Where are the songs of Spring?  Ay, where are they?  Autumn didn’t so much roll in this year as drop from the sky like a cold lead weight, smashing the leaves from the trees as it did so.  I don’t care so much for its mists and mellow fruitfulness; however the camera appears to do so – that almost looks like a Touch album cover above, doesn’t it?  Hmmm, maybe Touch photographer (and label boss) Jon Wozencroft doesn’t have anything to worry about just yet. 

Not that I think this last year will have caused him too many worries anyway.  Tonight’s showcase at the Bedford Arms was the left-facing bookend – to go with the right-facing one I collected last year – of their silver jubilee celebrations.   And what a year they have had, with superb releases from Fennesz/Sakamoto, Oren Ambarchi, and Marhaug/Asheim amongst others.  The redbreasts or twittering swallows haven’t begun to gather yet, the label pushes on as strong as ever.

Chris Watson warmed us up (a particularly chilly venue this; fortunately I remembered that fact from last year and wore plenty of layers) with his “remix” of his new 7” Oceanus Pacificus, an aural snapshot of the Galapagos Islands.  The piece was seemingly recorded both above and below the waves simultaneously, with the muffly rumble at the bottom separated from the shingly scrapple at the top.  Dolphins circled, squeaking and clicking, cajoling and chiding me.  The visuals provided as an accompaniment were unnecessary; I closed my eyes, lay back, and floated away.

After some freaky fairground cut and splice from People Like Us, Watson’s collaborator on the Storm record BJ “Benny” Nilsen played a stunning set drawn primarily from his new album The Short Night.  It began with wind gusting up church organ pipes, ascending to the heavens where it coalesced and fell to the sky as rain.  The water began to lap at our ankles, before a biting autumnal gust scared some birds from the trees and into the air to sing, attempting to ward off the black of night.  The last tones had barely died out before I was at the stall buying a copy of the album.

It got a bit bitty for a while after that.  People Like Us showed off a fiftiescentric visual collage entitled “Work Rest and Play”. There was some ill-fitting (albeit brief) crooning from Zerocrop.  Wozencroft himself then wrestled with some malfunctioning equipment to provide a DJ set which included some Joy Division, and a new Fennesz single – the CD player drew the line at Judy Garland.

*Big ranty digression warning.  Rejoin again in a para’s time if you want to skip it*  That new Fennesz track was almost ruined by the swathe of chattering numpties in the crowd.  One photographer, whose name fails me at present, seemed not content with trying to disrupt the show for everyone by flashing his camera in the artists’ faces from about 6” away, just as he did last year – if he needs flash in those conditions I would suggest he probably needs a better camera, as well as perhaps a sense of shame – but stood talking noisily with his friend throughout, until someone sitting next to me pointed out to them that people were actually trying to listen to the music.   If I ever reach the point where I am so jaded or care so little about music that I will talk through a preview play of a new Fennesz recording then, dear reader, I will gladly pay for the gun with which you are to shoot me. *ends ranty digression*

Aaaaaaaaand welcome back to those who skipped that bit, you’re just in time to hear me discuss how Geir Jenssen broke the evening’s remarkable run of bald artists.  With his recorded output, I’ve always felt that the beats were the framework on which the rest of his music hung, but it was different here: the music was so dense, that the rhythms seemed to perch on top like a princess on a hundred mattresses, being distressed by an abstract pea at the bottom.  At times it felt like listening to a radio slowly retuning between stations; through layers of static, instruments and voices would appear and disappear, as the patterns around them shifted almost imperceptibly.  The end of the set was like one of those puzzles in which you have to make a picture by shuffling lots of tiles around, with the tiles in this instance being some skronky honks and parps, with Geir seemingly calculating furiously and just about making sense of it all before he ran out of time.  Everyone was quiet by the end, probably as their jaws were hanging agape at this magnicent performance.

To the last oozings: amongst a cacophonous coda from Autodigest I could just about make out human voices.  I couldn’t work out whether they were screaming in pain or baying for an encore; somehow both would have been appropriate for this harsh piece which laid waste to the immense beauty that had gone before.  Ah, Autumn – thou hast thy music too. 

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