WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, MATSY?

This week, the Guardian featured an article entitled 'What's the point of music?', in which Alain de Botton discussed the purpose of organised sound with Peter Gabriel. Not to suggest that the Guardian are totally ripping me off again or anything, but this is a question I habitually ask musicians that I interview. However, the answers rarely make it to the printed page. Below are a selection of responses, ranging from the profound to the bewildered.  

The Cosmic Dead

James T Mckay: Masturbation.

Julian Dicken: Pure unadulterated fun.

Omar Aborida: It’s freedom to create without settling for the lines that you have in other media. In art you have a finished painting. But with music it’s an open-ended thing, you can take it where you want. That’s what drew me to music in the first place.

JTM: It feels like you’re tapping into a seamless continuum too. Like there’s this great big wave, like one of those cosmic snakes out of Sliders or Bill & Ted, when they’re time travelling. Feels like they’re travelling through everything, and when you really get into a jam, it feels like you’re riding through one of them.

Lewis Cook: It’s easy to identify music as just like a social function in some ways, and I think it is to a large extent. But there’s also that transcendental aspect, which The Cosmic Dead really aims towards. It’s less a social function about what’s cool and what’s not. It’s more primal than that. It’s banging a drum, something that’s always been done. Animals do things like that as well. I don’t think the Cosmic Dead is an intellectual endeavour.

JTM: It’s that wee Neolithic man kicking about and realising that if he eats off oysters he’ll go on a funny little trip before shitting himself. That’s what the Cosmic Dead is. It’s a fun, often pretty deep little trip before we shit ourselves. And the shitting ourselves does happen. The way I think of it sometimes, if you imagine a cavemen looking up into the stars for the first time on some lonely, barren night, his wife’s at some other guy’s cave, and he looks up at the stars and he just sees that one little shooting star, and for the first time he relaises that it’s not just a picture that’s above him. There’s a whole fucking depth to what’s out there. Creating that experience and capturing that sense of wonder is a large part of it. Infinite death and infinite life through music. 

http://thecosmicdead.blogspot.co.uk/

Mats Gustafsson

Again, using Derek [Bailey]’s words: ‘Music is like living, but better.’ I hope Derek would forgive me for using his line so many times.

http://matsgus.com/

  

Free Nelson Mandoomjazz

Colin Stewart: I just love music so it seems like an obvious extension of that to play it. The opportunity to do something totally different like this band is very inspiring and satisfying from a creative point of view. I’m always looking for new music that pushes the boundaries of what I’ve already heard and to be able to do that and perform with such talented people is a real privilege. I can’t imagine ever being at a point in my life where I don’t want to make music any more.

Rebecca Sneddon: Because my saxophone is like an extra limb. Except that it looks better than the other ones. 'What is music for...?' Does it matter? It's for me.

http://www.rarenoiserecords.com/free-nelson-mandoomjazz

Mogwai

Stuart Braithwaite: I dunno. Just… fun. It’s fun to make music. It feels like a privilege. Especially to be able to do it and make a living from it, it’s amazing. But even just to get to do it and have anyone give a shit about it, it’s brilliant!

www.mogwai.co.uk/

Richard Youngs

  

On a very functional level in my life, I have a 3-and-a-half-year-old son and for the first couple of years of his life he was a terrible sleeper. We found that one of the few ways to calm him down was to play him Gregorian chant. Very functional use of Gregorian chant. On the other hand, is something you dance to functional, or is it pure pleasure?

https://nofansrecords.wordpress.com/

The Fierce and the Dead

Kevin Feazey: For me it's about shared experience. The band, the audience, the listener. It may not be an identical experience but if we can get people to move and be moved in whatever way works for them then that will rebound to me and the back and forth begins. Music is a pretty perfect blend of spirituality and hard science, something that we can all plug in to and actually does something real to us. When i'm standing in front of an audience my ego shrinks, as I have become part of a bigger machine that links all the band members and the audience together. And I like loud noises.

Matt Stevens: For the rush of it all coming together, that moment when it becomes bigger than any one individual. Mirror neurons working overtime, that link you get with people you have been playing with for years.

http://www.fierceandthedead.com/

Sloth Hammer

Paul Priest: I am immersed in music and sound. I have been since I was about 5 years old. I'm 35 now and I've made my own music since I was about 12 and played gigs since I was 16. I just have to do it. Even when I'm not playing live, I'll still need to expel the sounds from within otherwise I will go utterly insane, and not the good kind.

Luke Iley: Life without music would be pretty fucking dull. Every culture on the planet makes it. It's as unifying as it is subjective. If I didn't make some sort of music I'd probably have to resort to trepanning and self-flagellation.

https://slothhammer.bandcamp.com/

Harvey Milk

Creston Speirs: Good question. Fuck if I know 

http://www.harveymilktheband.com/

TECTONICS 2014

St Andrew’s in the Square/City Halls/The Old Fruitmarket

Glasgow

9–11/5/2014

All photos courtesy of Alex Woodward (www.crimsonglow.co.uk)

‘There is an option to fail, which is totally fine,’ says curator Ilan Volkov at his introductory talk – and he means it. He and Tectonics co-curator Alasdair Campbell have programmed more than 40 wildly diverse performances over three days, including numerous vastly challenging orchestral premieres. There are plenty of opportunities for disaster.

Improvisation and new contemporary composition are still at the core, but there’s a stronger song-based current this year. Friday begins in St Andrew’s church with a beautifully poignant song cycle from pianist Bill Wells and vocalist/violist Aby Vuillamy, accompanied by a small BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra ensemble. Richard Youngs and Anakanak also offer songs – the former, an a cappella declaration of love and trust that weaves in and out of the rafters’ ecclesiastical acoustics; the latter, an innovative web of vocal loops that hints at but mischievously frustrates dance music. More abstractly, Collective Endeavours offer an interpretive invective against fracking, in which Jer Reid stacks up harmonium loops while dancer Solene Weinachter endures violent contortions, ending up shattered and broken. The sumptuous, time-suspending drones of Klaus Lang, Catherine Lamb and Marcus Weiss, as well as Kristín Þóra Haraldsdóttir’s ultra-minimalist precipice-of-silence viola piece, offer deeply meditative, engaging experiences.

Collective Endeavours

Much of Saturday is given over to largely orchestral works by the festival’s big hitters. As its name implies, Christian Wolff’s ‘Ordinary Matter’ seems to evoke different physical states: liquid drones, fizzing Brownian clouds, vast slabs of solid granite. John Oswald’s big, bold ‘I’d Love to Turn’ is a brash repurposing of formative influences, in which the Beatles, Ligeti and Riley are smooshed together into a cohesive whole. Fragile, sparkling drones and jazz motifs characterise David Behrman’s ‘How We Got Here’, the fantastically evocative climax of which reaches for the celestial with suspended chords. Behrman and Wolff also present some small-scale structured improvisations, replete with grunts and boings and scrapes. Best of all is Behrman’s ‘Wavetrain’, in which a grand piano and pickups generate vast, intersecting rushes of noise, reaching colossal volume, like an earthquake wrestling a Branca guitar ensemble.

Wavetrain - David Behrman, Christian Wolff, Takehisa Kosugi and Ilan Volkov.  

This year’s strongest offerings revel in a playful sense of curiosity, exploration and engagement. This is perhaps best embodied by Sarah Kenchington and her wondrous, interactive installation of hand-built sound-making machines, constructed from junkyard detritus – a bicycle, tubas, foot pumps, plumbing, wine glasses, a vintage pram. Whether operated by Kenchington and her friends or by delighted passing punters, her parping, honking, creaking creations inspire considerable delight. 

One of Sarah Kenchington's creations (the machine, not the man). 

Sunday’s afternoon performance from Edinburgh’s Usurper and friends also capture this spirit, with an absurd set that’s equal parts dinner party, slapstick routine, experimental vocalisation and object-based improv. One of the weekend’s most instantly appealing sets comes from Icelandic composers’ collective S.L.Á.T.U.R, who produce complex, fascinating outcomes from simple techniques, via projected graphic scores that make the compositional process open and accessible – and funny, too. And then there’s Takehisa Kosugi – a man of advancing years at play in a self-made world of lights and wires and boxes, making proto sci-fi soundscapes and deliciously controlled chaos, his joyous, celebratory noise an inspiring vision of creative contentment.

S.L.A.T.U.R. 

Much excitement surrounds Sunday’s finale – Richard Youngs’ 'Past Fragments of Distant Confrontation', his first-ever orchestral piece. He and Volkov take the orchestra out of the concert hall, and install it in the more informal Old Fruitmarket, the musicians placed around, amid and above the audience. Strings drone incessantly, then horns blare in a discordant, warlike fashion, followed by a brief cacophonous assault from BBC SSO percussionist Dave Lyons (playing the unusual role of D-beat drummer), Youngs on guitar, and frequent collaborator Andrew Paine on scathing electronics. These three elements cycle and repeat and repeat and cycle, as Youngs toys with and disregards the narrative expectations of orchestral music. Visceral, naïve, unkempt, surprising and a tad cheeky: a massively enjoyable bit of a shambles.

Ilan Volkov conducting Richard Youngs

Though still a young festival, Tectonics is rapidly carving out a thrilling niche, in which the furthest fringes of the outer frontiers seem less and less remote. While others may revel in their otherness in a way that makes them appear prickly and aloof, Tectonics is pointedly welcoming and inclusive – and all the more daring for that reason. The option to fail may be there, but it hasn’t been exercised yet.