Taiko and Electronica - quite enough for one day, surely?

The fundamental difference between Ben Frost's By The Throat Live and Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers is not merely one of instrumentation but of intention. Taiko may come from an ancient Japanese tradition - the respect shown for the teacher and the ritualistic movements of the drummers reflect music that evolved in a specific cultural and religious context - but Mugenkyo filter it through a determinedly rock'n'roll perspective. Their camouflage costumes, complete with punky functionless zips, the emphatic shaking of hair, the restless chasing between drums, the cheeky, competitive interlude when three male performers demonstrate that size does matter not only show off the drummers' skills but transform the formal presentation of an art into an improvising, melodramatic spectacle.

That founder Neil Mackie was originally a kit drummer is evident in the ethos of the company: the drum is not a framing device for a ritual, but the point and purpose of the performance. Mugenkyo are known as passionate evangelicals for Taiko - they have a school and describe their style as European Taiko - and are always collaborating, not least with the Scottish Jazz Orchestra: their shows focus on the rhythmic energy of the drum, and emphasise the joy and fun of hitting skin with sticks.

By The Throat Live is harder to explain: the concert environment drains the music of the cinematic force of the recorded version, and Frost's own presence is, at times, tangential to the atmosphere. There's a chance for Frost to reconsider the material - the gig is more of a reworking than a straight performance - but, unlike Mugenkyo, he is not trying to introduce an audience to the pleasures of his medium. Rather, there is no celebration, rather an acknowledgement of the music's moody tempers. Flashes of percussion summon the similar energies of percussive might that are the foundation of Taiko, although they emerge from the swirling and drones of Frost's treated sounds and accompany rather than drive.

By The Throat, like Mugenkyo, is a bravura display of skill: it is also a more purely aesthetic experience. Ironically, it moves closer to ritual than the taiko, establishing a strict congregation of audience against celebrants on the stage, and evokes restrained approval rather than spontaneous cheers.

Transcription of Conversation about Ben Frost

"Classical music and rock'n'roll have never got on too well. It's been the problem of rock since about 1966 - probably about the time that the Velvet Underground started fiddling about in Warhol's Factory. It wants to be taken seriously as art. There's nothing worse than stupid rockers trying to make serious music. Don't believe me? I've got the complete works of Yes on my hard drive, have a listen."

"Are you saying you don't like Lou Reed?"

"Never met him. But he doesn't come across too well when Lester Bangs interviewed him. The point isn't whether the Velvets are any good - but the presence of a vinyl copy of their first album in Urban Outfitters suggests that they are more of a fashion accessory than a vital musical force these days. Yes, I know they don't make music any more, but part of the recording revolution ensured that music could exist even after the musicians had had their respective emotional or pharmaceutical crises-"

"This is the last time I ever take you to a concert. You just enjoy moaning..."

"(Expletive deleted). No, I am developing a critical discourse around the status of electronic music. With added alcohol. I'm not saying that Ben Frost comes out of the same tradition as the progressive rock of the 1970s - frankly, you wouldn't have got me in there if I thought he had anything to do with Jethro Tull. But the event we saw tonight did enforce the idea that rock and classical ought to remain in opposition."

"Ben Frost isn't rock'n'roll, and it's another one of your deliberate misreadings to suggest otherwise. Your ambition seems to revolve around applying inappropriate aesthetic parameters..."

"And seeing what happens. I've explained this before. I do exactly what Ben Frost does - I test what happens when you place one art form in a different context. Admittedly, Ben Frost is probably more interesting in The Old Fruitmarket than I am wandering around The Merchant City full of coffee..."

"Do you want to tell me why you think Ben Frost is rock'n'roll? Here's the objections: he uses a laptop to manipulate sound, he shapes albums in a way that has little in common with traditional pop structure and the three minute track. He takes on major themes and is not limited by the industry that surrounds rock music..."

"Yes were under the impression that their albums were influenced by eastern philosophy. That's a "major theme". But that isn't the point. Frost's instrumentation echoes the rock format: guitars, a bit of drumming and the electronics, although manipulated by a computer, are just a natural move from the experimental approaches of bands like Swans. Remember the start of the gig, before he came on. There was the new Swans album playing and his kit was all over the stage. A computer - I love the way he taped the cover to hide the brand, so anti-commercial - a drum  kit which is probably pretty close to the ones used by every rock'n'roller since Elvis - and a big whack of speakers. That was all an announcement: I am here to rock. And rock is the musical form that is most concerned with volume."

"I'd argue that the laptop is more associated with either techno or the soundscaping that is so often used for choreography..."

"See, this is what makes Frost fascinating. He comes from a tradition that includes Brian Eno - his ambient music militates against rock's macho posturing - someone even wrote a book about how Eno's production style was the antithesis of rock'n'roll. But Eno was in Roxy Music and he produced U2. They might not be fashionable - and part of their uncoolness comes exactly from the awkward sterility of Eno's production against the band's instinct to be a good time rock'n'roll band - but U2 are a by-word for stadium rock."

"Even Eno can't make U2 hip. But that's probably because of Bono. So is Eno, and this tradition you are inventing, rock or not rock?"

"It's both. That's the tension we saw played out tonight. On one level, there's no reason at all for Frost to perform By The Throat live. It's a wonderful recording, made all the more fascinating by the process of creation - those wolf sounds were apparently made on a double-bass. And it is conceptually complete. It's a studio creation, and although he remixes it live, it doesn't need the presence of the performer to make it immediate and visceral."

"But by playing it live, he adds the presence - which is very rock'n'roll, I suppose. And all those instruments - signifiers of rock?"

"Yep, and rock itself is a signifier of something aggressive, energetic, powerful. In theory, adding that to By The Throat lends it... well, a toughness. And look at how Frost performed - guitar slung over the shoulder, getting the drummer on to give it some tribal punch. It's rock'n'roll right there."

"However... after your first sip of that double espresso, you were burbling about classical music. Was that just the caffeine talking?"

"No, it's where the problems come in. Something about Apollo and Dionysus. The way that the venue was designed for a classical show - "

"There were no seats, that's rock..."

"Yeah, but most people just stood and watched. The lack of seating is more usually to give people space to dance."

"I saw that you went for a stroll."

"I was dancing. I was improvising a one man non-contact jam. Interestingly, the music was much more exciting when I was pacing about. But the way the actual music was presented, the way it was received, had more in common with a classical concert. And, given the best way to listen to the album is as a single piece, the audience weren't wrong... unlike me, they weren't misreading it."

"That's the non-rock part being played out, then? And his lack of rock'n'roll front man antics. As theatre, it's pretty boring to watch."

"Hence people have a wee lie down, or closing their eyes to listen. Or me staring at the bar for ten minutes, watching people buy drinks to this glacial soundtrack. With the red neon above, it became a lost scene from a David Lynch movie."

"So you are saying that the gig served two functions - or  has a dual identity? Rock and not rock? But that's fascinating."

"If you perceive it through a series of sign-systems, yes. But rock draws on an energy that is immediate and visceral. So, as rock, it fails."

"So it's classical?"

"Well, I didn't get confused and think I was listening to Arvo Part,  so no."

"It's beyond classification?"

"We could call it "electronica" and recognise that the simplistic systems I have applied don't work. Electronica craves its own format for performance, but falls back into the twin defaults of classical and  rock."

"It's pretty hectic being you. What's it like going to a hardware store?"

"Like entering a room full of cyborgs. But I have a suspicion that Frost knows about this problem. There's a bonus track on By The Throat called Studies for Michael. It is a typical title for a classical piece. But I reckon the Michael in question is Gira, out of Swans. So, he's making a point about the music he makes."

"(Laughter). David Stubbs does compare bits of By The Throat to Arvo Part. Major fail, Criticulous."

Extract from (Highly Pretentious) Essay on Musical Performance

The connecting strand between Ben Frost's live re-enactment of his By The Throat album, the Minimal festival's evening of Arvo Part's choral music and Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers - all appearing in Glasgow in a single week - is not so much in any shared musical heritage as each performance's balance of the theatrical and the musical. Taiko drumming comes from a Japanese tradition - made explicit by the welcome guest appearance of Mugenkyo's teacher - while Part's compositions are very European: the use of language on stage during the recitals, Japanese and Latin respectively, emphasise that the manipulation of noise into music is culturally determined and while Frost and Part share bits of their audience, Mugenkyo attract a very different crowd. Despite the simple categories of newspapers and magazines, grouping these three shows together is not as obvious as it appears.

Although the word "performativity" has been heinously misused in recent years - originally part of Judith Butler's attempts to disassociate ideas of gender identity from naturalism, but now a bland catch-all for the performance potential of any action, and flung about with abandon by critics and students to describe anything that has had a performance made about it - it might be the best approach to understand both the similarities and differences in the three events. Disconnecting it from any feminist context, perfomativity will be defined for the rest of this essay as being the qualities of performance that are defined by the nature of the art. This definition does not address the problems of misapplying Butler's original idea, but it does help to clarify how Ben Frost's live show is fundamentally different from Mugenkyo.

First of all the actual instruments and performers used during each of the three performances need to be considered. In brief, Ben Frost predominantly uses a laptop, slings on a guitar to build up some treated and distorted loops, sits down at a piano for a spot of mutant honkytonk - the Jools Holland collaboration may be expected in the next decade - and invites a drummer on-stage for the occasional bash on a classic rock kit. Two performers - Frost himself, doing most of the work, and the percussion. 

Although the Arvo Part performance features a variety of line-ups - the first half alone has assembled choir, choir with added big drum, solo voice and organ - it works around a combination of the untreated voices of  highly trained singers and acoustic instrumentation associated with western classical music. Stabat Mater, which made up the second half of the evening, pitched two trios together - violin, viola and cello against soprano, alto and tenor. 

Mugenkyo Taiko, meanwhile, had a wide variety of drums from Japan. They all looked really cool and, not coincidently, very foreign to the western tradition. The core Mugenkyo team consisted of two women, who also looked really cool piling about the stage and whacking big drums, and five guys who had this sweet martial artist meets rock'n'roll vibe about them. They were joined by their teacher and two of his students - these three were given much respect by Neil Mackie, Mugenkyo's main man and the compère for the evening.

Even this limited and increasingly fatuous analysis of the three events clarifies the fundamental differences between the artists. Despite the writer's apparent inability to maintain the academic tone of the first paragraphs, and the sudden descent into self-referential analysis, each event offers a different foundation for musical performance. That both Ben Frost and Mugenkyo had their kit set up before they arrived on-stage suggests that the instruments themselves were offered as a form of introduction: the spectacular array of Taiko drums or Frost's tangled electronics present a clear setting for the subsequent mood of the performance - even if the musicians would later subvert it.

Ben Frost

Ben Frost makes marvellously masculine music. In the up-market environment of The Fruitmarket, his  glacial slabs of noise and juddering bass is oddly alienating and disorientating: despite the dynamic ebb and flow of sound, punctured by melodic piano and the crackle of electric synapses, By The Throat becomes less a visceral assault and more a soundtrack to a film that is never shown.

The format of the concert does Frost few favours: somewhere between the idolatry of a rock ritual and  the serious attention paid to a classical recital, the energy of Frost's soundscapes is sacrificed for a reverential recreation of an album that emphasises the sinister and cerebral. While his dedication to intensity is unquestionable, and the patterning of drones, samples and slashes of distorted guitar build towards climaxes that never resolve into simple thrash, Frost's reworking of the album adds little to the listening experience.

There are moments of stunning immediacy: the sporadic appearance of the drums, tribal and driving, give the washes of sound an abrupt focus, and the slow fade towards the end reveals how Frost uses volume as part of a subtle manipulation of the emotions. Passages evoke snow-covered tundra, or the desolation of forests over-run with wolves, and his sudden slips into sub-bass suggest a more vigorous and violent narrative. The structure is precisely calculated, the songs acting more as movements in a symphony built on noise and electronics - the snatches of crackle that animate the early passages are shocking and strangely melodic.

Ironically, the live performance is far more cerebral than the recorded version: there is almost a sense that this is an exercise in sound play - effectively rejecting the potential of a live show. Frost establishes his skill and the scope of his music and although it is rarely less than satisfactory, it struggles to elevate the source material into an immersive whole.

Vile gets grabbed By The Throat

Although my enthusiasm for music was replaced by theatre after I burst my eardrums listening to very loud Japanese drummers, there are still times when I am distracted from the well-made play by the well-made album. The new Swans album has been taking up many of my late night, alcohol-soaked self-pity sessions (at around two hours, it takes me from the first sip of Cava through to unconsciousness) and, in my research for my forthcoming interview with Swans' main-man Michael Gira, I came across this magic moment from Icelandic TV.

Apart from making me want to move to Iceland - British TV has Jools Holland and his smug dadrock fest, they have drone rock supergroups - it introduced me to Ben Frost. I pride myself on having an ear for this kind of noise, sitting between the electronic, rock and classical zones.

Then I found out Frost was coming to Glasgow. This week. Apparently, there is a new platform for electronic music, PULSE, which is promising to bring Scanner to Glasgow within two years. When I saw Scanner - rocking a team up with David Toop, I think - at The National Review of Live Art, I felt as if I had been downloaded into a satellite channel. 

I've been chasing Frost's music, discovered a free download of his live set at Unsound - that will take care of the last hour of the radio show if I run out of conversation - and have spent hours arguing about the classification of Frost's sound. Although he uses guitars, and is clearly in a similar lineage to the majestic drone rock that blighted my teenage years, the use of dynamics hints at a minimalist heritage and the mesh of sound is only possible through the advances of electronic music.

Frost is performing 2009's By the Throat  in the Old Fruitmarket - I'd usually worry about an artist performing an entire album (that nostalgia wave that The Swans so studiously avoid is best understood by the plethora of once exciting bands churning out their single successful album on a "a very special tour"), but 2009 is recent enough to make it excusable. Plus, Frost makes a big bloody noise, and there is still no market for experimental, avant-garde nostalgia.

Actually, that isn't true. There totally is a market for old school avant-garde action: once time strips away the context of art, it becomes safe enough to hit the mainstream. See tango? Strictly Come Dancing? When tango kicked off, it was seen as so sexily provocative that they made the Pope watch some, to get a ruling on whether Catholics were allowed to do it. In fact, it was so controversial that it was watered down by various teachers, to make it respectable. And less than a century later, it's on prime time TV.

That brings me back to Iceland, where Ben Frost gets on the TV. And Wayne McGregor, whom Frost has composed for. And The Fruitmarket, which is a comfortable and classy venue in which to get drowned in sound...

Ben Frost performs By the Throat

Wednesday 24 October 2012, 8pm

£10/£12

Old Fruitmarket