Led Bib: Sounds New Festival

If there is something I don't usually associate with Canterbury it is Jazz.  Jazz music played in dimly lit rooms filled with soulful sounds and chilled grooves seems more suited to backstreet Parisian dens overflowing with cigarette smoke or spilling out into the New Orleans night air as dancers twirl up the street.  I certainly didn't expect to find it in the converted hall of Canterbury Christ Church University and yet this is exactly where I found myself on Sunday night, awaiting the arrival of progressive jazz band Led Bib.  

The Anselm studio was transformed.  Heavy black drapes blocked out all sign of the starlit night sky outside.  Round tables were lit by tea lights giving the room a soft glow, picking up on the cool blue vibes of the stage lights.  Groups of people were softly talking around the room in counterpoint to the chilled out jazz music playing through the speakers as we awaited the arrival of the band and I felt an overwhelming need to go and find a honey hued whiskey.

Led Bib enter silently and take up their positions centre stage.  There is no ceremony, no introduction or long-winded speech.  They simply pick up their instruments and we are catapulted into the voice of new age jazz, electronic sounds ghosting through the centre of the two saxophones whilst the keyboard player is furiously tinkling the ivories.

The sound is heart pounding and electrifying.  The keyboard player undulates to the music, head and back moving in perfect synchronicity.  The band have their eyes closed, lost in their own sound.  The music is frantic and furious, a hedonistic frenzy that makes you want to dance wildly around a bonfire.

Jazz music is about the soul and this is pure soul, pure raw energy and pure heart.  It just screams out at you, unbelievably powerful and almost uncontrolled.  

This is jazz with a punk aesthetic.  The lighting cast shadows and then flashes into brightness as the tempo quickens then is taking right down again as the drummer's sticks scrape over the edge of the cymbals and a heartbeat thuds out of the keyboard, matching the thumping in my own chest.

Led Bib's sound is unforgettable, fresh and new and yet so familiar to the ears.  It is jazz music grown up, moved out and throwing a coming of age party.  The energy is infectious - people around the room have no choice but to ride the wave with them and the appreciation is evident.  At the end of the gig the energy is still high and people are excitedly milling around the group or purchasing their latest album.  I must admit - I was one of them and walked away with my own copy of The People In Your Neighbourhood.

This gig marked the end of the Sounds New Festival for me.  There were so many events to go to, and so many experiences to try out that I feel incredibly lucky to live in a city which celebrates such musical diversity, which exposes people to new emotions and feelings and most of all broadens their minds.

Sounds New will be back again so make sure you get the opportunity to try out something a little new for yourself.

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Icebreaker and BJ Cole 'Apollo For All Mankind'

On Saturday night my foray into the Sounds New Festival continued in the Colyer-Fergusson music hall at the University of Kent.

Icebreaker and BJ Cole were performing Apollo: For All Mankind.

I had no idea what that meant but I was really intrigued to find out!

I took my seat in the centre of the concert hall and watched as the place filled up, recognising a couple of work colleagues in the audience.  In front of me was a huge orchestra filled with an array of instruments, including pan pipes and an intriguing pedal steel guitar.

The first item on the programme was Ed Bennet's Suspect Device.  It was discordant and built and built around you.  It sounded like the Jaws Theme, Slasher Horror and Punk all rolled into one.  In fact it recycles material from the original song of the same name by Northern Irish Punk band Stiff Little Fingers who were mainly active during the height of the Northern Irish 'troubles' in the late 1970's and early 1980's.  The band provided optimistic and energetic anthems for the disaffected Northern Irish Youth culture who wanted nothing to do with the violence and politics of the time.  Bennet's music has elements of War of the Worlds ringing through it, a screech of high flutes and the pounding bass of the piano and you feel your imagination racing down dark streets.  At the end you hear a sound reminiscent of a Spitfire plummeting to the ground.  Bennet's work has been described as 'anarchic' (Irish Times), 'manic' (Classical Music) and 'beautiful' (Gramophone), an 'unclassifiable, raw-nerve music of huge energy and imagination' (The Guardian) and it is all of these things.

The second piece was Roy Carrol's Towards / Against.  This involved a much smaller ensemble and relied extensively on the considerable skills of the percussionist.  All manner of items were used, including whiskey cartons filled with rice whose tonal notes were then picked up by the wind instruments.  The piece had the feeling of a rattlesnakes tail tale in the Texan desert and footsteps in a deserted mansion.  Carroll's music has this quality about it, he explores the physicality of music through creating kinetic interactions between apparently discarded materials such as denuded loudspeakers, textured materials and feedback loops.  He views instability as a creative prerogative.

The final piece before the interval is Julia Wolfe's 'Big, Beautiful, Dark and Scary'.  Described as this is how life feels right now, the overall effect is not scary, it is terrifying.  Occasionally the instruments scream their protest at being used thus and the floor vibrates up through our seats.  The noise is deafening.  This is raw power in musical form, natures rage unleashed.  It crescendo's and then is suddenly cut off.  There is a dazed silence before rapturous applause from the audience. 

After the interval we were treated to the main event.  For All Mankind is a 1989 documentary film showcasing the Apollo missions of NASA and provides 80 minutes of real NASA footage taken on the Apollo missions of the 1960's and 1970's.  The focus is on the human views of the space flights and the beauty of earth as seen from space.  The film's soundtrack was written by Brian Eno.  Eno's reputation has been built over a number of years - he is one of the most successful record producers of all times, creating the sounds of seminal albums by Talking Head, U2 and Coldplay and was also heavily involved with the early 1970's Roxy Music .

He has also been credited with the creation of an entire genre of music - ambient.  Although this is debatable, Eno is the person who is most clearly identified with the genre and who has made it his own.

The soundtrack to Apollo takes it's cue from the fact that many of the astronauts took tapes of country and western music with them on the Apollo missions.  Eno used this idea to create a subtle blend of country and western with ambient.  

The music is highly atmospheric.  The lights go down, a stark contrast from the 1st half and the orchestra are lit only by the glow from their sheet lights.  The projector starts to play the film and the music makes you feel like you are floating away.  All around the auditorium people are hugging loved ones close to them or have their eyes closed in reflective contemplation.  The music drifts and floats with the astronauts.

Then the atmosphere switches as the panpipes come in mingled with the thud of the kettle drum.  The landing is approaching and there is a sense of anticipation.  The music becomes almost menacing; this is alien territory, somewhere humans are not meant to tread and we have defied nature to get here.

 

2009 was the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, and to celebrate this Tim Boon, Head of Research and Public History at The Science Museum in London suggested the idea of producing a live version of the work to play alongside Al Reinhart's film For All Mankind.  Woojun Lee was personally selected by Eno to make the transcription and the live version was performed by Icebreaker on the 19th July 2009.

After the landing the mood becomes joyful and soothing, much more uplifting.  The flutes and the pedal steel are employed and then the electric guitar comes in.  Somehow this sound turns the moon from an alien entity into a human playground - somewhere inviting, safe and familiar, almost homely.  The country music influence can be heard most clearly here. 

The entire of the second half took just over an hour for one single track of music.  They say music can take you on a journey, and this piece certainly achieves that.  I'm quite surprised at how I reacted to it - I have an unwarranted fear of space, the great unknown and the sense of all that unexplored, uncharted mass out there makes my head ache and makes me feel very, very small.  It's a feeling I try to avoid for the most part, but I left this concert with an underlying sense of peace.  I'm not the only one either.  As people trickled out and into the night air, I saw many of them turn their faces to sky to gaze at the moon which was glowing particularly bright that night and think on the experience they had just had.

The Sounds New Festival is running until the 9th May - you can check out the programme of events here, see them on Facebook here and also follow them on twitter here.  Don't forget to use the #SoundsNew2014 to join in the online chat!

If you like (or hate!) what you have read, please do let me know in the comments below or slap me with a cheeky follow, or say Hi to me on my Facebook group or twitter!

Sounds New Festival 2014

It's festival season at the moment.  No sooner have the last lines of Wise Words finished echoing off the Cathedral walls than Sounds New starts!  Sounds New is a Contemporary Music Festival that takes place from the 2nd-9th May around a plethora of venues in the heart of Canterbury.  It's been going for donkeys years, but was recently given a bit of a spit and a polish in 2011 and is now huge.  37 events in 7 days huge.  That's a lot to take in.

My Festival kicked off with me sprinting down the hill as fast as possible (all right, driving responsibly within the speed limit.  It just isn't the same) after work on the Friday to get to the Sidney Cooper Gallery for the launch event and a pre-view of the Cloud / Cuckooland exhibition. 

Cloud / Cuckooland looks into the 'Canterbury Sound', in particular the creativity of Robert Wyatt and his Cuckooland album.  Robert Wyatt was a founding member of The Soft Machine, who, along with Pink Floyd helped to transform the late 60's Psychedelic scene in the UK into something more lasting.   His influence on the exhibit can be seen on the side wall with a full history of him and his connection to Canterbury, and also the 12 cuckoo boxes that instead of cuckoos, have headphones living in them.

However, this festival is all about New Sounds, and so the Cloud / Cuckooland exhibit also includes Radio Daze, a new sound installation created specifically for the exhibition by Janek Schaefer, one of the UK's most distinctive sound artists.

Around the walls in the gallery there is also artwork from Sam Bailey's Piano in the Woods residency.  In May 2013 a piano was put in some private woodland near Canterbury. Each month for a year Sam Bailey has played the piano, improvising in response to the instrument's changing state.  These performances have also included musicians, dancers, poets and filmmakers and the entire project has been documented by photographer Neil Sloman.  It is his works that dominate the clinical white walls of the gallery, with headphones dangling enticingly next to them.  Around the room there are 12 photographs and 12 audio recordings, one for each month of the year.  You can listen to the audio from the piano, which, with the bleed from the Radio Daze sound trickling through your consciousness at the same time, is a truly eerie experience.  You are effectively listening to the sound a piano makes as it dies (which, as a pianist, although admittedly an extremely ad-hoc one, was more upsetting for me that I had thought it would be).

On the rear wall the entire exhibition is dominated by a flickering projection of the piano in its dilapidated state.  Shadows move alongside it like forest sprites, an impression emphasized by the performance art that sporadically takes place.  These are the same performers that danced alongside the Piano at its past open-air concerts.

There is also work by Sound Art students from Canterbury Christ Church University, including 2 short films by Ben Rowley which shows the piano being moved into position in the woods and the piano again in 2014.  The improvised music reflected on the 100-year history of the piano, which was built in 1913.  The films are all shot on a hand processed 16mm film taken with a clockwork Bolex camera which gives a vintage, disjointed element to the film, similar to that you would have seen in films of the era in which the piano was built.  There is also an audio documentary by sound artist Ben Horner which features interviews with people involved with the project.  

This launch was an introduction to the spirit of the Sounds New Festival.  Festival Coordinator, Matt, said that he wanted people to treat the festival as they would treat a food fayre, to explore and taste and sample new sounds and new concepts that they have never tried before.

Sounds New features a vibrant mix of musical concerts, electronic music events, sound installations, poetry slams, gallery exhibitions and education projects.  It is aimed at a broad range of audiences, from those who have an interest in contemporary music to those who have never listened, from those who like chamber music to those who have a passion for experimental electronic jazz.  There is contemporary dance and sonic art installations.  The spirit of the Sounds New Festival is a willingness to open your ears and your mind to new sounds, to discuss and discover and engage with others in a shared spirit of enquiry.

Sounds New music is also linked with Sounds New Poetry and Free Range poetry, the award winning experimental concert series featuring a variety of late night events. 

Sounds New wishes to portray Canterbury as a cultural hub – a City of musical and poetic pilgrimage surrounded by four European capitals drawing on the rich history of “The Canterbury Scene”. There is Indian classical tradition and African groove in various venues, from the ultra modern Beaney Library and Colyer-Fergusson Concert Hall to the ancient Eastbridge Hospital and concerts out in the woodlands and in local restaurants and cafe's.  This is an extremely diverse festival and with such a huge variety of events, there is something there for everyone.

I can't wait to see what else this Festival has in store for me.

The festival is running until the 9th May - you can check out the programme of events here, see them on Facebook here and also follow them on twitter here.  Don't forget to use the #SoundsNew2014 to join in the online chat!

If you like (or hate!) what you have read, please do let me know in the comments below or slap me with a cheeky follow, or say Hi to me on my Facebook group or twitter!