Project Description
EXTENDED PLAY
@ City Recital Hall, NSW
(Live Review)
25/08/2018
Reviewer/Photographer: Rodrigo Llauro
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The Ellison Ensemble opens the festival from the Auditorium. Daryl Buckley sits by his slide guitar creating a noise landscape. A screeching, piercing and jarring melody tells us this is going to be an interesting day. Graeme Jennings comes on stage and gives a solo performance to gently soothe us back to a receptive state. Then, the ensemble reconfigures into a three piece with the addition of Tristram Williams on winds and his piece about a particle’s trajectory through the 4thdimension.
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Now it is time to pay Lisa Moore a visit. It is early. It is lunch time. The festival has just begun and the room is already full. She plays Phillip Glass, favourites, pieces composed by her husband. People yearned for the experience to such extent that they fully embraced sitting on the floor. Children, teens, adults, elders. It didn’t matter, everyone was comforted by her presence.
The festival is full of surprises in every corner. Video and music installations. Paintings and other visual works along the City Recital Hall’s walls. As we search for the next artistic fix we find the Nexas Saxophone Quartet providing an excellent segue with a classy performance in one of the building’s halls.
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Anna McMichael also put yet another room’s capacity to the test. Her alluring violin over the mysteriously attractive bed of electronic music put everyone in a trance. Sophisticated. Elegant.
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Meanwhile, Topology and Karin Schaupp put on an emotive show at the auditorium by conveying their heartfelt response to testimonies from disadvantaged and underprivileged people and their personal struggles. A solemn homage to those who openly share their stories so we can also learn a bit about ourselves.
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We must move on. There is more to see just a floor below us: the magic of the Theremin.
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The audience waits naively for a Theremin lesson but get a lot more. The young experimental collective “The Music Box Project” shows there are no boundaries to musical expression. These young talents bewilder the audience with their improvisations and cathartic poetry reading.
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Rubiks collective keeps the pace going back where Lisa Moore once sat. The room is transformed by layers of sounds emanating from these multi-instrumentalists and their weapons of choice. They seem to improvise yet everything seems to be perfectly coordinated. The highlight of the act is their performance to a projection of “Odboy & Erordog Suite” by Marcus Fjellström; an animated film that combines cartoons, retro-computer game aesthetics, and a dark sadistic plot.
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Concreative follows. Their chaotic, opinionated and fierce presentation keeps our hearts pumping. Desperate screams, grunts, agony. The voice of a woman: “I am waiting…I am waiting”. “I love you Solomon Frank” on repeat.
The final treat? A multimedia opinion piece. A musical reaction to Emma Gonzalez speech on the Florida shooting in February. The title: “We call BS”. Angry yet carefully orchestrated disharmonies of noise are perfectly timed to the inflections of Emir Gonzalez’ voice.
Let’s move on and take a peak at “We are Breathing”, if we can. Turns out we are late for this one. Most of us only get to listen… from the hall… while sitting on the floor. Ironically, there is no room to “breathe” in there. People well in the hallway do not seem upset that they can’t see a thing. It is about listening, being there, taking it all in.
Back to the auditorium. People gather. They look at their watches. We are 10 minutes away from the next performance. The venue’s patient personnel provides the same answer to the ongoing flow of future spectators: “they are finishing up with sound check and the show will start in just a few minutes”. This does not seem to curb their enthusiasm towards what is to come.
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The spacious auditorium is pitch black. A mysterious figure begins its performance amid stars. Technicolor silhouettes dance freely on the foreground. Bursts of light accompany the beat. Grotesque figures hold a guitar and soon crumble into simple polygon configurations as the beat intensifies. Conducting all of this is Alon Ilsar. Man, body, music, and light as one.
He reaffirms his mastery of rhythm by engaging alternating loops that drift into perfect syncopation as he swings his drumsticks into the sky. His body is now confined in a ring of white light which provides us with visual clues of the pulse and rhythm to follow… one, two, three, four, countless rings. He lands behind his drum set only to mesmerize us with his organic flow. A perfect amalgam between man-machine.
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The music. The beats. The shapes and colours. The blood in our veins seems to pump faster and faster seeking that inevitable release which we wish to postpone forever and yet anxiously wait for.
Higher and higher we go until he softly brings us back to reality and exits the stage after a short bow along his colleague.
Finally we get to experience Bang on a Can. Ken Thomson begins the show by charismatically addressing the audience and introducing the members of Bang on a Can All-Stars. The show begins with a rendition of a composition by JG Thirlwell about a cat looking for something to drink. The conductor explains that this piece is usually accompanied by a film made with a cat-cam. To be clear, that is a cat with a helmet cam looking for something to drink. JG Thirlwell sat among the audience a few meters away from the stage and did not hesitate to step forward to congratulate the musicians after the performance.
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Bang on a Can All-Stars played with great enthusiasm throughout. They delighted the audience with a rendition of “Closing” by Philip Glass from Glassworks and a few other surprises. Ashley Bathgate seemed to feel every movement with every inch of her soul while her cello answered.
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The festival was quite a treat. The City Recital Hall could not have been more welcoming and appropriate venue for such an eclectic and avant-garde event. This is the music of the future. These unique classically trained musicians with a thirst for experimentation and self-expression are the ones who will define the future of music.
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Get more info
on the artists
and future events at:
CITY RECITAL HALL Website
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