‘Now let’s turn the Royal Festival Hall into a rave!” In all my experience of concert-going at the Southbank Centre, this was a first. Most of the audience were already on their feet, but the prompt from Ólafur Arnalds – a composer and one half of Icelandic techno duo Kiasmos – had people streaming down the aisles towards the stage, hands aloft. For the next 90 minutes, Kiasmos set in motion shimmering, rib-quaking layers of electronic sound that flowed across each other and pulled apart, while CGI scenes of slow-motion apocalypse unfolded on a vast screen behind the mixing decks – imagine John Martin’s paintings of hellfire with industrial-strength bass.
Kiasmos represented one aesthetic extreme of this two-day event celebrating the 10th anniversary of Erased Tapes, a London-based record label that describes itself as a “genre-defying” home for “avant-garde artists”. At the other extreme was pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, a bearded mystic who ranted against modern-day materialism but offered to sell records following his afternoon show. Though he played a mixture of new and older work it was all in the same vein: the swirling, mostly-tonal arpeggio figuration of what he calls “continuous music”, churned out with the piano’s sustaining pedal down.
Incomparably more sophisticated was the dapper 12-piece outfit Penguin Cafe. Surrounded by giant pot-plants and equipped with a plethora of instruments from a battery of ukuleles to a tabla (via a string quintet, two melodicas, bird whistles and a Steinway grand), they served up a mix of gently kitsch hits and new, minimalism-influenced material – all rhythmically taut and irrepressibly energetic. Similar energy levels, though a very different kind of sound, characterised the set played on Friday evening by Brooklyn drum-piano-and-bass trio Dawn of Midi, which wove a series of beguilingly complex sonic fabrics from musical materials as simple as repeated notes plucked on an acoustic bass.
Nothing, though, could compete for simplicity with multi-instrumentalist Peter Broderick, who wandered onto the stage alone, singing the Irish ballad As I Roved Out on a May Morning. I don’t know how audible he was at the back of the hall but from the stalls, before he was plugged in, before the heavier Indie-folk vocals, before the electronic looping, his spare, sinewy voice provided a moment of respite – and a reminder that if defying genre is the aim, the sound of the human voice is as radical as it gets.
- Erased Tapes Is Ten will be Colston Hall, Bristol, on 12-13 September. Box office: 0117-203 4040.
