Review: Bristol New Music Festival 2024, Beacon/St George’s/Strange Brew

I don’t know if anyone managed to catch the whole weekend of the Bristol New Music Festival programme but it would be interesting to know where their head was at by the finish. Suffice it to say that there was a huge range of performance styles and creative approaches to the notion of music on offer with some remarkable performers to enjoy. As a combination of thought-provoking experiences and fine entertainment the 2024 festival was an undoubted success.

One theme was the exploration of voice, exemplified on the opening night by Elaine Mitchener and Lonnie Holley (see earlier review) and further displayed by two acts in St George’s on Saturday night. Scots veteran of the free music world Maggie Nicols teamed up with youngster percussionist Dan Johnson, the latter kneeling in a circle of instruments. From a silent pause their music grew and swerved, Maggie’s extraordinary range of vocal sounds at times implausibly powerful, at others mumblingly gentle or dislocatingly ethereal. Throughout, Dan coaxed and enriched her flow of ideas towards its anguished climax referencing the crisis in Gaza. That issue was also a recurrent theme for Matana Roberts who used the call and response of protest marches to engage an audience that eventually would provide them with a three-part choir as they toyed with snatches of Gospel songs. Equally impressive, however, were their bursts of soprano sax, richly-toned and fluent, hinting at free-playing giants like Albert Ayler or Anthony Braxton.

Bass guitarist Ruth Goller’s Skylla (Strange Brew, Sunday) originated as a primarily vocal project, three intertwined voices underpinned by detuned bass guitar harmonics. Her latest album, however, incorporates drummer Seb Rochford. He was a suitable sensitive presence yet this added instrumentation brought out more conventional bass playing and reduced the space for the vocal interactions and spontaneity between Ruth, Lauren Kinsella and Alice Grant that make Skylla so magical. It was lovely stuff, whatever, evoking the bleak and mysterious corners of Ruth’s imagination.

Friday night at the Beacon saw a great sequence of audio-visual treats that started with a triple-bill in The Lantern. First up, Penumbra from Dali de Saint Paul and bassist Maxwell Sterling was an improvised response to a combination of lights and projected images from Rebecca Salvadori and Charlie Hope. Their sonic narrative was a grippingly tense soundscape, deep throbbing loops and aggressive breathing enhanced by odd subtitles on screen images of workshops and cityscapes. By contrast, Parisian digital composer Aho Ssan and Sevi Iko Dømochevsky slammed unhesitatingly into a visceral apocalypse of deconstructed dance music to an explosive swirling visual backdrop.

The dynamic energy of their set didn’t sustain itself into headliner Klein’s closing show, however. Seemingly lost in smoky darkness it felt as though it began with technical difficulties before thrashing post-punk guitar chords established an insistent pulse. It was strangely reminiscent of church bells, yet with a harshness emphasised by fierce strobe lights, with simplistic line drawings adding an enigmatic counterpoint. People drifted over to the main hall where a packed ground floor audience shuffled under the beautifully relentless graphic evolutions of Ryoji Ikeda with its accompanying soundtrack of mashed up electronic dance music, moments of reggae bliss or drum and bass tension blurring into one another beautifully.

Amongst all these pleasures two highlight performances stood out, the first being Apartment House at St George’s. Their opening was a string quartet plus keyboard arrangement of theatre music by Arthur Russell, a layered piece of steady minimalism driven by subtle variations that established a kind of contemplative atmosphere  which would prove ideal for their subsequent performance of the Nico album The Marble Index. This proved a triumphant refreshment to that extraordinary original, with all the musical ideas and dynamics captured in the string arrangements. The peerless performance of vocalist Francesca Fargion deployed gentle clarity and avoidance of melodrama to bring out the full strangeness of Nico’s somewhat elliptical poetry. The beautiful simplicity of Frozen Warnings and the musical chaos of The End of Time were exceptional moments.

The other highlight actually closed the festival when improvising jazz quartet [Ahmed] performed at Strange Brew. Their solid set had a relentless propulsion from the outset, pianist Pat Thomas pounding an Afro-Latin groove against Antonin Gerbal’s tight-knit drum pattern, Joel Grip‘s urgent bass and the punching squawks of Seymour Wright’s alto sax. The music reshaped, stripped back at times, growlingly restrained before rushing back to maximum intensity but always perfectly integrated and balanced with a clarity of pulsing purpose. It was a pure primal endorphin flow that swept the audience along unquestioningly to wherever it was going, a forceful reminder that, for all the intellectual and aesthetic processing behind much New Music, underlying it all it’s the beat that goes on.