Review: Bristol New Music Festival, Various Venues

I might have started Saturday with a sense of disappointment but by teatime I’d had a corker of a musical good time, including one of the highlights of my musical year so far. The disappointment was due to the cancellation of an evening of music from the great Keith Tippett following his unfortunate health problems earlier in the week – a sad loss to the Bristol New Music programme (and we hope, naturally, that he’s on course for a full recovery). But nothing daunted I set out to sample some of the free treats on offer, starting at the Victoria Rooms and a lunchtime concert of electronic classical music.

One of BULO’s star players poses for a selfie

The gig was billed as BULO – the Bristol University Loudspeaker Orchestra – and took place in a dark space encircled with speakers that created an ambient immersion zone that was well used in the first set of purely electronic pieces. For Manuella Blackburn’s Icebreaker, a collage of sampled sounds of ice as it melts in water, this led to cascades of sound running across the room, evoking hordes of rabbits nibbling furiously or crashing demolitions.  Katrina Warren’s Eight Paces, by contrast, drove malfunctioning machinery in chaotic directions to a pulsing pixellated video, while the orchestral samples underpinning Kyong Mee Choi’s rare yet soft re-emerged in disjointed contexts of sound and space.

Ligeti Quartet playing in the dark, Arthur Keegan-Bole in the foreground

Finally, for Jonathan Harvey’s String Quartet No 4 the spacial shifting was a kind of choreography, displacing the Ligeti Quartet’s four instruments as they played through a contemporary classical score which included squeaks and scrapes and, memorably, an almost inaudible breath sequence of the slightest sounds of bow-hair on string. All this became more dramatic as Arthur Keegan-Bole manipulated the sound’s spatial displacement around us, bringing a kinetic dimension into play.

The Audint megaspeaker in pause mode

Wandering down to Spike Island I found the Audint installation, a futuristic construction looking at the interaction between sound and bodies. In the main room a massive speaker threw out a rising crescendo that eventually had the whole building shaking, while I wore a sort of sub-sonic back pack that throbbed through my body. I caught a couple of short lectures: Audint’s Toby Heys speculating about the increasing use of holographic performances of dead musicians into ‘post-humanistic outsorcery’ and Steve Goodman deconstructed the recent ‘sonic warfare’ panics from the US Embassy in Havana. Both peppered their delivery with the kind of thrillingly bogus meta-scientific language you find in William Burroughs novels, creating a virtual rationality whose reality was impossible to decypher.

Orchestral Manouevres in the Light

And then there was the amazing Anatomy of the Orchestra in the Colston Hall foyer, a performance of Steve Reich’s Music in Four Sections by an orchestra spread across the four levels of the building. The idea, as explained by conductor Charles Hazlewood, was for the audience to move continuously around the building and thus hear all kinds of musical elements as you approached the different players. The piece lasted twenty minutes, allowing time for you to go anywhere you liked. It was truly amazing, like a non-electronic version of the BULO spatial reconstructions. At different moments I found myself between two trumpeters, alternately stabbing a theme echoing back from horn players far across on another of the foyer’s bridges, or listening to the oft neglected viola part while insistent marimbas wafted up the building like scented smoke.

Charles Hazlewood conducting in the thick of it

As I walked about it was most noticeable how everyone I passed smiled in the certain knowledge that we were all sharing something really unique. It was a brilliant conception based on a well-chosen piece of music whose contrapuntal echoes and repetitions brought out the three dimensionality of the orchestra. Big credit to all the players from the Paraorchestra and Friends who coped charmingly with this unusual situation and massive credit to Charles Hazlewood for envisaging the project and bringing it to life.

That dot of light is Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at the IMAX

After a reasonably full afternoon that experience was enough for one day, but I returned to the festival on Sunday to catch Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at the IMAX cinema, a remarkable performance hardly glimpsed beneath the massive visuals on the big screen. A diminutive figure in front of a space module’s control panel, Kaitlyn delivered a combination of highly disciplined synthesised music and waywardly playful and unassuming vocals, dancing in the dark by the flickering lights of her Buchla 100 synth. At time the pulsing dance groove and declamatory vocals gave the effect of Laurie Anderson’s younger, House-trained sister revelling in the synth textures and the free flow of vocals while effervescent liquid images morphed and flowed above her.

It was a nicely individualistic way to end a very successful weekend exploring the joys of music that is not trying to be the same but rather to enter new territory in the search for new experiences. Big credit must go to the collaborating organisations for getting such a diverse spread of music and venues together so successfully.