Olafur Arnalds: and they have escaped the weight of darkness. Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. 1st July 2010

This was not the ordinary kind of gig that gets reviewed on RWL. Icelandic pianist and composer of delicate, haunting soundscapes, Olafur Arnalds, was in Manchester to play a new, orchestral re-working of his latest album, ...and they have escaped the weight of darkness. This was to be my first classical concert, as the bill also included a Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead fame) composition, a new piece by Avner Dorman, a contemporary classical composer of whom I had never heard, and a performance of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The conductor for the evening was Andre de Ridder.

The Bridgewater Hall is a surprisingly friendly venue, spacious, with comfortable seats and nice toilets. Okay, architectural review over. After a selection of Radiohead songs reworked by the Loudon Piano Quintet in the lobby, which I did not catch, the evening opened with Popcorn Superhet Receiver, a 2005 piece by Jonny Greenwood. Jonny himself did not perform; I'm not sure if he was even present. Popcorn is inspired by white noise and the interplay between car engine noises and tape players on long journeys in Jonny's childhood. It is a wavering, sliding, quite subtle piece, performed by a string ensemble. The ranks of violins meshing over the top of one another creates a convincing, yet musical impression of white noise, and the piece builds to a pleasant crescendo.

The second performance was Spices, Perfumes, Toxins!, a new work by Avner Dorman for orchestra and percussion, in three parts. It is said to be inspired by the three titular substances, and influenced by the sounds and rhythms of the Near and Middle East.The percussion was provided by the DYAD Percussion Duo, who both moved between marimba, drums and orchestral percussion throughout the piece. Each movement became more dramatic and frenetic, culminating in a huge, cacophonous climax. The Eastern rhythms were hypnotic and the contribution of the marimbas put me in mind of more organic electronica I've listened to before, like Four Tet.
The percussion duo were really rather special, and were excellent performers as well as wonderfully intense musicians. They rightly received massive applause.

After an interval, the orchestra reformed for Rite of Spring, a composition considered so shocking on its debut in 1913 that concert-goers walked out in fear and disgust. Telling the story of a pagan sacrifice, a young girl forced to dance herself to death for the gods, it still retains some of its ability to shock now. From innocent, pastoral beginnings, it soon becomes one of the most brutal classical works I have heard, all stabbing violins, lamenting woodwind and thunderous percussion. The RNCM Symphony Orchestra more than did it justice.

After another interval, during which the Bits&Pieces Big Band played some more loose-limbed free-jazz Radiohead covers, Olafur Arnalds took the stage. Looking somewhat nervous in jeans and a bow tie, he took his place at the piano and softly launched in to Thu ert solin. To begin with, it was hard to adjust to Olafur's spare, delicate piano playing after such dramatic precursors, but the ear sooned re-tuned. The first song combined wistful piano with melancholy strings, underpinned by subtle electronic pulses. The second song, Thu ert jordin, continued in the same vein, with rain effects washing over the end giving a pastoral feel. By the third song, Tunglith, the rest of the orchestra joined in, filling out the spaces in the original with warm brass and dabs of percussion.
As befitting an album tracing a journey from the sadness of Olafur's debut to a more uplifting place, the pace and volume, although never more than gentle, increased as the set went on. Towards the middle, the orchestra was joined by synthesized beats and more atmospheric weather effects, which made it impossible not to think of Olafur's homeland with its elemental climate. The stand-out song for me was Gleypa okkur, which begins as melancholy and brightens towards the end, playing piano off subtle strings and the mellow sound of a bass clarinet.
The final song, whose title I will not even try to type using this non-Nordic interface, ended in a beautiful, warm crescendo of percussion and brass, a truly uplifting place to end the journey. Both Olafur and the conductor, as well as the orchestra, received multiple rounds of applause.

This was the only date in the UK on this tour, and the only one with this combination of people and music, and I feel privileged to have been there.

A tiki shrine in central Manchester

New Music on Monday - 28 Degrees Taurus

It's a bit of a slow week for new releases so far, so I've decided to blog about a band who released their debut album last week. Here are five interesting things about 28 Degrees Taurus:

1. There are two permanent members, Karina (vocals and bass) and Jinsen (guitars and vocals), plus an ever-changing, Spinal Tap-esque turnover of drummers.

2. Their debut album, All The Stars In Your Eyes, is available to download from Bandcamp. The album took two years to produce, and the band raised the money for recording by auctioning off preorders, plus more expensive options such as a song written about you on the next album, or Jinsen coming round to cook dinner for you, in addition to your music.

3. Karina is from Brazil.

4. They describe their sound as "shoegaze/psychedelic/ambient" (not always in that order). They even dip their toes into more unfashionable proggy guitar effects and swirly riffs, but they do it with a great deal of charm and some spooky multi-tracked girl-boy vocals.

5. As well as the longer, more atmospheric songs, All The Stars In Your Eyes contains several sweet two-minute jangle-pop gems, with girly vocals by Karina.

Listen to an album track here:



Bandcamp
Myspace

Sounds of Summer

Yes, I know, the title of this post is a total cliche. However, fear not. There will be no Ibiza compilations or Festival Classics here. It's just a handy hook upon which to hang two lovely new bands I've found.

First up are Sun Airway, aka Jon and Patrick from Philadelphia, who I found on the Yvynyl blog, who described their song Waiting On You as "beachy delight and pop cotton candy". So far, so summery. This is a soundtrack to the summer of barbecue parties and drinking a nice glass of something in the evening, if such cool little tunes ever made it on to the stereo at barbecue parties, instead of the aforementioned Ibiza compilations and Festival Classics. The subtle laid-back hip-hop beat, the upbeat walking bassline, the hint of castanets, the laconic vocal - it all brings summer to mind. There's something quite lovely and poetic to the lyrics too, with the refrain about not going down gently making me think of Dylan Thomas and his good night.


The second summer band that have caught my eye lately is Tamaryn. At first, I wasn't sure whether Tamaryn was a she or a they, but it appears that Tamaryn is a they: singer Tamaryn and producer/instrumentalist Rex, who are from San Francisco. They have been catching coverage from pretty much everyone, but I'm giving the credit to Salad Fork, as I think I heard their song Sandstone there first.
Sandstone is a summer song of a completely different variety, a hazy, dreamy opus that brings to mind the fierce heat of a desert midday. Tamaryn's hushed, atmospheric vocals have been compared to Hope Sandoval's, which I feel is fair, although she is lower down in the mix than Hope was in Mazzy Star. The looped, treated guitars and insistent drums are as hypnotic as a desert mirage, to continue the analogy.

Listen to Sandstone on any number of MP3 blogs, or on Tamaryn's Myspace.

Sun Airway's Myspace is here.

Cornelia Parker has flattened a brass band

Cornelia Parker's latest exhibition at the Baltic Gallery in Newcastle features this new piece: the constituent instruments of a brass band, flattened by an industrial press and suspended in a dim lamplit room for inspection.

In a video interview for the Guardian, Cornelia explains how she liked the idea of wind instruments "exhaling" and being flat and "out of puff".

There is something almost comical about the installation, and Cornelia took inspiration from a Charlie Chaplin film where he accidentally flattens a fob watch in a press. However, for me, there is also something sad lurking under the surface, I think. The instruments make me think of colliery bands and how that part of our culture has been lost and "flattened".

Other works in the exhibition include wire tracery nets made from deconstituted bullets and ominous polished Colt gun cutouts. It runs until September.

Baltic Gallery page

Music from Manchester (on Monday)

Instead of picking up this week's new songs, I've decided to do something different for this week's Music on Monday. This post is the first in a short series I've got planned on new bands from Manchester, partly in the wake of the FUC51 thing and the ongoing flame war on Twitter that goes with it.

The first Manchester band I'm going to big up is The Switch. They've graced these pages before, when I reviewed their Dum Dum Girls support slot and gave them a hearty thumbs-up. Since then, I've located their Myspace page, found out a little about them and discovered that they've posted some new music in the past week.


The Switch in action.

The band are four: programmer and bassist Tom Harris, Colin Dunkerley on synths and programming, guitarist Anthony Grantham and singer Caroline Sterling. Their origins are a little hazy, but they have been playing gigs since the start of the year at least.

The Switch live is a wall of dirty synth and guitar noise, but The Switch on record (or MP3, rather), is somewhat more of a polished proposition. At first glance, their sound does not deviate hugely from the synth+guitar+laptop shoegaze-revival style, but underpinning their waves of ethereal noise are some really quite clubby beats, more in line with classic-period Underworld or Prodigy. This sets them apart from other female-fronted dream-pop acts. Live especially, it also helps that Caroline commands the stage and can pout and pose with the best.

Their latest offering, Stowaway, is one of the most dance-oriented of their tracks, featuring fractured vocals and an electro-esque bassline. Also standing out on their Myspace is Ser Etico, a very early song, which is hazy and atmospheric, and Heartbreaker, which has a killer pop chorus.

Myspace

Marvellous Men

It has come to my attention that most of my music posts (in fact, most of my posts) have concerned female musicians, or female-fronted bands: CocoRosie, Dum Dum Girls, HTDA, Tennis - this is partly due to the fact that there ARE lots of female musicians around at the moment to talk about, and the fact that a lot of music I like right now features women singing or playing, or both. This is not in itself a bad thing, and will form part of a future post I've got planned.

Despite my rant about lad-rock the week before last, I do actually have a lot of time for male musicians. In the interest of gender equity, and to catch up on some interesting musical bits and pieces I didn't get round to posting about while they were super-topical, here is a round-up of things to do with Marvellous Men.

LA noise-creators HEALTH have been rather busy of late, promoting their DISCO2 remix album. Stereogum has a selection of tracks from the album proper and the bonus disc for your listening pleasure here. A little while ago, the project's sole new track, USA Boys appeared, complete with this nihilistic, yet very sexy video that brings to mind the aesthetic of early NIN. Apparently, it was recorded in Trent Reznor's studio. Warning, the video is definitely NSFW.

HEALTH :: USA BOYS :: MUSIC VIDEO from Lovepump United on Vimeo.

The latest Twilight soundtrack album was only supposed to be online for 24 hours back at the start of the month, but tracks can now be found all over the internet. One of the most talked-about songs on a surprisingly good soundtrack was The Line, the return of Battles. Unusually for a Battles track, it features something very close to a sung vocal from Tyondai, although suitably distorted. The song itself is one of the most accessible Battles tracks, with a simple rhythm and a surprising Cossack influence towards the end.

I can't remember where I first heard about My Violaine Morning, but I've been listening to them quite a lot lately. They play the sort of dense, dreamy post-rockish noise, sometimes with vocals, that's very now at the moment, and my favourite kind of music. The band has been together since 2004, and their last release was in March. They are from Indonesia and led by Roni Tresnawan Smith. Their Myspace is here.

Now, some tour news: Godspeed You! Black Emperor are touring again in Europe in December, following on from their ATP curation, and they're playing in Manchester! Hopefully I shall be there, and will be able to report back on what is sure to be a mind-blowing gig. Let's hope there's a new album on the way, too.

Also touring are Dillinger Escape Plan. They hit the North in October, and should also give us a great show, probably blowing our eardrums as well as our minds.