And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball?

New music from Scott Walker, an event to behold. And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball? is a 20 minute composition for a piece performed by the Candoco dance company. Released, allegedly, in a one off, never to be repeated, run by 4AD, the music is instrumental, challenging, at times brutal, but in its sonic variety more digestable than last year’s The Drift.

Both works, when placed together with Darkness (the song commissioned and included on the Plague Songs multi-artist piece) make for an interesting aggregation of parts. I can’t help but elide the vocal-only Darkness with the instrumental dance composition: both share a yearning desperation and sense of keen watchfulness that’s fulfilled by The Drift’s desolate occlusion.

AWSGTTB?AWSGTTB? is a four part composition for strings, sound effects and occasional saxophone. What sounded overly Modernist/Schoenbergian in performance reveals itself to be much more varied when listened to on the studio recording. The same sudden volume contrasts from hushed to roaring that jump out at the listener from The Drift like a crazed mugger with a knife are in evidence here. They serve to keep the listener on their toes, to heighten awareness and engender an ongoing sense of dread. There are stretches of elongated drone, slow motion up and down seesaw, all played out against eery silences. In the wrong hands this could be awful melodrama, but there’s something of the uncanny and the all too real for this music to fail in that way. By the final part of AWSGTTB?AWSGTTB?, with its clanging bells and fearful repetition, there’s a real sense of form and clarity about the composition that verges on the strangely elegant, an elegance reminiscent of Ute Lemper’s rendition of Walker’s two songs, Scope J and Lullaby (by-by-by). The piece seems to stretch time, seeming longer than its brief duration and it leaves a singing silence in my ears.

I have no knowledge of dance, but I enjoyed the performances on the first of the two nights at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. AWSGTTB?AWSGTTB? has a small website dedicated to it. It’s Flash based so I can’t link directly to it, but there are video excerpts available: select Video Introduction from the menu. There was no sight of Scott Walker as we applauded the performers, but it seemed entirely appropriate that the lead dancer gestured to the shadowy gods in acknowledgement of the famously retiring composer.

Read my post about the packaging of the CD release on Hard Format.