (Notes to the Future, The Blue Thangka) whilst Philip Glass accompanied her on piano. Ginsberg's Witchita Vortex Sutra had more bite to it. She then read some of her favourite poems from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. Never can The Land of Nod have been read with such portentous earnestness. It ends with the line "The curious music that I hear" echoed in the line "Some strange music draws me in" in the verse of her song Dancing Barefoot which she followed it with. She repeated this trick with two other RLS poems (eg Looking-Glass River leading to her singing Pissing In A River with some gusto). Dedicating John Lennon's Beautiful Boy to Kate and William's wee George was a bit "yeuch". What was striking was the rhythm and pace Stevenson's poesy demonstrated in contrast to the earlier free verse.

Allen Ginsberg

More rhythmic again was Philip Glass who came back for an impressive run through excerpts from Metamorphosis and Etudes. Then Ginsberg's poems got a look in again towards the end with a rendition of the touching poem Aunt Rose and the strident anaphora marching out in Footnote to Howl and On Cremation of Chogyam Trungpa. The night was finished off with Tony Shanihan on guitar, Philip Glass on piano and Patti Smith singing her soft rock anthem People Have The Power, definitely a bit of a curio.

She certainly has a stage presence, but her serious, humourless, declamatory style (even when reading children's poems) I found a bit wearing.

Sonica, Glasgow 2012

Review of events I've been to this week in Sonica 2012, Glasgow

The inaugural Sonica festival is running in Glasgow from 8th-18th of November across various venues, produced by Cryptic. Subtitled "sonic art for the visually minded" it tries to provide an opportunity to showcase work from Glasgow and across the world which doesn't normally fit easily onto a gallery wall. Now, I have always had a leaning towards music which resembles vacuum cleaners in dust cans falling down a lift shaft, so I was hoping to find lots to intrigue and entertain me in Sonica.

The programme is imaginative and varied. Some of it is aimed specifically at children (such as Sonic Dreams). Others have a seemingly childish simplicity that would appeal to anyone, such as Kathy Hinde's kinetic sculpture, Piano Migrations, in the foyer of the Scottish Music Centre. It is a hypnotic sight as wee birds projected onto the strings of an up-ended piano cause motors to twitch and pluck the strings as the birds tweet about its workings, like a John Cage work brought to life.

Piano Migrations

Over at the Traway a more dramatic kinetic sculpture is on show from Korean artist Mookyoung Shin. Our Contemporaries is in a darkened room where dozens of perspex hands rest on desks. As each hand is illuminated in turn the impatient fingers drum on the desk with a repetitive tapping. It is a sight worth seeing, but hearing it is part of the whole dreamy atmosphere too that slowly builds. I was there with my kids, who felt it was like the drumming that The Master used in hypnotising the human race in an episode of Doctor Who. Very impressive in scale and execution.

Our Contemporaries

More was on show over at the CCA. Luke Fowler worked with Jean-Luc Guionnet's to produce his film All Divided Selves about RD Laing and is a current Turner Prize nominee. I won't be able to see the film they've made together for Sonica, which is on this Friday night. However I was able to go and see Pilgrimage from Scattered Points, about Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra on at the CCA throughout the festival. The "musicians" and composers on film are all so very earnest and sincere in their enterprises, whether dropping marbles onto a drum skin, scraping rocks across the floor or in the final sequence debating whether their self-expression in this music is enough to express their political ideas of the world. I like their earnestness.

Extended Play

Upstairs at the CCA is the fantastically atmospheric and thought provoking Extended Play by Janeck Schaefer. Three groups of old-fashioned record players in a darkened room with red spotlights play separately the violin, cello and piano parts of a piece of music taken from a Polish folk song. As you walk around them you cause the record players to slow and stop, constantly changing the music. The blurb describes it as "a triptych for the child survivors of war and conflict" and started from the idea of 'Jodoform', music played by the BBC during WW2 to pass messages to the Polish Underground. It does make you ponder as you wander, reflect, think about the effect you have on the room. I liked it a lot.

Along the corridor from it is another outing for Aidan Moffat and FOUND's "sound installation" #UNRAVEL, more stripped down than when I last saw it at Glasgow International 2012, but the idea is the same. You pick singles from someone's collection and unpick the story of their life from the monologues they trigger off. With the headphones on this time, rather than standing back in awe at the mechanical instruments as I did last time, I was more able to take in the stories being told.

Remember Me by Claudia Molitor is being performed in the lovely setting of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed Scotland Street School Museum. We are gathered outside the room and lead in to find her dressed like one of the Greek priestesses who light the Olympic flame watching a projected film to the sounds of water falling and discordant strings. Then we are taken next door and about 20 of us watched her performance around an old white writing desk. She talks of the imagined phone call between the female operatic heroines Dido and Eurydice and "their good friend Cinderella" whilst taking objects from the drawers and projecting films onto it and herself. It made me think back to the fun I had as a child rummaging in the jam-packed drawers of my granny's old "bureau" which was full of the most random stuff. We were dismissed one by one at the end by words whispered privately in our ear by the elfin performer. "Remember me?", I think I will. Bonkers, but good bonkers. I headed over to the Tramway hoping for more of the same.
I made a quick dash over to the Tramway to see Bluebeard, again based upon opera, Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, but described as "state of the art opera for the digital age", produced and performed by the "33 1/3 collective", a collaboration of Dutch artists. The story of Bartok's opera has Bluebeard's new wife insisting he opens the seven castle doors, revealing various dark secrets. In this staging bizarre and spectacular images are projected onto a large cube in the centre of a darkened hall whilst music and singing/ chanting rings out. Some images and sounds are startling, like the coins spinning onto the floor as the treasure room is opened, whilst in others the artists come onstage to interact with them, such as apparently sweeping corpses onto a stretcher. I have never seen anything like this before. Absolutely stunning, although the visuals overwhelmed the music a bit.

Between shows at the Tramway I played with Tim Cooper's Dora, a computer programme set up in the foyer where your typed in thoughts are translated into electronic music, of sorts.

Tales of Magical Realism - Part 2 (and my allocated number)

The best show of the night for me I'd saved until last. "Tales of Magical Realism - Part 2" by Sven Werner. Part 1 was apparently done at Cryptic Nights, the previous incarnation of this festival and both are based on his film Oculista and featuring musician Graeme Miller. The description in the programme didn't give many clues to what was in store for us. Initially our group were led outside and up a fire exit at the back of the building to enter a hall where three musicians were playing at the far end, whilst a ballerina performed in the middle of the hall. It takes a while to realise the dancer is bound by a line of twine to a weight on a pulley. We are measured and given a raffle ticket on arrival, and every 5 minutes the doors at the far end opened, a bell rings and three of our ticket numbers are called forward. After an eye examination akin to Deckard's V-K test and a serenade in German, the three are lead away to another room. Meanwhile the musicians and ballerina start up again as we shuffle about in the room, keeping out of her way. Down a corridor we enter another room of the installation, where music and spoken word through headphones we are given tell us a mysterious story. We are guided to look through an array of Heath Robinson contraptions, sort of zoetrope machines. The last stage of the story entails a one in three chance of you ending up on a penny farthing to power a dynamo to illuminate the end of the story. The whole thing was a joy, a vaudevillian version of Blade Runner, re-imagined by a Victorian Tom Waits. The surreal nature of it all was added to by the fact that I knew the guy on guitar, having worked with him about 15 years ago. Very strange.
Overall Sonica was full to bursting with the type of music, performance and sonic arts that I absolutely love. The reduced prices for advanced booking and 3 for 2 offers meant I was able to see loads of stuff in the festival and I hope to find it returning next year.