Somehow, at times, in places, this city appears to forget a strip of lands, a bundle of cobbled streets buried behind a humid blanket of low-lying clouds occasionally, horizontally stained by the passing crimson stripes of the clanking bus. St John-at-Hackney lies at the very centre of emptiness, kept at a safe, silent distance from the clamour and saturation of a bustling Friday night. Night one of the Denovali Festival, London, 200 yards or years from Lower Clapton Road, the slow, lustful waves stretching from the middle of the stage meet us halfway between the misty garden and the shrine’s dark heart.
Orson Hentschel has just started twisting the sound of his debut album, Feed the Tape, supported by drummer Lukas Baumgart, when it becomes apparent that the fierce pace of his music is strangely at one with the unusual venue. The martial tone set by the drums, with their insistence on the hard skins of the toms, bears a vague religious accent, a metaphysical emphasis that has to do only marginally with the musical spectrum. The hardware and the drum kit, the software and the brains, such dichotomies constitute the one, complex idea behind the album.
We hear movie scores, classical minimal music, drones, loops and a music that develops a vocabulary of its own, sentence after sentence. The title-track starts as a tribute to Steve Reich, with its citation of “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Different Trains”, and ends in an orgasmic jumble of thoughts and drums so fierce that the two become perfectly intertwined. A revelation on album and an interesting surprise on stage, German composer Orson Hentschel toys with phase variations in the same way that child plays dad’s old games: in silence, with a certain dose of fear, with pure respect.
The queue to the toilet smells of Red Stripe and candle wax, of want and must, of comfort and pity, and the man at the back of the line is too numb to know the difference. He curses his by now warm brew, before being awoken by a beautifully imposing drone hovering overhead.
Lakker’s set is centred on water and Holland: one is the threat and the resource, the other is the tamer and the sufferer. Whatever the message, Irish duo Lekker — today exceptionally a one-man thing with only Dara Smith at the console — breaks the stasis of silence with his droning, obscure, obsessive post-industrial low frequencies that shatter the place, catalysing the attention of the whole audience. The video projected behind him accompanies the repetitions, but it is water: oxygen, hydrogen and loops that seem to lead the set, and not the other way around.
Gone is the time when noise ruled their inspiration, somehow limiting the artistic landscape: with the new album Tundra, Lakker is an entity that is as at ease with punishing blasts as it is with choral music. The set is virtually flawless: heads follow the beat, eyes stuck on the source, queues dissolve between ambient segments and techno variations, and silence anticipates the audience’s final roar. Energy and ecstasy.
We leave the venue to gather our thoughts, to cogitate on the abstract and grab a moulded bite from the local Sainsbury’s at a reduced price. Andy Stott does not wait, so we leave behind the wet grass of the churchyard with a heavier notion of the abstract and a healthier future behind us, but it does not matter. Not at all.
The lonely church candle on one side of the stage is a fire. From the floor, where we are sitting, Stott doesn’t know it, but he’s hiding behind the flame to remain in the dark. High frequencies now fill the room, the glitch, the sporadic melodic solutions envelop every single person in the audience. The sound is so pure that the waves reaching our ears seem to caress our eardrums. The volume is high, but there’s no discomfort; just sound, vibrations and harmonies, now joined together to create a blast, now diluted in a trance-like discipline.
If Lakker seems to be currently researching the low frequencies, Stott is now exploring the meaning and value of the high ones. Swords clashing, blades and an overall sci-fi iconography make up an hour-long suite that shakes the very foundations of the church. The new album, Too Many Voices, is presented en masse with its distorted sounds (“Butterflies”) and a renewed penchant for the glitch. The latter, in its less musical form and a more technical one, plagues his set which, towards the end, seems to bother Stott so much, that he forgets about the strict schedule and has to be reminded on at least three occasions by a sorrowful stage technician that, well, time is running out.
It’s a brilliant set, extremely well dosed, with a more “mellow” middle section. It sees the room completely filled with a crowd and its thoughts. A few cretins are inviting people in the first row to dance (really?), and a number of equally troubled individuals chatting and screaming do nothing to tarnish and spoil the event for everybody else. The candle is now half gone, but nobody notes its diminishment when the lights are back on as we enter the misty garden chasing a passing red shadow for one last time today.
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The second evening of Denovali Festival sees us in the more appropriate locus that is Kings Place, in the once seedy surroundings of Kings Cross station. The divine providence, relativity and transport for London’s weekend engineering works make us miss the performance of one of the most awaited acts. I’m thankful for the great local brew served at the unnecessarily expensive bar.
With the taste of good hops still fornicating with my palate, Poppy Ackroyd, also of Hidden Orchestra fame, sits at the piano, touches her hair with the tip of just three fingers, before the gently awkward sounds coming from her loop station grace the room. Liquid notes make melodies disappear unnoticed behind the loops, only to come back after some time — the right amount of time — unchanged, for closure and mere artistic elegance.
This is intricate but simple music, a light but substantial outlet generated by these apparent (only apparent) idiosyncrasies. These sets of dialectic, dynamic relationships give birth to harmony the moment tunes like “Seven” or “Grounds” reveal themselves in all their intricate beauty. The undeniably classical roots of her compositions are not a burden, but rather an asset. Poppy Ackroyd journeys from György Ligeti to Yann Tiersen without us realising it. Her two albums, both out on Denovali Records, make even more sense now.
As soon as the Dale Cooper Quartet hits the stage, it becomes clear that what is said on the tin is true. On their Facebook page, the quartet describes itself as “doom dark ambient noise electronic jazz… or something else”: and this is entirely true. Recent years have seen a surge in bands wilfully labelled in similar ways. Names that come to mind are Bohren & Der Club of Gore, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble and even Godspeed You! Black Emperor, leaving us with ample choices in terms of influences.
So what to expect from The Dale Cooper Quartet? A lot. After all their two albums are worthy of our respect and appreciation for their brilliancy. So where does the problem lie? Well, the ensemble we see tonight is one which fails to capture the audience, and it remains as dull as the silly choice of stage lighting, with a fixed red illumination which doesn’t contribute to making the set more enjoyable. The end result is, unfortunately, a bidimensional performance that doesn’t add much to what we already know about the quartet’s artistic output. It’s a shame and an artistic crime.
The long-awaited set of Piano Interrupted begins following a short introduction from main man Franz Kirmann, explaining how most of the compositions played tonight will be from the new album, Landscape of the Unfinished, recorded following a long journey through Senegal back in February 2015. The influences of such an experience are tangible not only in the choice of sounds employed, but also in the shape these very sounds take when joined together.
Greg Hall’s piano slips between faraway radio transmissions drawing musical sketches of West African melodies and western electronic music. It’s an amazing itinerary between the mbalax, sabra drumming and western classical music. It sits right in the middle, paying attention not to favour one side ignoring the other. This new approach can be heard in the weaves of their music, which is now, at least temporarily, something else from the tangled structures of their previous albums. We can’t but anticipate the album’s tone and take a liking for it. It’s dense, elegant, pulsating music right between two cultures. Not in a limbo, not a hybrid, but rather a mediation: the sound of a nature that follows the fate of a tormented and fluid landscape.