Electronic Musing and Sonatas for People

It’s debatable whether my contention that electronic music is not enhanced by live performance is a prejudice evolved from years of watching dance: the theatricality lacking from events like Touch 30 is as much about the process of creation not allowing or encouraging wild performance as any more specific problems of the concert format. Nevertheless, after Sonica, and Sonata for a Man and a Boy, the sight of three men fiddling with electronics is less engaging than either an orchestra in full flight or a cellist chasing around the stage after a mischievous student.

What Touch: 30 does provide is a statement about the range of electronic music being made outside of the classical, dance and pop spheres. Philip Jeck is a veteran artist – his set made up the middle portion of the night and a large projection cast up his intricate attentions to turntables and a keyboard. Like BJ Nilsen and Thomas Koner – both using a more contemporary laptop set-up, Jeck’s music is about the texture. All three artists emphasise the drone and the nuanced shift – Jeck’s analogue equipment includes surface noise and distortion while Nilsen goes for a collaged soundscape of found noises. Koner’s final set is the most bass heavy and illustrated through a series of dark projections, each one shifting slowly like the moods of his composition.

All three artists are immensely serious, but only Koner’s subsonic bass justifies the live performance – there’s a brutal reverberation to his seismic shifts. Sonata for a Man and a Boy isn’t really trying to imitate the musical sophistication of Touch’s artists – the music it uses is familiar and melodic, taking advantage of the cello’s eloquent melancholy.

The music is, indeed, only part of Sonata’s purpose: rather, it uses the format of a lesson to bounce around ideas about education and maturity. The skill of the man is mirrored by the humour of the boy and a simple cello lesson – a rare example of a teacher being represented positively within the arts – becomes the ground for games and life learning.

It’s almost irrelevant to group these two shows together simply because they are centred around music and yet their intentions – to find new ways to use music – are shared. While Touch: 30 emerges from the independent label scene of the 1980s, it has adapted the high seriousness of classical and visual art, shifting away from explicit meaning towards abstraction. Sonata embraces physical theatre but, despite interludes of idiosyncratic choreography, speaks of the relationship between childhood and maturity leaving enough ambiguity for discussion but clearly grounding the content.