Theatre and Culture from Scotland, starring The List's Theatre Editor, his performance persona and occasional guest stars. Experimental writings, cod-academic critiques and all his opinions, stolen or original.
Both Akbar Ali Khan and Matthew Whiteside present their music to a seated, relaxed audience: Khan turns the Strathclyde Suite of Glasgow's Concert Halls into a subdued, meditative chamber while Whiteside's collaboration with Emma Lloyd makes the white, clean space of Edinburgh's Fruitmarket into a laboratory of experimental sound. Hector Bizerk, however, cram their experimental hip-hop into the sweaty upstairs of King Tut's, and get the crowd bouncing. But it's all music, innit?
On record, Hector Bizerk have sounded pedestrian - the clarity of the production often leaves Louie's raps exposed as doggerel. Live, they are a ragged, belligerent presence: twin drummers pounding beneath ferocious rapping, the bass grinding out funky flurries against wisps of melody. Perhaps because of the electronics that Whiteside uses in his compositions, the gap between live and studio performance is less marked: using his tour to introduce his first album, he selects Ed Bennett's Ghosts and Grisey's Prologue from Les Espaces Acoustiques to give a context for his scores for Emma Lloyd's viola and viola d'amore.
Bizerk's relentless energy sucks up reggae and hip-hop, with shades of new wave and funk, into a distinctive sound that escapes easy references, finding a tempestuous backing for Louie's raging words. The live instrumentation adds an immediacy and dynamism often lacking in hip-hop that relies on turntables - or backing tracks - and the rapport with the crowd is direct. While Whiteside exists in a more respectable musical genre, the same sense of urgency fills his Ulation and work for viola d'amore. The melancholic strings are forced towards a vigorous attack, Whiteside's own humming electronics twisting the acoustic sounds and conjuring a warm depth. The resonating drone of the viola d'amore echo medieval song, but Solo for viola d'amore and electronics is a restless, contemporary piece, never quite falling simply into minimalism - Whiteside has an interest in timbre rather than repetition - despite passages of minimal eloquence.
Akbar Ali Khan's qawwali relies on his voice, shaping sculptures into the air, although, like Hector Bizerk, he sits back at times to let the drummer have some. The approach of qawwali is based on repetition, but also vocal gymnastics, the story-telling of the songs evoked as much by the lyrical line and the lyrics. There's the same sense of virtuosity found in Emma Lloyd's viola playing, but while her reading of Grisey's Prologue is an erudite journey into the edges of musical possibility, Ali Khan finds a sensuous spirituality.
Matthew Whiteside has been composing electro-acoustic music in Glasgow for several years, first of all as part of the Said Ensemble and now Edit Point. His current project, however, maintains his use of modern technology, but also looks back to the baroque period.
In collaboration with Emma Lloyd, more usually known as a violin and viola player, Whiteside is writing a piece for the viola d'amore. This instrument, as Lloyd admits 'is not often used nowadays, and it is hard to find out what music has been composed for it!' First made during the baroque era, Lloyd adds that 'it is a peculiar instrument - it's interesting sounding. It has seven bowed strings and seven sympathetic ones. The non-fretted string instruments that you meet nowadays - violins, cellos and so on - usually have four strings.'
Given Whiteside's enthusiasm for a wide range of music (previous compositions have drawn on glitch electronica as well as contemporary classical styles), his composition is not purely about this obscure instrument.
'The new piece is for viola d'amore and motion sensors – of some sort,' he explains. Aware of the danger that electro-acoustic music can lose any sense of liveness in performance, Whiteside suggests that introducing this baroque curiosity can provide a further dimension to the composition.
'The instrument is already extended by the fact that it has sympathetic strings,' he says. 'The electronics are another thing to
play with. I'm toying with the ideas of cybernetics, and the relationship between the performer and the audience.'
In the early stages of the project, Whiteside and Lloyd have been experimenting with 'incredibly delicate sensors, which are usually used for testing movement in bridges.' Attaching these sensors to the musician, which then respond to her movements, brings a more improvisational, even random, element into the composition.
'In much performance of electronic music, the audience just ends
up looking at the back of a laptop, wondering whether the performer is just checking his emails,' Whiteside continues. By working with a stringed instrument, and applying sensors to Lloyd's fingers, Whiteside's composition uses both the traditional performance activity of the classical concert, and integrates contemporary technology. And while the project will see a CD release, the fullness of the piece will be revealed in the act of performance.
At the same time, the process of composition is an adventure, challenging Whiteside and Lloyd to find a compromise between the demands of a baroque instrument and electro-acoustic complexity: while there are limited scores for the viola d'amore (despite a recent fashion for rediscovering similar idiosyncratic baroque instrumentation), this is a unique fusion of the old and the new.
