Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.05.2014, Qupperneq 24

April 10 – 12 Harpa Concert Hall
Tectonics Music Festival
Plate Shifting, Wall Busting
Experimental music collides with the public
in all kinds of weird, brutal and frustrating ways
24
The international line up at Tecton-
ics Reykjavík 2014 was for the main
part the same as Tectonics Glasgow
from last year. The guest of honour,
composer Alvin Lucier, is a man well
known for being less interested in con-
ventional musical forms and instead
investigating sound once it’s left the
source. Throughout the weekend, we
were treated to numerous performanc-
es of his works, showcasing his views
in simple, yet mischievous ways. “Mu-
sic For Piano (With One Or More Snare
Drum),” was a delicate piano piece
with surrounding snare drums acting
as resonators to the piano’s sound vi-
brations, while “Nothing Is Real” had
pianist Tinna Þorsteinsdóttir play
decontextualised melody phrases from
“Strawberry Fields Forever,” with Alvin
playing the piece back with a teapot as
an amplifier, using the lid to change the
resonance and pitch of the playback.
Telekinesis To Terrorism
The best performance of his works was
“Music For Solo Performer,” in which
Alvin used his own brainwaves to gen-
erate electrical currents that flowed to
contact speakers on various instru-
ments and objects situated across
Norðurljós. Sitting there passively like
the psychokinetic man from ‘The Me-
dusa Touch,’ he would make every-
thing come alive and buzz and rumble
at random. It felt like being in a rattling
old house in the middle of a storm.
Other international artists decided
to smash our senses into jelly with or-
chestral terrorism. Norwegian quartet
Lemur’s “Critical Band” started in to-
tal darkness as heavy grunting drones
and dissonant squeals and phrases
from musicians dispersed through El-
dborg, flying around our heads. It was
an intense listen that left you feeling
wiped out in the end. The title of one
of Iancu Dumitrescu’s pieces, “Uto-
pias For Iceland,” made you want to roll
your eyes and groan, but very quickly
you realised that Inspired By Iceland
would run for the hills upon hearing
this. Discordant phrases and wet noo-
dlings were stabbed with orchestral
attacks that were nasty and brutish.
Following this, Ana-Maria Avram’s
works were even more aggressive, as
her mixture of instruments, electronics
and vocal guttrics contained several
moments of high frequency feedback
and queasy throbbing resonances that
made several people cower and clutch
their ears (the two women who were
knitting throughout kept at it though).
By comparison, Liz Harris, aka
Grouper, cast a reserved, almost
spectral presence on Thursday night.
Using piano, effects and field record-
ings, she created an eerie vibe that re-
sembled the last gasp of humanity. Her
vocals barely registered and stayed in
the background over gentle low fre-
quency rumbles and sounds that you
couldn’t place or register. The accom-
panying film by Paul Clipson, echoing
of the work of Malcolm Le Grice and
Kurt Kren, displayed memories of a for-
gotten moment from a past life. Haunt-
ing, yet weirdly reassuring.
A Mixed Bag
The performances from Icelandic
composers were a mixed bag. On the
plus side, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdót-
tir’s “Esoteric Mass For Winds” in
Norðurljós was far and away the best
thing I’ve heard yet from the S.L.Á.T.U.R
music collective. A group of woodwind
instruments stood around a projection
of moving dots around circles (similar
to the models of electrons in an atom),
playing notes determined by the speed
the dot passed each musician. It was a
concept so simple a child could grasp
it, but the end result was playful, me-
lodic and imaginative. Also of note
was Angela Rawlings’ “Echolology,”
which emphasised environmental is-
sues with a mix of choral notes, sound
poetry techniques, and contact mic’d
objects, while Páll Ivan frá eiðum’s
“Mirror Neuron System” had the or-
chestra head tilting and sighing in
unison, displaying a form of deper-
sonalisation and forced homogeneity
reminiscent of sci-fi dystopias such as
“THX 1138.”
On the downside, Hallveig Ágúst-
sdóttir’s “kLAnK,” which consisted
of time-delayed, superimposition pro-
jections of her using paint, wood and
sticks on a mic’d surface accompanied
by rasping cello sounds seemed to go
nowhere beyond randomly making
a mess. Davíð Brynjar Franzson’s
“Longitudinal study #2,” a “sound
piece” consisting of a string orchestra
playing deadened strings or the sides
of their instruments, suffered from a
lack of variation and the harsh acoustic
atmosphere of Norðurljós. The shuf-
fling of the crowd caused Ilan to restart
from scratch, asking everyone to take
their shoes off. For a piece focused on
the crowd mingling among the instru-
ments, this ironically created a barrier
between the two parties, with people
almost too scared to breathe, let alone
move.
Unleashing The Hounds
The final day saw Tectonics unleash
the hounds. Down in Kaldalón, the
Icelandic electronic “supergroup” cen-
tred around Rúnar Magnússon (with
Thoranna Bjornsdottir, Pétur Eyvinds-
son and Valtýr Björn Thors) would for
more than three hours lift up big paving
stones of drone and assorted sounds
to inspect the muck that lay beneath. In
the main foyer, Glaswegian anti-rock-
ers Asparagus Piss Raindrop made
mischief, hunched and cloaked like the
bastard moonchildren from the Outer
Church, leaving slug-like trails of blue
tape everywhere they went. Finally set-
tling outside Kaldalón, they embarked
on a mix of dada art nonsense, noise
metal, and free jazz improv that be-
mused many of the crowd who’d come
to see the ABBA tribute concert in El-
dborg. Beyond being merely “weird,”
or “kooky,” they had the aura of alien
situationists, as if Guy Debord directed
‘Earth Girls Are Easy.’
The final performances of the fes-
tival were as demanding as they were
relentless, far removed from the usual
congratulatory dross you’d normally
get. First up was “Verlat,” composed by
one half of Einóma, Bjarni Gunnars-
son. With spotlights that splattered red
light across the walls and smoke rising
from the front, we were assaulted with
low-end electronic roars and screams
dredged from the bowels of the Earth,
all hissing rock and shrieking lava. It
was the contemporary art festival ver-
sion of “go hard or go home.”
Those who decided to “go hard”
were treated to Ghostigital’s “I Am
Sitting On A Long Thin Wire,” a reinter-
pretation of Alvin’s best known work,
“I Am Sitting In A Room.” Inspired by
sociology instead of physics, it was
more coherent and better executed
than their homage to John Cage at
Tectonics a couple of years earlier.
The insanely loud, heavy bass beats
manipulated by Curver were aug-
mented by tape recordings by Einar
Örn, his speech becoming increas-
ingly degraded with each re-recording.
Whereas Alvin’s words gradually died
way, leaving the resonant space of the
“room,” Einar Örn’s words became lost
in the cacophony, no matter how hard
he screamed into the tape, highlighting
the social dislocation and noise we ex-
perience in our everyday lives. It was so
loud and punishing that it caused some
of the wall panelling to fall off.
This made for a slightly pessimis-
tic, but honest, ending to what was an
intensive mix of active listening, inven-
tive ideas and sometimes wayward
and carefree execution that you rarely
get to hear anywhere else, rewarding
those who managed to hold on to the
very end.
Words by
Bob Cluness
If I didn’t know any better, I would say that the main purpose in the professional life of
Tectonics curator and Icelandic Symphony Orchestra conductor Ilan Volkov is “to stir shit
up.” Of course he’d probably call it something like “being radical and experimental,” but
it should be noted that in the two short years since its inception, the Tectonics Music
Festival has quickly grown in international stature (via Glasgow and now Adelaide) as a
testament to Volkov’s mission statement to shake up staid music conventions, bringing
together musicians from a variety of contemporary and experimental fields.
MusicThe Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 5 — 2014
THE NUMBER 1 MUSIC STORE
IN EUROPE ACCORDING TO
LONELY PLANET
SKÓLAVÖRÐUSTÍG 15, 101 REYKJAVÍK AND HARPA CONCERT HALL
“The shuffling of the
crowd caused Ilan to
restart from scratch,
asking everyone to take
their shoes off.”
REVIEW
Nanna Dís