Cryptic Nights@CCA, Glasgow
Thursday February 2nd 2012
Thursday February 2nd 2012
The title of Raydale Dower's new 'spatial sound composition' speaks
volumes about the former Uncle John & Whitelock bassist and current Tut
Vu Vu clarinettist and sonic architect's methodology. Hard on the heels
of his film installation, Piano Drop, which did exactly what it says on
the tin, this commission for twenty-first century music-theatre company
Cryptic's series of experimental one-night-stands, Cryptic Nights,
plays with sound and space in a far more formal arrangement, as the
fixed rows of seats surrounded by speakers and amplifiers great and
small suggests.
It begins in darkness, before a light is discreetly beamed onto a lone
speaker, from which emanates snatches of double bass, cello and bass
clarinet as played by Dower with Catherine Robb and David Munn and
overlaid with low-key electronics and found sound. With the instruments
criss-crossing both each other and whichever speaker they're channelled
through, and with lights raised and lowered by degrees, playful little
cacophonies are pulsed along like a robot baroque heartbeat.
Where one might normally expect such an affair to be relayed in an
empty room, allowing spectators to drift between speakers or else
choose their favoured vantage point while sprawled in repose flat out
on the floor, the seating arrangements and in-the-round presentation
suggests something requiring more discipline. This is Stockhausen meets
Samuel Beckett, possibly uptown, for a fifty minute narrative that
comes on like an extended remix of Beckett's wordless life and death
miniature, Breath, by way of Stockhausen's Kontakte, which has been
'performed' in a similar fashion, both by the grand-daddy of electronic
music, and his followers.
Dower is no stranger to either artist. Beckett was all over On Memory &
Chance, his 2011 show at the Changing Room gallery in Stirling, while
his pop-up speakeasy for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art
in 2010 was an artistic and social hub for left-field sonic exploring
without any of that particular oeuvre’s more usually po-faced
trappings. With a published record of Le Drapeau Noir forthcoming, it's
legacy can already be found in the permanent venue on its site it
inspired. With Dower as much social engineer as sonic architect, then,
(….....) would fit in well there.
The List, February 2012
ends
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