Gamelan Ding Dong

I have a brutal headache, so I'm not going to write anything, just paste the review and have a little rest.

PLAID & THE SOUTH BANK GAMELAN – OCM, Oxford Playhouse, 1/10/10

Promotion can really matter. We recall a Swiss Concrete gig starring ultra-twee poppets You And Me, with backing vocals from actor Ewen Macintosh. Had the promoters swapped their tasteful A4 posters for a banner across Cowley Road reading “See Keith off The Office: Fiver!” a sparse turnout could have become a sell-out crowd. With that in mind, this event advertised as Plaid with the South Bank Gamelan may have enticed the mid-30s Artificial Intelligentsia who grew up on Warp, but if anything the billing should have been reversed. The gamelan made by far the bigger impression, not only in the quality of their playing, but with the arresting sight of their exquisitely turned Javanese metalophones, xylophones and assorted percussive devices.

The physical presence of the gamelan sound is incredible, whether it’s playing with piercing volume, or with a limpid, elegant stateliness. A fascinating contrast between complexity and simplicity arises when repeated iterations of brief melodies are made on many instruments simultaneously – not only is the sound miasmic and mysterious (one piece is like the bleached bones of a 60s spy theme deep underwater), but the sight of five sets of ornate mallets being dropped in unison looks like eerie alien choreography. Plaid’s dinky electro doesn’t really mix. The duo has spent many years taking the 808 boom out of Detroit techno, and replacing it with a the twinkle and patter of a perpetual motion toybox – Rest Proof Clockwork, as their third LP would have it – so their sound hovers oddly above the surface of the gamelan’s resonant overtones. Plus, for the most part, despite the programme’s bombastic trumpeting about new vistas, the gamelan and Plaid alternate their playing. Joint composition with gamelan master Rahayu Supanggah is more a patchwork of ideas than a collaborative creation, more a musical Exquisite Corpse than a fresh stylistic alloy.

All very pleasant indeed, in short, but not a touch on the inscrutable architecture of the centuries old music that opened the evening. However, two moments showed that this young collaboration could still blossom into something wonderful. A subtle arrangement of Aphex Twin’s “Actium” revealed not only how dynasties and continents could be brought together, but also Richard James’ knack with a killer melody, no matter how fragmentary. The encore was apparently played for the first time the preceding night, and yet it was the highlight of the concert, a melding of an old Plaid track with a traditional Javanese song. The synthesised clicks and the warm percussion tones truly meld together for the first time, and suddenly we saw performers working on the same wavelength as well as the same stage, musicians who shared an exciting vision and not just a publicist.