Music Sound platform Seekers of easy listening music, turn away now. Instal’s exploration of ‘brave, new music’ aims to stimulate your brain, and your ears. Neil Cooper explains more
www.list.co.uk/music
✽✽ HITLIST
THE BEST ROCK, POP, JAZZ & FOLK
✽✽ Jacob Yates & the Pearly Gate Lock Pickers The Cramps-influenced band formed out the ashes of Uncle John and Whitelock, with support from Male Pattern Band and Black Jash. 13th Note Café, Glasgow, Fri 5 Nov. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings Old-school, Stax Records-style big band action. The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Fri 5 Nov. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Cowboy Junkies The spacey country-rockers who soundtracked some of Juliette Lewis’s bad behaviour in Natural Born Killers promote new album, Renmin Park. City Halls, Glasgow, Sun 7 Nov. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Wavves, (pictured) Other People and Paws See preview, page 58. The Arches, Glasgow, Mon 8 Nov. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Les Savy Fav Beardy art- rocker Tim Harrington and cohorts bring the noise, with Cloud Nothings and Sky Larkin providing support. Oran Mor, Glasgow, Sat 13 Nov. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Local Natives Psych-folkers living in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, with favourable comparisons to Arcade Fire and Vampire Weekend. King Tut’s, Glasgow, Sat 13 Nov. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Instal See interview, left. Tramway, Glasgow, Fri 12–Sun 14 Nov. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ LCD Soundsystem See feature, page 16. Barrowland, Glasgow, Wed 17 Nov. Please note Thu 18 date is now CANCELLED. (Rock & Pop)
The List is sad to announce that The Roxy Art House had to close it doors on Thu 28 Oct, after the bankruptcy of the charity that ran it. It was a great, multi-purpose space, doing a lot of good for the local grassroots music/ spoken word/ theatre scene. The organisers tell us they are ‘down but not out’ and we hope they find a new space to take events to. Keep an eye on www.list.co.uk for information on rescheduled dates and venues. 4–18 Nov 2010 THE LIST 57
MATTIN
CHALLENGES AUDIENCE/
PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIPS
T he arrival of the 21st century had all sorts of connotations about the future. Eleven months into 2001, a year that had finally caught up with science-fiction, the first Instal festival of ‘Brave New Music’ opened its doors with an era-spanning statement of intent, as 100 metronomes ticked its audience into the unknown. As a re-enactment/tribute to Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s Fluxus movement-inspired 1962 composition, ‘Poeme Symphonique for 100 metronomes’, here was a nod to avant-garde and experimental music’s most arguably fertile historical period.
Almost a decade later, curated leftfield music festivals are commonplace, while micro-gigs of experimental sounds are a staple of art galleries and ad hoc venues. Yet, after a decade of Japanese noise artists and New York minimalist veterans, this year’s programme is unrecognisable. Organisers Barry Esson and Bryony McIntyre’s other iconoclastic events such as the sound and vision-based ‘Kill Your Timid Notion’ and environmental-based one-offs ‘Resonant Spaces’ and ‘Shadowed Spaces’ may have seen them morph into the fully professional Arika organisation, but 2010’s Instal, marketed with the ‘Braver Newer Music’ tag, seems to question it’s very existence. ‘Maybe it was enough when we started,’ Esson explains, ‘to just put things on that, at the time, weren’t happening in Scotland. Since then, we’ve deepened our engagement with experimental music. I see it now as a fidelity to certain systems of thought through experimental music.’
dogmatic way, but in a more inquiring way that gels with a reawakening of social engagement borne of 1960s idealism among many contemporary cutting- edge artists.
At Instal, there will be performances, provocations and investigations by computer-based noise musician Florian Hecker, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra guitarist Neil Davidson and French improviser Matthieu Saladin. The opening event is provided by actor Tam Dean Burn, who with sound-art based radio station Resonance FM’s Radio Orchestra, will do a 48-hour walk around Glasgow, broadcast as it happens. Also key to where Instal is at right now is the presence of Basque provocateur Mattin (pictured), whose copyright-free book, Noise and Capitalism challenges the audience/performance relationship. Instal’s closing event will see Mattin collaborate with Glasgow Open School, a group based on self-determination similar to the Glasgow Free University that existed in the 80s, in which the ‘performance’ will be ‘led’ by audience members who’ve attended a series of workshops. ‘There is no-one that isn’t part of the system.’ Mattin acknowledges. ‘If you’re a performer you’re supposed to present something, but you have to go against expectations and see it more as a social gathering.’ ‘All experimental art-forms come out of a desire for opposition,’ Esson says. ‘How you avoid being consumed is the hard part.’ The rest, it seems, is up to you.
Put simply, Instal has got political. Not in a Instal, Tramway, Glasgow, Fri 12–Sun 14 Nov.