Back To The Fuchsia

Originally this review had an extra paragraph, that my editor remove, and on reflection, I think he was right, so into the bin it goes. If you live in Oxon you shoudl check out some OCM gigs, they have some good stuff. I was watching Andrew Poppy last night in a small theatre to write a review, & that was a good change from flat beer & sticky carpets. The gigs don't come cheap, however. Still, I couldn't give a fuck about you lot, I get in free, innit.

POWERPLANT & THE ELYSIAN QUARTET, Oxford Contemporary Music, Jacquelie Du Pre Building, 10/5/07


Your word for the week is synaesthesia, the unusual ability to experience one sense through another. We’ve always wondered how synaesthetes find multimedia son et lumiere shows like tonight’s: “The yellow is out of tune with the bassoon”? Still, they might find a little more to entice than we do in Kathy Hinde’s projections, which are lush but ultimately as memorable or meaningful as the majority of pop videos. Her colleagues in Powerplant (Joby Burgess, percussion, and Matthew Fairclough, machines) make up for this shortfall beautifully. They open with Javier Alvarez’ “Temazcal”, mixing chitinous electronics that sound like Lovecraftian tentacles clawing at shaly beaches, with live rhythms from a single pair of maracas. The piece intelligently finds similarities between the two very different sound sources, and is played with jaw-dropping precision.

“Carbon Copy” loops sounds from improvisations on a Brazilian berimbau, and overlays them with stabbing percussion, ending up sounding uncannily like a drum and bass remix of Aphex Twin’s classic “Digeridoo”. Even better is Burgess’ performance of Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” on the xylosynth, an instrument that allows metallophone keys to act as midi triggers, producing a vast array of sounds. By performing the piece using vintage synthesiser tones instead of guitar, Powerplant remind us just how much electronic club music has borrowed from Reich over the past twenty years (we’re looking at you, The Orb!). Possibly the best performance we’ve seen this year.

After the interval Powerplant are joined by The Elysian quartet for Ben Foster’s arrangements of Kraftwerk compositions. The electronics are decent enough (even if they will keep breaking down) and the Elysians play with fine dynamic sense, but somehow the two elements don’t mix. The fascinating paradox of Kraftwerk is that their music is simultaneously robotically arid and joyously human, that they create true warmth by eradicating all traces of the flesh from their austerely controlled soundworld. By fudging the arrangements between two camps Foster has reduced Kraftwerk’s masterpieces to a series of pretty tunes. And we have Coldplay to do that for us.