Sit Down. Stand Up. Red Stripe: Gigs are sometimes the worst way to hear music

Last month I wrote about the Halls gig at the Old Blue Last for L&Q, and felt kinda bad about having to conclude that it was mediocre. Essentially, I thought they'd done the music a disservice by failing to turn their bedroom producer fare into any kind of live show. I'm seeing them again tomorrow, same place (according to the line-up that's been floating around), supporting Beat Connection and the rather good Entrepreneurs. If bands ever took advice from sideline snipers and blather-boxes like myself then I'd expect them to rock up with some freshly-honed stage moves and stunning visuals at the very least; ideally they'd make their entrance from the door of a 35 ft mirror ball lemon. But somehow I think this will not be the case.

Last night, at the other end of the synth-dude spectrum, I caught Emeralds at Village Underground. This arpeggio-humping synth/ambient/drone trio came to my attention last year with their album Does It Look Like I'm Here (s'on Spotify), but they've been around for a few years and apparently have about 40 releases behind them on various small labels, including Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace imprint. So they're a little more established than Halls, shall we say. But how much better was the live show? Well, there were no laptops involved (that I could see) and they had wisely set up the synths side-on to the audience so that we could seem them pressing stuff, a bit. And they have a guitarist! He sways around in a post-rock sorta way. 

All the same, I don't think more than a handful of people could have been described as 'engrossed' in the Emeralds live experience. This is not to say that there's anything wrong with it - at the very least it's cool to see how such complex, textured tracks are brought to life through the beating heart of analogue - but it makes me wonder about the limitations of the standard gig format. When Brian Eno patented his Ambient music it was all about creating sounds that could happily exist in the background, while the listener splits her attention with something else. Likewise when you're listening to a DJ in club surroundings you're free to dance and chat and move around without looking over to the booth (unless you're one of those creepy booth-snoopers with your eyes fixed on the decks. Weirdo).

And on and on - so much music is designed as part of an overall experience, not as the experience itself. Like in ballet or dance where music is just one of the required elements. Or in many non-Western musical traditions where participation is expected and there's no performer-audience divide. Or, in fact, in its recorded state as the soundtrack to your day. Music doesn't need to be 'Ambient' to be literally 'ambient' - how much time do you spend listening to music while doing nothing else? Most of my listening happens while I'm getting on with other things.

So when it comes to the music of Emeralds, or even Halls, I just wonder if its anti-flamboyance, evolving textures and slow-burn dynamics wouldn't be better served in a less straightforward 'gig' situation. If there's nothing to look at, why are we all facing the same way? Are there other ways of presenting live music that are better suited to the actual sounds being made? By way of example, a couple of memorable gigs: Yo La Tengo at the Royal Festival Hall, providing a soundtrack to a '70s French documentary about marine life. Lucky Dragons at the Scala, handing out homemade electronic instruments to the audience. Both were totally engrossing and gave the audience a sense of purpose and belonging, as though it really mattered that we were there, creating an atmosphere together (ergh, what a hippy I'm becoming). But without that, we risk reducing the gig to something functional and replicable, a simple product to be touted now that CDs are virtually worthless.

Wow, downer post. I'll dish up some happy clappy shit next time!

Dirty Projectors + Polar Bear + Lucky Dragons, Scala, 2nd April 2009

Dirty Projectors + Polar Bear + Lucky Dragons
Scala, 2nd April 2009

A pile of junk is neatly laid out in the middle of the room, a spotlight shining down on it. Looking closely it still doesn’t make sense, like being drunk or taking off your glasses; the objects look half-familiar but your brain finds it impossible to alight upon their meaning or purpose.
Kids with beards, chunky cardigans, specs, plimsolls, checkshirts - all the necessary accoutrements of London scenesters - sit in a Brownie Guide circle, cross-legged and curious-bashful. Lucky Dragons appears – a youngish wiry guy – kneels in his exposed electronic playpen, and starts up.
The first five minutes he’s laying out his wares, seeing where he can go, dipping our ears in the possibilities. A laptop and a box of buttons and faders are discernible – they conduct throbbings, hummings & tweetings, skittering and shaking sounds melting together and crumbling apart. The second five minutes and this melodica-panpipe-stick emerges, through which he conjures some free riffing. Hmm.

It’s getting worringly ‘ambient’-slash-Sounds of the Amazon Vol. I, and I’m just about to turn to my compadre and call it bollocks when:

Mr Dragons starts shaking what we’ll call a ‘shakeysticknoisemaker’, dancing around with it, cobra-necking. He hands the shakeystick to someone nearby, picks up another and starts handing out a whole bundle of them, more and more, until the inner ring of spectators has become an instrument in itself, shakeysticks cracking and coming together spontaneously in-and-out of rhythm.

Cynicism dies.

The music goes on. Mr Dragons gives the people freedom without direction, and they respect the project. It’s too right-on for words.

Next, the shakeysticks are gathered in and what we’ll call toyrocknoisemakers are given out. This time there are dozens of them, it seems, and they work like magnets over a central box of conduction/magic, a bit like an E bow for a guitar but totally unfathomable to my brain. Later there’s the snakecordnoisemaker which comes alive when people grab its ‘tails’ and then lock hands, connecting circuits and chiming chords and sweet dischords, reaching across the circle in search of new sounds. It’s somewhere between a physics class and an autism therapy workshop – people are re-learning sounds, lights, shapes, each other.
It’s not music, man, it’s a sound-connection. It’s for hippies, dead simple, and maybe we all want to be.

Polar Bear, for the uninitiated, are a typically couldn’t-make-it-up Upset The Rhythm band – two sax, one drums, one double bass, one guitar/laptop/balloon/Xbox controller (it certainly looked like one), and one afro.
Exploring an invigorating seam of jazz/noise, they freefall into free jazz, almost abandoning harmony and melody at points, and scare you up with rubber pink balloon vs sax face-offs before shaking you up with madcap time signature wacky races, finally falling back into a groovy pulse - yes, groovy, which in their hands becomes a satisfying reprieve of Yow! funkiness after a section of skronking brainmelt.
Overall, it’s like having a pipe cleaner go in one ear and out the other. That, is a messy headfuck with squeaky clean aftertaste. Fresh.

I had forgotten quite how charming Dirty Projectors are. How can anyone in their right mind not fall for them as they knock out these gift-wrapped slices of crispy genius, barely breaking a sweat?
Dave Longstreth’s fingers glide over the strings, his left and right hands each apparently using their own brain, at a speed so fast it makes rhythm more like spasm, only accentuated by his Mother Goose neck-jerk moves. But it’s all perfect, incredibly perfect.
And the girls! Nothing is quite like a DP harmony performed live. How they get that kind of purity of tone, note & timbre live I just can’t understand.
Dirty Projectors have such an unadulterated streak of originality that you can never forget you’re watching a former Yale composition student and (possibly certified) genius here, even when he forgets how to play ‘Rise Above’. Only for a minute though.