Review: Tom Rogerson/William Basinski

The Lantern, Wednesday May 3

It can’t have been chance that led the sound guy to play Bowie’s Eno-produced Low album between sets, both Bowie and Eno being big influences on what would follow. Whatever the reason, the ominous intonations of Warzawa overhung proceedings interestingly as a result.

Tom Rogerson, crumpled

Three Trapped Tigers keyboard player Tom Rogerson walked somewhat diffidently onstage and took his place between synth and piano, crumpling down over the electronic keyboard for what would be his first solo improvisational performance. This project had begun in collaboration with Brian Eno who had bequeathed him a set of sounds and, as bell-like sonorities became underpinned by roaring growls, it was the sonic texture that caught the ear as the melodic content rose and fell. There were big shifts – from murky walls of sound to ethereal clarity, industrial soundtracks to church organ resonances – and at one time the keyboard was left with a mutating howl as he added a pastoral counterpoint on the acoustic piano.

Admitting that this was ‘work in progress’ Tom explained his approach as ‘contextualising messing around’ and that was how it felt. Solo improvisation asks a lot of an audience because it all hangs on one person’s combination of skill and creativity: it takes a lot of preparation to succeed at spontaneity and while sonic teasers were plentiful the rising and falling of modal ragas was ultimately less interesting and the final vocal number, heavily reverbed, felt oddly superfluous.

William Basinski, apparently.

By the time the second half started things were clearly headed towards opacity. The whole room was suffused with smoke, glowing blue from the stage lights, with William Basinski’s laptop and mixer rig vaguely visible on a backlit table. He made his entrance as a shadowy silhouette, caressed by the red light shafts from floor projectors, and warned of a ‘bumpy ride’ as we headed towards his Bowie tribute For David Robert Jones via A Shadow In Time, both the tracks from his latest album. The looped music grew slowly, a layering of contrasting elements that formed a tidal orchestration, establishing a ponderous inevitability within which the accretion of small shifts eventually generated a sense of development (if not exactly change). The process was like a very slow dub without a beat, emphasised as it moved to the Bowie tribute and a funeral procession (suggested by a repeating wonky saxophone phrase) slowly drifted into the underworld and a long slow fade to a silence that nobody broke for a few seconds.

It was all very William Basinski – in fact it felt exactly like that new William Basinski recording – and while that was no bad thing there was the rub. The room was packed, with doubtless many devotees anticipating a live performance from a composer whose source material is largely decaying analogue tape recordings caught digitally as the sound actually disintegrates. What they’d seen was a faint shadow theatre of a man with laptops producing a simulacrum of studio-constructed music in the dark (while wearing shades). It added up to a brilliant display of conceptual chutzpah (or at least it would have been if it had actually been visible) that considerably added to the entertainment value of the evening.