Watts in the Hands of Babies
The Brood @ Purcell Room (QEH)
South Bank London, 6th November 1996
By Ed Pinsent
A mouth-watering programme tempted me into this - music by La Monte Young, John Cage, Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham? Sonic Boom, Scanner, Susan Stenger, Panasonic among the performers? Show me the queue! As it turned out, the concert was disappointing - it dished up an indigestible mess of poorly-chosen fragments of American 20th century music, and the performances and presentation were decidedly lacklustre. I felt we were being sold a bill of goods - avant-garde music as played by rock musicians. Of course there is an exciting rock/avant-garde interface: ready examples include Stockhausen and Holger Czukay, Luciano Berio and Phil Lesh, and the Sonic Youth-Glenn Branca connection. This concert managed to make this interface seem boring, and a tad pretentious too. The press releases for The Brood told us how Susan Stenger has a ‘foot in both camps’, which is hard to swallow - does merely following in Sonic Youth’s wake qualify you for such an epithet? I suspect this is a one-way traffic thing: rock musicians can borrow and popularise ideas from the avant-garde, but can they bring anything back the other way? These people may dig La Monte Young’s work, but are they really equipped to interpret his material? To these ears, the night’s contributions of Panasonic and Scanner - ostensibly playing someone else’s compositions - appeared no different to what they normally do on their own records.
The choice of music looked good on paper, but the programming of events was hardly felicitous. The second half, for example, gave us the concert’s highlight - 25+ minutes of a pretty good, loud and long Phill Niblock drone. But any beneficial effects on the listener were swiftly negated by the hamfisted Rhys Chatham noise-blast immediately following. This sub-Branca mishmash quickly deteriorated into sludge until only the snare drum stood out from the murky avalanche of guitar histrionics - the drumbeat simply reinforced how tedious this composition was. Of course, the wretched acoustics of this venue don’t help - a huge black drape was muffling 50% of sounds, while simultaneously bouncing back all the top end range towards the audience. Admittedly the promoter had obviously made some attempt to put like with like in the programme. Part one gave us the ‘difficult’ stuff; a Panasonic performance of Alvin Lucier which began to work when the electronic noises got so loud as to threaten to blow the speakers; a dismal Christian Wolff performance, verging on the plinky-plonk that gives avant-garde composition a bad name; and a sprawling shambles of three John Cage items performed simultaneously. This last one featured Shelley Hirsh going bananas with some hysterical vocalese gibberish - if only it’d been louder - and Scanner performing ‘Fontana Mix’ according to his own lights, which meant using random samples from records of John Cage readings. This melange promised in some places to catch fire, but obstinately refused to do so - the players stood on the brink of tipping it over into a delicious chaos of event-overload, but regained composure in the nick of time. Part two brought together three composers associated with minimal drones and harmonic tunings: Young, Niblock and Chatham; and also perhaps attempted to appeal to the rock component of the audience - all three pieces featuring electric guitars (sometimes played with the E-Bow), and players associated with the rock field. Yet they also brought rock’s bad attitude - the performers seemed non-committal, detached from their work. No pieces or players were introduced, only perfunctory attempts to acknowledge applause, even the dress was dismayingly art-student informal. I personally regretted this complete lack of a sense of occasion (and it’s quite common nowadays). You never sensed they even enjoyed doing this - rather, they rushed to get off stage and usher on the next act. Panasonic, the very first to appear, were virtually smuggled on stage in near-darkness, then remained crouched virtually out of sight behind electronic equipment. No doubt this adds to their mystique, but it came across as smug and ironic. Do they get away with it simply because it’s avant-garde music? (as if to say to an audience, if you like this noisy subversive stuff then you surely can’t be bothered about anything so bourgeois as good presentation.) Give me AMM any day of the week - even if their performances haven’t always taken off, they’ve never failed to involve and engage the spectator in a near-religious ceremonial, with their focused approach to playing and their respectful silences and pauses.
This event, co-ordinated by Susan Stenger, was affiliated to the ‘American Independents’ season at the South Bank, a programme which has also included some orchestral music by John Adams, George Crumb and Frank Zappa (among many others). The Brood was I suppose their concession to the fringe / avant-garde geniuses, but I can’t help feeling they were poorly represented by this token gesture. John Cage and La Monte Young in particular suffered here from excessively ‘free’ interpretations of their works. At least with the Niblock piece, the composer himself was present, and playing a sampler, which for many reasons made it the most successful of the pieces. The very presence of a good American Monster is what’s needed (as anyone who saw the dismal attempts to play Zappa will tell you): in the final analysis these composers tended to bring so much of their own personalities to their work that not everything can be written down or notated in such a way as to guarantee a successful interpretation by other musicians. I think The Brood event demonstrated this in spades.
ED PINSENT