Tolbooth / Various venues, Stirling
The longest running leftfield music festival in Scotland now styles
itself as ‘Stirling’s No Limits Music Festival’. This year it spread its wings
not only throughout the Tolbooth’s multi-tiered interior, but offsite to spaces
ancient and modern, from the Church of the Holy Rude next door to a concrete
underpass on the edge of town. The biggest presence over the course of the
three days was Bill Wells, whose prolific output as pianist, bassist and
composer has made him a quietly powerful force, both as a sideman and in his
own right. Wells introduced the weekend with a teatime set by his self-styled
National Jazz Trio of Scotland, their classically elegant originals setting a
wistful tone for a Friday night of understated pop.
Swedish trio Tape led the
quiet charge, their mix of harmonium, guitar patterns and electronics a
prettified and gentle display that sounded like Roy Budd scoring for State
River Widening. Taken by Trees, led by former Concretes singer Victoria
Bergsman, peaked with their nursery rhyme version of Guns N’Roses’ Sweet Child
O’ Mine, rendering the song’s sentimental machismo into something truly
childlike. The ongoing metamorphosis of The Pastels finds them applying
trumpet, flute, a couple of stray Teenage Fanclub guitarists, and, on piano,
that man Wells again towards some low-key equivalent of Pet Sounds.
Wells
returned with viola player Aby Vulliamy for the launch of The Loathsome Reel, a
lavishly illustrated limited edition compendium of 61 of his own scores. The
pair took just over an hour to get through all 61 of them in a charming take on
parlour entertainment. This was followed by a rare screening of Ebba Jahn’s
remarkable film Rising Tones Cross, a two hour document of New York jazz,
filmed in 1984 but looking so ramshackle and magnificently unreconstructed as
to resemble a down at heel scene from a good decade earlier.
Over at the Church
of the Holy Rude, a quartet of Evan Parker, Mark Wastell, Graham Halliwell and
Max Eastley took advantage of the space’s glorious acoustics, looping Parker’s
sax and an assortment of gongs and throbbing undercurrents into airy abandon.
David Fennessy’s Big Lung revelled in the space’s acoustic potential, as Fennessy
conducted percussionists Asuka Hatanaka and Tom de Cock’s innocuous wooden
block and glockenspiel arrangements, only to blow them away with a full-pelt
Gothic organ assault.
An evening of inspired duos followed, with sax player
Raymond MacDonald’s pairing with Portuguese electronicist Miguel Carvalhais far
from obvious. After MacDonald’s opening rally of busy soprano splutters and
Carvalhais’s foreboding bass tremors and air hockey clicks, the pair eased into
a deliciously brooding melancholy. It was as if John Coltrane’s After the Rain
had been reimagined for the 21st century, replacing the implied downpour with
acres of static. Hamid Drake and Raymond Boni were even warmer, if a whole lot
more propulsive, as Boni’s guitar became as percussive as Drake’s bodhran in a
wonderful moment of unison. Elliott Sharp and Franck Vigroux’s maverick
virtuosity conjured up a fierce set of pulse-driven extravagance, with Sharp
plucking the piano strings to make a moody and at times manic noir.
Sunday
began with the insistently named Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo’s
adventures in concrete, as the Edinburgh duo set up shop in a nearby underpass.
Their two pieces used squeezebox drone and a carefully laid out array of
cassette recorders to build up layers of sound from their immediate
surroundings.
Most anticipated arrival of the weekend was Annette Peacock,
whose off-kilter lounge-bar torch songs inspired serious devotion from those
who made the Stirling pilgrimage. While they weren’t left wanting, one can’t
help but long for more light and shade in Peacock’s minimalist palette of piano
and synthesizer. The woozy, half-spoken poetics are delivered in a consistently
downbeat tone, with Peacock’s portable set-up single-minded to the point of
austerity.
Shattering the mood, 7k Oaks were an all too welcome rude intrusion.
With Alfred 23 Harth on sax and Massimo Pupillo’s fuzz bass joining forces with
drummer Fabrizio Spera and pianist Luca Venitucci, their fusion of European
free jazz and noise scene blitz was just the right side of relentless. After
such a barrage, their version of Chic’s At Last I Am Free, by way of Robert
Wyatt’s own take on the song, took things into the spiritual, and was all the
more jaw-dropping because of it.
The Wire, Issue 294, August 2008
ends
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