It wasn’t long after returning to Chicago that I found myself wanting to shoot gigs again. Whilst living in London, I had the pleasure of reporting on a wide range of music events, including the Melvins, Fennesz, Dan Deacon, Gravetemple and Philip Jeck. Some of these I covered in words and all of them I covered in pictures. The main focus of my photography isn’t gigs by any means, but as a life-long music lover, it inevitably became a part of it.
I’ve always been a fan of the venerable Chicago blog Gapers Block, so when the opportunity arose to join the staff of their music section, Transmission, I jumped at it. Technically I’m part of their photography staff, as I joined to shoot gigs and let others write about them. When there are, however, events about which I’m so passionate that I also must say a few words, I wear both caps. Such was the case with the first annual Sónar Chicago this past weekend, where in the end I produced three reviews and a handful of snaps. They are all up on the site now, so please do have a read and a look. Cheers!
London fans of minimal electronic music will find themselves spending much of this week in Dalston, as Cafe Oto hosts a three-day residency featuring two of Japan’s preeminent improvisers. Each night, Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M will play with a different experimental luminary and as well as collaborate with each other in what is easily one of 2009′s most exciting series so far.
Equally skilled on both turntables and guitar, Yoshihide draws as much on cut-up sound technique as free jazz, while Sachiko M’s work centres on the most basic building block of synthesized sound, the sine wave generator. I recently listened to her Sine Wave Solo CD from 2000 and was shocked by how alien it still sounds nine years later. Whereas most experimental electronic music from the turn of the century sounds dated with too much garish glitch, Sine Wave Solo sounds positively fresh and timeless. If you’re hoping to hear her undiluted sound, Monday night is her only solo set, so don’t miss it!
The special guest each night will undoubtedly influence the direction the performers take. While Otomo Yoshihide will probably explore the jazzier side of his guitar with Evan Parker in the spotlight on Wednesday, I can’t imagine he’d miss the opportunity to hop behind the decks and spin alongside Technics virtuoso Christian Marclay on Tuesday. I’ve seen Marclay and Yoshihide collaborate once before, each manning their own set of turntables, and it’s nothing short of amazing.
With the stunning set of sounds Marclay and Yoshihide can extract from the much abused vinyl in their crates, augmented by Sachiko’s sine waves, if I had to pick one event to see, it would be Tuesday’s trio. Since each gig only costs £10, and a three-day pass can be had for £22, choosing just one seems a bit silly, really. It’s not every day you get some of the finest noisemakers in the world together in one place for the better part of a week, so arguably you have a moral obligation to attend at least two of these stellar gigs.
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If you’re not sold yet, here’s a small sample of the sort of sounds you can hope to hear this week. It’s the first track from Sachiko M’s Sine Wave Solo, “Don’t Move”. Not only is it one of my favourite pieces of hers, but it’s among my most loved works of experimental electronic music in general. It’s a proper mental palette cleanser, a bit like giving your brain an acid bath so it comes out all shiny and new again.
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Full schedule:
Monday, 9 March 2009 at 8pm
Otomo Yoshihide – Solo
Sachiko M – Solo
Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Eddie Prévost (AMM) – Trio
Tuesday, 10 March 2009 at 8pm
Filament: Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M
Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Christian Marclay – Trio
Wednesday, 11 March 2009 at 8pm
Otomo Yoshihide and John Butcher – Duo
Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Evan Parker, John Edwards and Tony Marsh – Quintet
When travelling, a fantastic experience can be had by doing something that would be incredibly mundane at home: going to the supermarket. Despite the age of globalisation that we currently live in, some products never make it very far out of their homeland (sometimes for good reason, too). On a recent trip to Austria, Rin and I stopped in a Salzburg supermarket and, of course, ended up in the booze aisle. It was there that we first saw Baumann’s Gletscher-Eis in all its glory.
Blue and toxic-looking, Gletscher-Eis stands tall
Along with a few other assorted miniature bottles of schnapps, we bought big blue as a souvenir of our time in the land of Mozart and singing nuns. How could we resist a spirit containing 50% alcohol by volume which required three minutes spent burning before it became drinkable? When we arrived home from our trip, we promptly found a nice spot for it on the shelf where it could collect dust until we mustered the courage to set it on fire and kick it back.
A few days ago courage came in the form of several glasses of Jameson, so Rin grabbed the video camera and filmed my first true encounter with this formidable Austrian bastard. Please excuse the South Park pyjamas, for the degree to which I was chilling precluded the wearing of proper trousers.
I have at least 75% of the bottle left and, not one to waste intoxicating substances, I’m sure I’ll give it another chance. For take two, I’ll follow the instructions more closely and give it a minimum of 3 minutes’ worth of burn time. I’ll also sip it through a straw since burnt lips aren’t very nice.
You can learn a lot of things about a country by visiting one of its supermarkets. For example, it wasn’t until I first came to Britain that I learned tea could come in boxes of 500 or more bags, or that one needed a choice between 30 different types of marmalade. On a recent trip to Belgium, I was surprised to find that it was cheaper to buy a bottle of Chimay than a Diet Coke. Sadly, I went with the Diet Coke, because whilst drinking on the street is legal in the UK, I wasn’t sure if that was the same case there. I may like foreign supermarkets, but I’m still too much of a pussy to start exploring foreign jails. Maybe I just need another bottle of Jameson.
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