No One Pulse (HK) + Olaf Hochherz (Germany), Circuitrip (Singapore), Naturalismo (Italy) + Sherman (HK), C-drík (Belgium), dj sniff (Japan) + Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), SETE STAR SEPT (Japan), Mikko Savela (Sweden), adeō (HK)
Hong Kong, HKICC Lee Shau Kee School Of Creativity, April 27
The last weekend was rich in music. After the Friday concert at SCM/CityU where Otomo Yoshihide was the main star, on Sunday, a mini music festival took place at HKICC. The festival was squeezed into approx. 5 hours from 6pm to 11pm. I was pleasantly surprised by the venue setup. It was my first time to HKICC. The entrance to the venue was surprisingly through the car park, so I first thought the car park will be the place where the performance will take place. After walking through and past a video projection and a dark corridor illuminated with sparingly flashing neon tubes, one entered the actual concert hall, filled with mysterious smoke penetrated by a number of spot lights directed from a low point towards the ceiling, forming a kind of light dome. It was not only smokey, but also icey inside, so the entering the venue felt like entering an ice cave somewhere in the Austrian Alps.
The lineup was rich and I will only mention some quick impressions. It was a lot to take in in the limited amount of time.
18:00 No One Pulse (HK) + Olaf Hochherz (Germany)
The first performance reminded me of taking a high speed train – low bass humming drone was forming the underlying layer out of which from time to time high-pitch sounds emerged, similar to when the wheels of a train screech in a more abrupt turn. I attributed most of the high-pitched tones to Olaf Hochherz – it was mainly coming from a no-input mixer. Occasionally some of his trademark electric bird-like sounds surfaced, this was probably coming from a sampler. The underlying humming gave a meditative feel to the performance, which was great to draw people’s attention in and create a break from the outer world experience – a train into another reality.
18:35 Circuitrip (Singapore)
If I likened the first performance to taking a high speed train, this performance was more like a plane taking off and the listener located on the outside of the plane, right next to the engine. The sound frequencies stayed quite balanced, so it was kind of white-noisy, which made it somehow digestible, even though not super engaging.
19:10 Naturalismo (Italy) + Sherman (HK)
Both performers worked with guitars as sound sources, which set this performance apart from the previous black-electronic-box performances. This sounded almost like some experimental version of jazz. The sound was fragmented, each time a string was struck a new fragment was released. The fragmentation into notes and impulses made the performance more understandable, but at the same time more tiring: I could better understand the interaction between the two players – it was well observable how they react to each other, which was reminiscent of more classical approaches to improvisation. By tiring I mean the necessity to listen carefully and taking in each note, as opposed to a more uniform ‘hum’ of a drone or an evolving melody (to be fair, this was the most melodic performance of all!). In the end the necessity to listen closely made me a bit tired and my attention wandered.
19:45 C-drík (Belgium)
I went to buy noodles.
20:35 dj sniff (Japan) + Otomo Yoshihide (Japan)
I was looking forward to this performance. I wanted to compare it with the Otomo Yoshihide concert on Friday at CityU/SCM (Otomo Yoshihide with 4 other musicians incl. DJ Sniff). Sniff and Otomo seemed more relaxed and unrestrained in their performance here than last Friday. Maybe it was caused by their chance to ‘practice’ in concerts on Friday as well as on Saturday prior to this performance on Sunday. Sound-wise the performance was rough and energetic, I felt both musicians were really trying to give their best. Both used record players to produce sound, but each had very different style to play them as well as a distinctive role within the performance. DJ Sniff was the gentler (well, still rough!) part of the duo, sampling bits and pieces of jazz records, mainly drums and sax. Otomo Yoshide did not take any consideration of his turntables, playing them as simple resonant objects with his fists or by banging the whole machine on the table. A bit too noisy for me, but I appreciated the raw energy.
21:10 SETE STAR SEPT (Japan)
This performance was probably best summed up by my friend who commented on it by saying it sounded like a rehearsal of a random death metal band… A half-naked male drummer bashing the drums like mad, a wall of guitar amplifiers with extreme feedback, a female bassist screaming, just screaming into the mike, while bashing the strings of her instrument, following a quite predictable pattern of scream – high-pitch feedback – scream – high-pitch feedback. It was interesting to observe them, for a while, but sonically there was nothing special about it. Maybe they can improve the performance by undressing the bass player too.
21:45 Mikko Savela (Sweden)
A high-energy performance, utilizing a modified guitar as a percussive instrument. The performer was really playing the guitar (equipped with a number of contact microphones) like a drum set. Then it seems he was recording and looping and recording on top of this. A complex rhythmic structure emerged. The fact that it was loop based, made it a bit repetitive, but given how complex the sound was that was acceptable. I had a feeling the performer could make use of another pair of hands to control the mixer. As a one-man show, it felt as if the machine is controlling him (he had to conform to the loop length) and not the other way around. Not sure if this was on purpose or not.
22:20 adeō (HK)
Too tired, I went to enjoy some silence…
It was interesting how in the intermissions between performances the sound engineer played mellow poppy songs, almost as if to counterbalance the noise of the performances. It made the atmosphere a bit lighter, but it made me think about the threshold: While on a classical concert, people enjoy the silence in the music performance break, here it all seemed to be pushed one level up: People needed music to enjoy in the noise performance break.
Still worth the visit for the experience…. I could broaden my horizons.