Usurper @ Techtonics (Old Fruitmarket)

Electronic Music: Pulse! (Part 1)

Electronic music is still struggling to find a relationship between the seriousness of its compositions and the immediacy of live performance. Often being closer to classical music in terms of scope and ambition, it lacks the vitality of rock or pop but can veer into pretentiousness when aping the chamber concert. Ben Frost summed up the problems - his music vacillates between Michael Gira and Reich - in his recent gig at the Fruitmarket, which was less interesting as performance than as a soundtrack. 

Matthew Herbert's One Pig at Tramway was more successful, not least due to the sight of a lab-coated boffin bouncing about in a musical cage but for all the live remixing, fancy trickery and performance play - One Pig was recast as a performance for laptops, electric fence, boffins and chef - electronic music thrives on the sterility of the studio rather than the grubby confines of the gig.

While Sonica is going some way to present enough sound art to sketch out the boundaries of modern musical performance, Glasgow City Halls is beavering away with PULSE: Touch 30. Pulse is a new strand of programming - kicked off by Frost last month - and Touch 30 is a celebration of the London experimental audio-visual company.

The gig is a three way mash-up of talents: like a Scottish Ballet triple bill, it has something for different crowds. Philip Jeck gets busy on the decks; BJ Nilsen examines how sound hits humans and composes for film and theatre; Thomas Köner would fit nicely under Sonica's "sonic art for the visually minded" rubric, and has been known to mess about with a bit of dub-techno

Philip Jeck is a rare turntablist who, like Janek Shaefer, is less a hero of the dance floor than a determined sound artist. He brought his Vinyl Requiem up to Tramway in the 1990s: this immense piece is both a nostalgic tribute to the record-player, made at the point when CDs were still looking viable as a replacement, and a reminder of how the turntable has a versatility that makes it an instrument in its own right. 

Jeck is also worth seeing perform. His music may come from a secure intellectual foundation - he learnt his skills at Dartington College, not at the block party, and so shares a tradition with live artists or theatre companies like Fish and Game rather than Terminator X - but he has a presence that is unexpected from the man who won The Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award.

Thursday 22 November 2012, 8pm @Old Fruitmarket

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