Even though it has only been in existence for about a year, it is hard to remember what we in London did before Cafe Oto was around to attend to our more avant-garde musical cravings. We probably all sat around some street in Shoreditch watching a man scraping the road with a stick, nodding sagely all the while. Much to my financial cost (the tickets, the Pitfield ales, the inevitable meal at Mangal II or some such establishment), my trips to Dalston are becoming increasingly frequent, and in can only get worse if Sprawl continue to put together bills like this one.
I arrived just as Sprawl co-founders Douglas Benford and Iris Garrelfs were giving a rather abstract and brief performance, with minimalist flurries of piano and Garrelf’s increasingly distorted wailing, before they settled down with the rest of us to watch the rest of the evening’s entertainment. Recent(ish) cover star of The Wire Antye Greie, or AGF to give her her recording name, was next. Perhaps appropriately for an event taking place in an old printing house, her fascination with the role of language, so vividly betrayed on the excellent Words Are Missing album a couple of years back was to the fore. Over projected backdrops of disjointed words (“complex”…”processes”…”emotional”…”models”) she began to sing. What began as an almost a capella performance was quickly taken down a Dalston dark alley and given a good going over. She began slicing into her words in real time, chopping and bending, and sending the resulting fragments out over some increasingly abrasive and grimey textures. Machine-like clanking and bursts of noise were spat out amidst the tumble of words, coming together briefly in electro/hip-hop flourishes before dissolving once more into glitch. Towards the end – which came all too soon for me – she repeated a phrase which seemed to make a lot of sense in the context: “sweet tiny disasters”; under the microscope, AGF’s music reveals a beauty amongst a seemingly random collection of little sounds.
I’d been eagerly awaiting the chance to see Bip-Hop label boss, recent The Wire cover disc contributor and (even more prestigious!) recent interviewee over at themilkfactory Philippe Petit. Along with all the publicity I’ve just mentioned, his magnificent S/T album with his ensemble Strings of Consciousness and Angel was lauded round here just a few weeks ago, after all. For his first piece he was joined by a cellist, who provided an array of scrapes to be woven amongst Petit’s laptop and turntable glitch and crackle. Philip Jeck-like melancholy met a Boards of Canada-like dreaminess, before the tone changed when a mournful guitar line found its way into the mix. The guitar kept threatening to explode and collapse the piece, but Petit kept a steady hand, keeping it looping over and over, before using that same steady hand to deliver an almight karate chop to the record on the deck, abruptly ending the piece. This physicality of performance was to become even more extreme and alarming after this, with a piece which featured some improvised trumpet and horror-movie droning being assaulted by Petit, slamming his hand and on two occasions his head onto his record player, producing sickening bursts of white noise. After this he started further disrepecting his equipment, stabbing his stylus into a piece of fabric to produce some grating rhythms, before finally he had to be dragged from the stage to the applause of a still-startled crowd.
(Such wild over-running meant I wasn’t able to hang around for a closing performance by the actor/musician Simon Fisher Turner, or SFT as he should probably have called himself for tonight. If anyone caught that, do let me know what I missed).
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