April 24, 2013
Musicians Are Scum
Monday night, courtesy of the lovely Antonio -- everyone has lapses in taste -- was spent at the Barbican for a (big, sold out) concert by vapid "alt-classical" pablum purveyor Ludovico Einaudi and his ensemble of talented but tragically misguided musical reprobates. From which introduction, you can probably tell how much I liked it.
Christ, what valueless drivel. It was like someone had dumped a bunch of Richard Clayderman tapes and Elton John backing tracks into a half-baked and bugridden Nymanizer. The result transcended mere boredom to reach a lower plane where tedium takes on new and threatening forms. It was so relentlessly and aggressively unchallenging that I found myself positively enraged. Dreary, banal chord progressions crescendoed for 10 minutes at a stretch. This was cinematic background music of the drabbest kind, desperately in need of pictures, characters, plot and dialogue to sketch something -- anything -- into its abysmal emptiness (and cover it over with more listenable sounds). In fact, it was so consistently like the soundtrack to semi-dramatic moments in some dull MOR B-movie that it could almost -- almost -- be read as a sly avant garde deconstruction of the interdependence of lazy music and cheap sentiment in shitty films, were it not for the fact that the whole thing was so fucking po-faced and humourless and Ludovico clearly takes it so seriously. It was utter, utter, utter, utter rubbish. But the full house in the huge Barbican Hall was rapturous, leaping to a standing ovation and demanding and receiving a smugly interminable encore. Clearly I am just a snob; which implication only pisses me off the more.
Thankfully, an antidote to this musical affliction was duly administered on Tuesday in the form of Pere Ubu at the much smaller but at least well-attended Bush Hall. (Last time I was there was to see Michelle Shocked; hopefully Crocus B won't be spiralling off into crackpot homophobic religiosity next.) The audience here was a kind of exaggerated version of the one I attributed to Sean O'Hagan, underperforming on the blood relations side but certainly making up the numbers in ageing musos and misfits.
As it happens, the bill offered two fat weirdo noise bands for the price of one, with David Baker's new combo Variety Lights wailing and torturing their collection of beat-up instruments like a middle aged Sisters of Mercy who'd long since given up on being gaunt and stylish and settled instead for bewildered and resentful. (That's not a criticism: I enjoyed their bilious caterwauling a lot.)
David Thomas, of course, is no longer actually fat -- in fact, he's looking distressingly old and frail -- but at least remains steadfastly weird.
In the real world, we wear eyeglasses not so that we can see, but so that we can't see; we have stage monitors not so we can hear, but so we can't hear; and we have fans not so they can love us, but so we can hate them...
DT's frailty aside, Ubu collectively seemed in rude health, much stronger and fiercer than for Bring me the Head of Ubu Roi a few years back, with livelier material more confidently performed and generally better received by the aforementioned ragtag fugitive band. Old classics featured alongside some pretty decent new stuff, and though David forewent the melodeon there was some pretty wacky instrumentation. Never have I seen a theremin so foregrounded, and Robert Wheeler's playing of it was actually quite amazing, contributing a vital sonic thread to many of the songs. He had a few other toys to play with -- literally, in the case of a circuit-bent raygun -- and there were many other bits of creaky tech onstage to add to the nuttiness. (Several pieces looked very like some of the obsolete electrophysiology equipment stacked up in the corners of our lab, and it struck me that there's a clear aesthetic crossover between experimentalists in music and science. Perhaps that's just an age thing, but I don't think so.)
Anyway, it was a great evening and I am now satisfactorily decompressed. Yet more culture tonight, in the form of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Puz/zle. I predict that the audience will be generally younger, prettier and more fashionable than for either of the preceding; but that's almost inevitable when going from music to dance. I think that's changing, slowly, but the day when a dance crowd are as cranky, unfit and badly dressed as the average rock gig are a long way off. At least I do my bit.
Posted by matt at April 24, 2013 9:31 AM