For me it’s not often that a musical performance instills a
compulsion to write, even less that such a desire might be so clearly
tied up with the performance as it is happening, but something about
last night’s gig by Gannets got my fingers itching. This is not to say
that this would simply be an opportunity to write about the music, or
anything as ostensibly straightforward as that, but rather that the
alterations made to the room by that almost over-fertile music seemed to
provide a place in which to write, a irresistible site of writing…
there was an excess of material to be tapped. Given that it has had to
wait until the next morning, I inevitably feel I’ve missed a trick, but
still I find myself wondering how the activities of listening (a
resolutely physical task in this case) and the act of writing came into
such an imploring proximity… what made this music a potential writing
machine…?
The cumulative presence conjured by this quintet was of extraordinary
power – the intensity with which they filled the room was of a
physicality beyond the effects of high volume and extreme dynamics. The
group commenced sharply with a barrage of artillery from Noble, as Ward
and Cundy began to maneuver their clarinets between shared coordinates
of fractured phrases and tongue stops. A low bed of tonal snow came from
Dangerfield’s distorted keyboard, punctured by mortar arcs of glissandi
and half-loops from Lash’s amplified double bass. From a near-chaotic
beginning that threatened not to fuse, the music set about determining
itself on a level slightly askew from its opening statements – which is
to say that there was a sense that it was only after pummeling the
surrounding air with an initial assault – curtain fire, carpet bombing
– that it would be possible for textures and frequencies to find
angles, troughs and planes into which they could bleed and settle, and
from where they could make inroads into new terrain, at different
altitudes and on different vectors. As these degrees of overall cohesion
took shape there was a sense of an always available ‘recognition’ of
different scales and intensities: a bass shot illuminating a squeal from
Ward, a flat-hand slap on the keyboard marking out a moments silence (…
as if entire weather systems could be intimated from zones of rainfall,
delicate thunderclaps instantly sounding out a surround… ). The option
to engage in a variety of concurrent modes, always in mixture, set these
burgeoning forms in a position to be disassembled, as if the trajectory
of the music were always looking for (or demanding) new forms to
assume. This was restless music in the sense that there was never any
wavering whenever the ‘decision’ emerged to abandon all that had gone
before, no matter how arduous and meticulous its set up had been.
Although it was a coincidence that I had seen Turner’s Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth
earlier in the day, it was certainly apt to associate the performance
with a vortex of sound – clenching planes swelling and swirling in the
narrow room, dragging the audience in. It seems trite to say it, but
there was an unnerving realisation that what was being produced there
and then was interfering with the space in a particularly brutal manner –
like Turner’s canvas, the music feigned to rotate the room as you sat
before it. If the gravity of the airscrew was undeniable, yet the free
arms of the spiral were audible here too: combinations of instruments
peeling off, cohering elsewhere, their differences of timbre shielded by
the context of their simultaneous production. For every layer there
were possible splits, with each player finding space in which to fray
and feather the group’s momentum – intense metallic hisses from the
hi-hat, frames of white noise, full blooded screeches – all making
themselves available for collapse and redistribution.
If anything, it was the lighter moments that were the least
successful, perhaps suggesting why they were apparently fewer than
usual. Following a charged gap – an improvised apnea – Dangerfield
tested out a barbed rhythm, immediately enforced by the ruthless Noble,
whose control allowed him to both fix and lever the pattern before
allowing his playing to disperse, as if observing its own residue from
above. In fact, the figure of combat is not too far off – the tone of a
battlefield, including moments of calm aftermath, which Ward and Cundy
would punctuate with their own defiant Reveille, in the space left after
armies have either departed or fallen. If the room was filled with
smoke at the end of it all, it would simply confirm that it had been
filled with matter, a smoke of such consistency that it might have
assumed the solidity of a base – a phantasmagorical, floating head with
expressions passing across it, a face constantly shifting. In any case,
it was a reminder as to how powerful and affecting this music can be.
Gannets are: Chris Cundy, Fyfe Dangerfield, Dominic Lash, Steve Noble & Alex Ward
