Review: Bristol New Music Festival, Various Venues

So I dipped my toes into the Bristol New Music Festival hoping to be surprised and excited by what I found and yes, to a large extent that’s exactly what happened. The first foray was to hear the Ligeti Quartet play Austrian composer Georg Haas’ String Quartet no 3 at the Victoria Rooms. The surprising detail being it was to be performed in total darkness, the four players seated at the corners of a block of seats with us sat between them. Sitting in rows was like waiting for a film but when the lights went out a 40 minute soundtrack to pure darkness began. Much of the music was call-and-response between the instruments, occasionally tones were magically passed overhead from viola to cello, towards the end things accreted to a tumult that felt like a canopy of sound with overtones and resonances somehow breaking loose from their origins. It truly was a new experience of listening and a phenomenal feat of musicianship given the players could neither see each other nor their instruments.

Shirley Pegna (Bristol New Music Festival, pic: Tony Benjamin)

There were literally hidden depths to Shirley Pegna’s Earth Din project, which used the sounds of the Earth’s internal grindings picked up from Indonesia, Fiji and Greece by a seismometer. These were overlaid with ‘sferics’, the radio wave bursts made by lightning storms in the ionosphere. The uncluttered field recordings created an unpredictable stimulus for Shirley’s cello with Dominic Lash on ‘bass violin’ and Angharad Davies’ violin. All seasoned improvisers, the trio’s sound vocabularies were as varied as the outbursts of static and unearthly wrenchings. With the players also continuously repositioning around the Arnolfini’s dimly lit Dark Studio it was another enhanced listening experience, their bows wrenching and scratching at the strings and bodies of the instruments. At one point Dominic even used his tuning pegs to make rasping croaks, at another they layered their bowed sound into tectonic plates with fossilised groans exhumed from prehistory. Or so it seemed.

Wojciech Rusin (Bristol New Music Festival, pic: Tony Benjamin)

Over at St George’s Polish-born artist Wojciech Rusin unveiled strangely eclectic soundtracks to his graphic animations. The camera eye of After A Feast circled a collection of hyper-real corrupted Ancient Greek artefacts, while Speculum Veritatis prowled a ravaged swamp around the wreckage of a burnt out car. With the assistance of multi-instrumentalist Emmy ‘The Harp’ Broughton and singer-artist Jo Hellier they moved from home-made didgeridoo drones through electro-acoustic mash-ups and the semi-ancient sounds of Wojciech’s 3D printed pipes. Jo’s vocal contributions were impressive, ranging from shamanic intonations to a beautiful rendition of the English traditional Drowned Lover folk song, and the set ended with the three of them thrashing about on an inflatable bag some twelve foot long with a chanter attached, surely making it a size record for bagpipes. Very entertaining, if all a bit non-sequitur.

Following on from that, the Hazarfan Ensemble’s Makam 21 was a more orthodox performance that explored the introduction of traditional Turkish musical modes (Makam) into a conventional Western musical context, with the addition of traditional instruments like the ney, a long whistle, and kemençe, a three string bowed instrument with a distinctive softened sound. Playing newly composed music from contemporary Turkish composers the sheer variety of composition made it hard to generalise about the project, other than to say it has immense flexibility in imaginative hands. Many pieces had atmospheric percussion provided by Amy Salsgiver, and pianist Müge Hendekli was also required to play on the piano strings evoking a santoor-like sound. The piece Luftschloss Passacaglia pitted the ney and kemençe against Western sounds as they patiently maintained a dogged undertow despite the aggressive ensemble sound around them.

Angel Bat Dawid (Bristol New Music Festival, pic: Tony Benjamin)

But the biggest impact was to be had from Angel Bat Dawid, an absolute phenomenon of a performer who made her way through the crowded Arnolfini auditorium hollering I Be Indestructible like an ecstatic gospel ranter. Rolling onto the stage she enthroned herself behind keyboards for a stately piano introduction to You Got To Do What’s Right, frenetic processed vocals and thunderous electro loops and all. Then she swerved into some freeform piano before picking up one of her range of clarinets and delivering a beautifully eloquent (and eloquently beautiful) clarinet solo. And when it stopped she began a conversation with the audience – didn’t we go somewhere then? But where? Then we were off again.

Angel Bat Dawid (Bristol New Music Festival, pic: Tony Benjamin)

She was the embodiment of complete freedom, both as a person and a musician, dispensing through a gospel-evoking truly spiritual jazz her own brand of wit and wisdom, part hell-fire preacher, part motivational speaker, part really nice person you’d want for a friend. When Nina Simone sang Billy Taylor’s I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free she may well have been yearning for what Angel Bat David has achieved. And that is despite the many oppressive social forces surrounding a black woman in modern society – something made horribly visible throughout the performance by the continuous collage of historic images of slavery and the scientific objectification of black people projected above her exuberant and affirmative stage presence. It was a new music, indeed, and one from a better future we have to hope we all can share.