Nothing Gonna Stop The Floe

I have to write a "best of 2011" for one person and a "ones to watch for 2012" for another. I hate that kind of stuff.

I also hate it when adverts say "Terms & Conditions apply". Of course they do, otherwise there would be chaos; there's no way I could make you an offer without delineating it in some fashion. "Buy one bottle of Head & Shoulders and get...whatever your mind can conceive of absolutely free - the accepted parameters of scientific governance notwithstanding". Idiotic.


TERJE ISUNGSET, OCM, The Northwall, 5/11/11

We don’t normally care about a musician’s equipment - start talking like that and before you know it you think Stevie Vai is better than John Lee Hooker – but we watched Terje Isungset’s Ice Music desperate to know what gear they had backstage. What sort of refrigeration rig is required to bring instruments carved from Norwegian glaciers around the UK?

The instruments not only look gorgeous in subdued theatre lighting, but they sound phenomenal: an ice marimba is somewhere between a balafon and a tabla, and a pair of glistening ice horns sound like Jan Garbarek mournfully morphing into an elephant seal. But, once you’ve marvelled at the logistics and the concept and the beauty of ice instruments, you’re unfortunately left with something aimlessly pretty. Take Lena Nymark’s breathy vocals: she may be adept enough with her effects pedals to build a wash of Cocteau Twins ambience, but her voice is rather thin when what the show needs is a steely soprano or a gutsy folk chorus to raise it from the morass of politeness.

To be honest, we far preferred the first half of the concert. Tribute To Nature is a piece for drumkit augmented by elemental wood and granite percussion, but the rough-hewn instruments offer more than earthy novelty. The click of stone on stone is a Neanderthal telex, and a Jew’s harp passage sounds like a Tuvan version of Aphex Twin’s “Didgeridoo”; at times the windswept stillness is Biosphere unplugged, at others the frenetic crackling rhythms are bebop played by a huge insect. A Max Roach, maybe? No, no, you’re right, we’re sorry.

Tribute To Nature may be too long, and the shamanistic groove is too Howard Moon (“Coming at you like a jazz narwhal!”), but the piece is hypnotic and evocative, and Isungset is modest enough to break the sonic spell and make people giggle by creaking his drum stool: ice is nice, but sometimes a musician finds their best material in jokes and accidents.