Music
Counterflows
Various venues, Glasgow
Claire Sawers
four stars
THE FINAL day of Counterflows shifted to Glasgow’s southside. Hangovers from the frenetic, big fun Art School party the night before, with DJs Clara and Letitia Pleiades, were managed with coffee at the Glad Café, and a gentle Q&A between music critic Frances Morgan and Ashley Paul, 2017’s featured artist. A young conservatory-trained saxophonist, Paul’s real love is for free jazz and improvisation, and she performed several times over the weekend: solo, backed by an ensemble on double bass, tuba and guitar, and in a duo with Berlin-based artist, Rashad Becker. Programming her that way reflects the festival’s fascination with the practice behind the artist’s work, just as much as the end performance – and judging by the crowd of geeks inspecting and discussing the electronic gear and instruments left onstage at the Queen’s Park Bowling Club after she and Becker had played, the audience shares their curiosity.
Sunday featured excellent sets of flea-market cassette chatter and birdsong from Glasgow’s atmospheric field recordist, Mark Vernon, and Ukraine’s Svitlana Nianio, spinning a cobwebby vocal over creepy keyboard folksongs, as though she was lost in a Slavic forest, trying to outsmart the snapping teeth of Baba Yaga.
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force closed the festival with a dubby, techno blend of Senegalese percussion and fevered dancing. Made in Dakar and making their UK debut, they were another reminder that while lesser festivals wheel out dreary, nostalgia acts, or all-white, mostly male line-ups of over-hyped emperors in new clothes, Counterflows can always be relied upon for sublime new discoveries and vital support of music on the margins. A precious thing in the cultural landscape, it’s also a special occasion for lovers of the curious, the cerebral, and the annual opportunity to go bananas on the dancefloor.
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