So I start a holiday and end up more tired than ever after just a couple of days… ah well. I was out late last night at Interlace, a report on which follows, but then up very early this morning to drive for two hours, sit about bored to death and then make the reverse journey tonight. All somewhat exhausting, but then it wasn’t work, so I’ll stop complaining. So last night’s concert was a nice, if somewhat underattended affair that involved four sets of music. The evening began with the duo of Jane Dickson, playing piano with electronics alongside Claire Singer, playing cello and electronics. I had seen Dickson play once before, as part of one of Mark Wastell’s large The Seen groups, but on that occasion her sound was somewhat buried in the overall swell. Singer was a completely new name to me. I suspect (though I am not sure) that both could be linked in some way to Goldsmiths College, Interlace’s venue, partly because their approach to their instrumentation included some degree of digital processing of acoustic sound, an area of investigation I (probably irrationally) link to Goldsmiths.

Dickson and Singer made a kind of slow, often dreamy and somnolent music that veered very close to an Eno-esque ambience but was undercut by a gritty edge and irregular patterns in the otherwise deathly slow rhythmic structure. The tendency was for one musician or the other to make an acoustic sound that would then be stretched out digitally into a longer droning note, with the other then placing incidental sounds into it, often repeating them slowly. While Dickson concentrated entirely on the piano, working both inside and outside, but with slowed, spaced out gestures which were sometimes then digitally transformed, Singer began the set by working with what looked like telephone pick-ups placed on the body of her laptop and what I think was also a CD player to pick up the electromagnetic signals, which she moulded into the music. She later switched to the cello, the sound of which was transformed into a kind of amorphous wail, which was often looped onwards after she had put the instrument down. Overall I found Dickson and Singer’s set to be lacking in enough gristle or punch to really connect fully with me, but certainly there were some very nice sounds here and enough skill and technique to suggest that on another occasion it could really work. For now things strayed a little too close to ambient areas with a capital A.

There followed another young looking ensemble named Inclusive Improv that consisted of four laptop musicians sat in a line at the back of the space in front of a solo cellist. Two of the musicians were Adam Jansch and Scott Hewitt, but sadly, and embarrassingly, I did not catch the names of the others when they were so beautifully announced, and only these two are mentioned on the flyer. Subsequent googling on the group brings up a whole host of possible names, so I will have to rely on Sebastian or one of the group chiming in here with the details. Sorry about that. One thing I do know is that the musicians hail from Huddersfield, or rather I suspect attend Huddersfield University, whose music programme seems as progressive as at Goldsmiths.

While four MacBooks have the potential to make an awful lot of noise the group played in a nicely restrained, suitably balanced manner that, for a laptop group impressed me quite a bit. The four digital players seemed to work only with sounds generated from their computers, though at least one seemed to be taking a feed from the cello, which was played very well indeed, mostly in small bursts of expressionistic angular bowing. Mostly the laptoppers blended together a gentle field of textural sounds, many of which were completely abstract, perhaps originating from closely miked events, but others included hydrophone recordings, cut up snippets of spoken word and even a loud thunderstorm, alongside which the cellist duetted for a while. I personally found the less obvious digital sounds far more interesting than the straight field recordings, though there was always enough going on to distract the ear away from any one sound source at any time. The most enjoyable aspect of all was the cello’s interaction with the computerised sound. I’m annoyed I cannot name the cellist right now as he was good, sat very still and attentive for much of the time, flowing into confident and powerful shapes at others. Again, this set was far from perfect, and if it was up to me I would like to hear less of the more obviously referential sounds, but it isn’t so I’ll shut up.

There then followed a solo by Kanta Horio, whose performance I wrote a little about last night. Horio’s set was as much about a shared happening as it was about purely the sounds he produced. He sat down beside a small pile of handmade bits and pieces before beckoning the audience close, so we all sat in a tight circle around his apparatus. Its impossible for me to describe in detail what he worked with, but it included a number of small motors, magnet driven engines, springs, including a long one stretched down from a plastic flower pot suspended from a high mic stand and a speaker housed in another flower pot, which was itself mounted on what looked like an old scrubbing brush. So all kind of rattles, scrapes and whirring sounds took place. Even sat up close I’m not sure how some of them came about. The speaker took on a life of its own, wandering about the floor driven by its own vibrations, causing the audience to lift their legs at times, or move to let it pass. Most of the sounds were very quiet, either acoustic scratches and ticks or the gentle purr of the speaker, with only the odd rhythmic banging caused by some kind of bouncing motor suspended on the spring standing out above the rest. In fact, often Horio’s excited scampering from one section of his set-up to another would cause as much sound as the objects themselves, but it really felt like the performance was all about the process itself rather than the audio output. Everything ended in true improvisational fashion when, as Horio stretched out the spring to capacity to attach it to something new it accidentally slipped from his hand and flew back with a sudden crack, as if signalling the finish. This set was thoroughly engaging (I could have watched all night) and thoroughly interesting, part musical experiment, part practical physics lesson and a whole lot of highly original fun. Catch him if you get the chance.

The evening ended in more familiar Interlace territory with an improvised trio by three members of the weekly improv workshop, Grundik Kasyansky, (electronics) Ross Lambert (guitar but also a load of other small objects) and Gabriel Humberstone (percussion). This was a constantly searching, varied and unusual set that covered a lot of ground across its thirty-five or so minutes but was completely captivating throughout, even though I am not sure I know why! Although I have spoken to Gabriel Humberstone often in the past I had never had the opportunity to see him play before, and I liked what he did, working with very little, just a single snare, drumsticks and what looked like a zither but I couldn’t quite see. He rattled, scraped and attacked what he had, with the snare often removed from its stand and played on its end on the floor. His playing style was very forthright and direct, making firm musical statements often louder than the other music taking place around him, but placed very well, changing the music on each occasion.

This approach was actually quite symptomatic of the performance in general, with Kasyansky in wonderful form, producing blasts of feedback, sudden, momentary random samples and other squeaks and squeals. He used his bulldog clip styled microphones to amplify the tables his equipment was placed on before setting about the table legs with drum sticks, creating a booming crash with every strike. Often Kasyansky’s hands containing the mics were flailing about from surface to surface, and on one occasion he even inexplicably clipped one to his nose. Behind the theatrics though was a wonderful sense of disruptive timing and placement of sounds. If things looked completely haphazard and accidental they certainly were not.

Lambert had a troubled look on his face throughout the entire set, but equally his input into proceedings was thoughtful and playful, ranging from the usual tweaks and chimes from his electric guitar to extensive use of a beautiful old steel bicycle bell, a wind-up torch and something that seemed to be a machine designed to imitate birdcalls. Certainly it was a small black box from which the sound of cackling crows and blackbirds seemed to come. Exactly what it was I don’t know.

If all of this sounds like an erratic mess well in many ways it was, but perhaps much less of a mess and more of a confrontational interchange between the musicians, never, not for one minute letting things settle into one area, always shifting, changing gear, changing sounds altogether. At the heart of everything was that old favourite, the electricity of free improvisation, the challenge in the moment, the search for different combinations of sounds. It was this constant reinvention, reappraisal of the music on the go that drew me into this performance. I suspect if I heard the recording back at a later date I may not be as grabbed as I was last night as perhaps it was less about any final product and more about the ongoing investigation that pulled me and the rest of the audience into the equation last night. Good stuff.