These daylight music concerts feel a little strange, don’t they? My normal gig-going routine just doesn’t seem to work. You know, the usual sort of thing – half a dozen pints and a curry beforehand, cocktails and hookers with the band backstage afterwards, before getting into a brawl with a minicab driver on the way home. I did manage TWO nice cups of tea, and there was some loud tutting about a minor breach of tube etiquette on the return journey, but somehow it just wasn’t the same. Still, there was much to enjoy about the line-up for this Arctic Circle Daylight Music event in the sunlight-dappled (if still absolutely bloody freezing) interior of the lovely Union Chapel.
Despite his recent LP release for the Type label, the extravagantly-titled yet restrained of content Your Eyes The Stars and Your Hands The Sea, Seasons (pre-din) remains something of a mystery, almost as if he was just a figment of Xela’s imagination. By actually appearing on this London stage for a live performance, he gave the lie to that mischievous extrapolation. Utilising a combination of short wave radio samples, field recordings, scarred drones and some scraped violin, he created a dark alternative reality inside the chapel. Everything had a bleak undertone, from the distant metallic clanging of ominous-sounding church bells, to some string-based squawks which conjured up the image of a flock of birds being sucked into a jet engine. After this the set’s finale, with some classical music bleeding into the mix, violins and piano ravaged by hiss (Caretaker style), felt almost uplifting.
Copenhagen resident Peter Jørgensen’s approach was different, if no less dark. He opted to fill the chapel’s great acoustic space with layers of competing frequencies. Some felt like they were coming from under the floor, some from the venue’s high ceiling. Some deep traces of melody (classical samples, ghostly voices) felt like they were coming from another chapel altogether, one some way further down Upper Street. It pitched up somewhere between Greg Davis’s slowly-shifting tones and Hecker’s crumbling cities. But watching Jørgensen at work – so intense, eyes ablaze, rocking on two legs of his chair – it looked for all the world like he was fighting to keep the music in, rather than to produce it; using all his energy to reduce everything to the minimum necessary to achieve a given force.
Simon Scott’s excellent Miasmah debut Navigare dipped his shoegaze roots in some haunted, cinematic waters. This set continued on that theme, with some looped harmonica lending the first half of Scott’s set a Morricone-esque ambience. This was another very economical construction, with tiny flickers of slide guitar being treated and repeated, sounding like anything other than slide guitar by the time he was through with them. As the layers built up in the second half, they took on an almost vocal feel, like a choir of sighing females. Just when this reached a pulchritudinous pinnacle, Scott began to slash away at the body of sound, chopping into it with glitch and distortion, ending with the speaker frayed and flapping.
Rameses III took us back to somewhere more pleasant, with gentle interlocking fingerpicking, slide guitar, singing bowls and violin being used to build one long, flowing piece of woozy ambience. Bird song filled the air as the light sparkled through the Union Chapel’s stained glass windows, and it was probably only the icy chill which was keeping me from nodding off. As good as Rameses III are (and their recent release on Type is a very lovely thing indeed) I started to think I’d maybe had enough of all this quietness after two and a half hours, too much minimalism perhaps. I needed something a bit more street. By which I mean a street. I took my leave, and joined the thronged shuffling Islington masses outside, blinking in confusion at this rare glimpse of post-gig sunlight.
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