- Venue
- Wilton Music Hall
- Location
- London
Cut and Splice is an annual Festival of experimental music, performance and sound art organised by Radio 3’s Hear and Now, and the Sound and Music Organisation. This year it was held in the perfectly worn Wilton’s Music Hall and focussed on the theme of radio.
The opening night featured four performances. First up was Nicolas Collins, performer and author of Handmade Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. Collins’ piece, entitled Devil’s Music, emerged not from the loudspeakers on the stage, but from somewhere in the dress circle – a mechanical squeak and a garbled holler. Then, a choked sinewave and a synoptic squeal as the sound slowly started circling the theatre. Finally from the stairs we saw Collins’ descend, a tray of circuit boards and aerials hanging around his neck.
The sounds acquired presence as he plugged the device into the sound rig. Instead of evaporating into the rafters they began pummelling at our eardrums. Their source, shortwave radio transmissions from the UK, France, and beyond, became more discernible. For all its abrasive and fragmented qualities Devil’s Music had some compositional shape. The piece built up, with moments of release and tension. Snatches of popular songs created pockets of nostalgia that were then trounced in static noise. Collin’s self-made technology revelled in its imperfections. Collin’s performed with care, as if playing the children’s game Operation, each movement controlled enough not to let the noise takeover entirely. By the close I’m exhausted. A fine opening.
Next up was the Resonance Radio Orchestra performing Ed Baxter’s Spiral. After Collins it was oddly comforting to see a piano, a tympani and a snare drum on the stage. There’s a cosy relief in a seeing ‘real’ instruments at an experimental music gig. Spiral focussed on the interplay between the live players and three mobile phone conversations that were apparently occurring at the same time as the performance. Opening with rolling snares and squealing digital sound played on a touchscreen pad, the piece settled into a Sun Ra-esque soundscape of intermittent tympani rolls and atonal piano stabs. The mobile phone voices drifted in and out of the mix, creating a nicely contemporary counterpoint to the almost retro avant-gardism of the players. The narrative outlined in the programme got a little lost in the mix and the piece sagged somewhat in the middle, but it did build to a neat pay-off at the end; I won’t give the game away as the piece will be performed again soon in Glasgow.
The next group, featuring AMM’s Keith Rowe, Lee Paterson, Robert Worby and Kjell Bjorneegen played a version of Earle Brown’s Four Systems. The piece is a visual score, devoid of traditional notation so open to endless interpretation. For much of the performance only Worby seemed to look up at the paper. A visual score is often more interesting to talk about than actually play. However – that’s not to say the performance was bad. There was incredibly poise and restraint displayed by all the players, as well as moments of ‘what-the-fuck-was-that-ness’ that can make live improvisation so thrilling. The threat of imminent derailment, held at bay by fearless playing, can be a great listen. The best moments of the set balanced the deathful static of radio noise with the intense melancholia of the fragmented broadcast; exotic and intimate at the same moment.
Tetsuo Kogawa’s closing set was the highlight of the night. The first four minutes of his set were completely silent (how this will sound when broadcast on Radio 3 I don’t know), and contained the first performance of live soldering I’ve ever seen. He sent a hundred geeky hearts fluttering; “He’s one of us. Soldering on a Saturday night.” Kogawa was building a radio, from coloured wire and two water glasses. It was fascinating. When complete he began coaxing all kinds of radiophonic distress out of his transmitters. His hands hovered over and around the glasses and the performance took a spiritualist turn. The notion of the radio as a medium resonated into mediumship, especially inside the Victorian venue. I was reminded that one of the earliest uses of phonographic technology was to record the voices of the dying; an act of aural embalmment. Sound hovers between the living and the dead. Kogawa reinvigorated this wonder in radio; his primitive wireless soundings almost became magic. His soundings were atonal, noisy, fragmented, but somehow never dull. After a final swooping descent through the frequencies it was over.
A diverse and enjoyable opening to the festival. However, one complaint to Cut and Splice: the whole weekend was a bit bloke-y. Ten acts over the weekend and only two women onstage? This does little to dispel the slight whiff of male geekery than can surround sound practices, and it’s not for a lack of talented women working in the radiophonic arts (Anna Friz and Nina Czegledy are two examples of the top of my head). There’s no excuse really.
