The Electric Dr M and Spring Heel Jack

Met up with Ian and Pete at the gig last night. Writing this on the following day and am still feeling a little mauled. Why? The music was fascinating – I’ll write the review soon – but the visuals were supplied by Yeast whose work for Courtney Pine and Denys Baptiste at last year’s London Jazz Festival appalled me because of its crassness. I’m not a fan of visuals full stop and can only occassionally stomach them: count me out for abstract eye candy, count me out for figurative ‘interpretations’ of music. Ugh. Take a look round most any gig with a video screen, catch the majority of the audience slackjawed in the darkness, zombie faces lit only by the light of onscreen inanities, ain’t no en-light-en-ment there. Music is an abstraction, good music proffers freedom to anybody wishing to engage with it – the freedom to think, feel, move, daydream, whatever. The visual limits that freedom, locks things down, reduces interpretative potential to somebody else’s perspective. It applies an extra cognitive layer between the music and its reception by the audience. Most of the time music video is crap unless it achieves a cohesive synergy with the music, even then it’s a distraction.

So what about last night’s performance? Yeast (it was one guy with a laptop) didn’t impress me from the outset by eliding loops of caged monkeys with all too familiar footage of commuters walking across somewhere like London Bridge – as Pete succinctly remarked, gee what a comment upon the human condition. The screen filled the space behind the stage and it was almost impossible to avoid looking at the imagery. Closing eyes was an option, but then it’s less like being at a live performance. I did end up averting my eyes quite a lot. There seemed to be a lot of fucking, some clips of 9/11, quite a lot of Bush, some sado-masochistic stuff and quite a few segments of firing squads complete with hoods being put over heads and heads being blown off. All of this was looped, sped-up, slowed down, kaleidoscoped, etc. Distasteful to say the least, exploitative certainly. I’ll talk about the music in the review, suffice to say it was harsh and stunted and I liked it a lot. What left me perturbed was the synergy achieved between the visuals and the music. It tempted the audience into an unwelcome complicity. The net effect was similar to being forced to neck a lot of MDMA which resolutely refuses to kick in, while also feeling acute guilt at doing so. That or being mugged. There was a definite parallel between Matthew Bourne’s attack-dog sampling in his solo work and the onscreen stuff being flung at the audience.

On the way there I listened to Laibach. On the way home I put on Penguin Cafe Orchestera. Bless you Simon Jeffes.