Let’s return to one of the great maxims of not just contemporary but all music: size isn’t important. In the case of Norway’s Only Connect festival, its short, 2½-day duration belied the fact that its content was highly concentrated. As such, one event started to blur into the next, into the next; that makes things tricky retrospectively, but a whole lot of intense fun as it’s happening. i’ll do my best to disentangle some of its highlights.
Some of which came right at the start, the festival hitting the ground running with Den elektriske tannlegestolen [the electric dentist’s chair], a personalised performance experience devised and executed (perhaps a bad choice of word in relation to electric chairs) by Morten Minothi Kristiansen and Ulrik Ibsen Thorsrud. Lying back in the chair, a large rubber mat festooned with loudspeakers is placed over your chest, whereupon the duo gets to work. Sound came from their console to the side, from a hanging parabolic speaker above the head, but primarily – in terms of experience – from the chest covering.
It’s one thing to speak figuratively about the way music moves us, but to have it made physically real was genuinely exhilarating. My own body rippled and pulsed with bursts of energy, vibrated and purred as the duo took me through a period of repose, made unsettling by a woman’s voice softly cooing from above, “open wide … open wide …”. Five minutes of sound have rarely been so completely involving.
At the same opening event, brief but outstanding performances were given by violinist Sarah Saviet and percussionist Bastien Ricquebourg. Saviet’s rendition of Cassandra Miller‘s For Mira was the best i’ve ever heard, transforming it into a hyperexpressive form of folk music, dazzling and ferociously passionate. Ricquebourg made Michio Kitazume‘s Side by Side a fluid sequence of patterns, loops and fills, interspersed with passages where the certainty became more loose. The timbral palette limitations became a positive, making the rhythmic permutations yet more hypnotic.
Sarah Saviet was back later that day in one of the festival’s most immersive concerts, taking place in the deep, cave-like beer halls of Stavenger’s Tou Scene. Here was a classic example of entanglement: on the one hand, a clear progression through various pieces – Jack Sheen‘s Television continuity solos, Oliver Leith‘s Blurry wake song, Johann Paul von Westhoff‘s Imitazione delle compane and her own walking; yet despite the clarity – reinforced by movement toward and away from electronics, culminating in their mingling – Saviet gave the impression of a single, large-scale music.
It was one of those rare occasions when taking notes becomes impossible; one was lost in the intricacy, virtuosity, stasis and immensity, its waves of energised gossamer, where almost everything coming from the electronics – even, impossibly, field recordings – seemed to be an extension of, and emanating from, Saviet’s violin. Extraordinary.
Smaller-scale but no less mesmerising was Wings by Dutch experimentalist Cathy van Eyck. Performed by Eyck with a pair of companions in an adjacent ‘cave’, they slowly manipulated large panels (which van Eyck later referred to as “shields”) around the space in a smooth choreography, in the process causing changes to the sound being projected into the space. Its shifting reflection, deflection, reinforcement and cancellation was always unexpected, with the amount of change often resulting from a surprisingly slight alteration of an angle here or there. The sound became stratified, growled, retreated to a high drone, culminating – as the trio came together to form a box – in a hovering tritone. It was a most curious but effective kind of performance drama.
Van Eyck returned the following day, breaking up an evening in the Stavanger Concert Hall, otherwise focused on the organ, to give a tour de force performance on an apple. In her piece In Paradisum, each emphatic crunch was met by an increasingly demonstrative electronic response. Starting out as delicate sustained pitches, before long she was surrounded by percussive outbursts and reverberant clunks and trills, van Eyck by turns curious, intrigued, confused, blissfully unaware, all somehow articulated via largely emotionless looks and stares. Equal parts hilarious, ridiculous and magical.
Of the actual organ works, Olli Virtaperko‘s Dawkins worked well, progressing from a playful mix of monody filigree, two parts chasing each other, and textural passages smudging things over, to a radiant, white-hot climax, building to a rapid high point that fizzled as the organ’s wind was switched off. Teppo Hauta-aho‘s Ode to the Whales was interesting in the way it brought together a network of whale calls with music that accompanied, commented on and imitated, forming a strong, sympathetic electroacoustic duet. The work had an troubling side, sounding increasingly plaintive and distressed in its latter stages, its material becoming hyperactive (superbly performed by Susanne Kujala).
Jan Esra Kuhl provided a short but effective diversion in Wendeltreppe, where perpetual descending scale patterns were echoed by the organ’s electronics, in the process becoming microtonally shifted. It thus became a metrically regular but wonderfully smeared music, eventually leading to a messy, self-playing texture, like parallel fugues playing out in a harmonic multiverse. And it was good to hear more from Maija Hynninen (her organ music had featured at this year’s Musica Nova), the second part of whose Trois mondes, ‘La cathédrale engloutie’, also invoked parallel worlds. Rapid but intimate music was repeated by the organ, yet sagged down into oblivion, like a reflection from a place where pitches continually slide rather than having fixed positions.
The close of the concert was James Saunders‘ having to carry out the repetitive, mind-numbingly boring but still very necessary tasks required to manage increasingly complicated processes of production. A work that had sounded promising beforehand, it turned out to be a rather underwhelming demonstration of its title. The ensemble was periodically halted by the organ (at first bringing to mind the blaring organ-horn in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, signalling the end of the workshift, though its later chords were more gentle), but the element of control was fluid, evidently not resting in any one particular place. Was it democratic? Was it anarchistic? Was it interesting? Yes – but no.
A more cohesive example of group dynamics came in the concert given by Song Circus, particularly Jorun Marie Kvernberg‘s Vardøger (a world première). The quartet of voices moved between reverie and a kind of ritual chorus, fuelled by folk elements to form a communal melodic action, enlivened – as if touched by some mix of divine inspiration and madness – by recurring eruptions of vocal tics.
Another, even more engaging quartet was the focus of Agape by Bergrún Snæbjörnsdottir. Across four large video screens, contrabass clarinet, harp, percussion and cello were progressively unveiled as the constituent parts – fundamental, harmonics, overtones and timbral offshoots – of one complex, resonant sound. As the camera revolved around them, their relationship to each other and to time itself became confused, telescoped, feathering into a delay trail of foreshadows and echoes. There was a growing sense throughout of wanting – needing! – the four to become truly aligned, and when this finally happened its vivid, long-awaited point of focus was glorious.
Various performances featured, or were focused on, the piano. In Øyvind Torvund‘s typically mischievous Plans for Future Operas, Mark Knoop was the foil to Juliet Fraser’s amusingly serious articulation of its sequence of absurd, postcard-like depictions of implausible-conceived operas. Knoop’s part in Sam Salem‘s Waves of crashing blackness was harder to pin down, being both source and, possibly, victim of the work’s violence (not entirely helped by its on-the-nose visuals). Yet his increasingly taciturn role left one wishing – no doubt counter to Salem’s intentions – that there was more violence to shake up the tedium.
Far more compelling was Zoe Efstathiou, performing music from her album Edge of Chaos. Delicate forms of dancing lyricism were cajoled into cheerful existence, answered by solemn, deep notes speaking through overtones and austere chords. The way Efstathiou articulated everything seemed measured, in the best sense careful, lending her performance a strong sense of both unity and continuity, like a melody being constantly filtered and processed but carrying on regardless. At times, she broke up the sense of forward flow, becoming stuck on a phrase or simply captivated by a particular sound or effect, lingering upon it. Its intimacy felt highly tactile.
The most impressive work involving piano – and, in hindsight, of the entire festival – was Madad, given by Pat Thomas with the Kitchen Orchestra. Thomas’ role at the piano was ambiguous, either acting as a catalyst for what followed or just another player, equal to the rest. That in itself suggests something of a similarity to what Saunders had been trying to explore, and in many ways this was a far more convincing study of ‘democratic’ action within a shifting ensemble configuration. From a network of friction, the brain trying (and failing) to resolve particular accents into downbeats, pulse innocuously materialised via brushed cymbals, the unlikely trigger for punchy, overactive overload. The group reduced, became variegated, surged into a wall of noise, whereupon they turned strangely sorrowful, entering a dark atmosphere with flailing vestiges of wail. This was inscrutable but telling music, led by a poignant violin, its tired beauty attaining ethereality and a floating stillness.
Vocalise front and centre initiated a widespread response, frantic, granular, shrill, tremulous. Things became more personal: Thomas seemingly triggered a new wave of tutti hyperactivity, angular and energetic, while violinist Gro Austgulen boldly strode the stage, making players start and stop on a whim. The conclusion, though united, was like an outbreak of nervous energy, everyone’s notes the apparent product of involuntary shakes and spasms. It was all unforgettably wondrous.
