Word to the wannbe wise. Watching a film for 90 minutes while lying on your back on a cold concrete floor in a yurt in a warehouse in Digbeth is never a good idea. If you then follow this by cycling home from the MAC around midnight on what turned out to be a -8 degree night, meaning you had to scrape a substantial amount of ice, not frost, ice off your saddle you know there’s going to be trouble.
Urrgh… Sunday’s Flatpack Festival schedule has been a write off. Thankfully I already had tickets for Bang on a Can‘s performance of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports at Symphony Hall so couldn’t back out of that. It was very good. Much better than I was expecting.
The first half consisted of pieces that weren’t by Brian Eno. Steve Reich‘s Electric Counterpoint consisted of a guitarist playing alongside a recording of himself and was very good. David Lang‘s Sunray I remember liking but don’t remember much about. Don Byron‘s Show Him Some Lub and and Dark Room were okay but didn’t quite work for me. Finally Thurston Moore‘s Stroking Piece was superb, sounding just enough like Sonic Youth to be interesting but not too much to be obvious.
After the break the entire Music for Airports album was recreated with predominantly classical instruments in four acts. I’ve somehow never heard the original electronic recording so this was fresh for me. I liked it a lot. At times it repaid rapt attention in spades, at others it allowed my fuggy brain to float away. By the end I didn’t really want to go outside where everything was normal, though I couldn’t really figure out why.
Bang on a Can is an American music festival where lots of interesting things related to contemporary music happen, such as 12 hour marathon concerts. This manifestation, also known as the Bang on a Can All-Stars, comprises of six members playing piano, clarinet, percussion / drums, cello, double bass and electric guitar. The guitar player has very impressive hair.
Oooh, Bang on a Can have stuff on eMusic. Not MfA unfortunately but probably worth a dig.
Also of interest are the program notes for MfA.
(Big thanks to Gareth for getting the cheap tickets. Pic nicked from the Bang on a Can site)
I didn’t know you were there Pete, I didn’t see you.
Was my mind impossibly addled, or did the visuals not go massively awry from how the blurb in the programme described them?
Was there also, was pretty excellent. Me and my friend both dozed off during the final part of Music For Airports. The visuals were kind of… irrelevant, it seemed, to me. The music isn’t ‘about’ airports, and it’s certainly not about air travel.
I certainly didn’t think they were very good. Maybe the missing one that was supposed the to go with the second movement would’ve been better, who can say.