Music
Tectonics
City Halls and The Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow
Claire Sawers
four stars
BACK for its fifth year, Tectonics Glasgow provides a place where orchestral and experimental types of music get to play around with their parameters. The two-day festival explores the bits that dovetail together or jar, and constantly sniffs out avant-garde and adventurous sides shyly hiding inside more buttoned-up and structured forms.
Seventy-six year-old saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, co-founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, is a nonchalant vision in his neon green tiger jumper and dark sunglasses, noodling through a staggering display of circular breathing and free jazz squawk to open Saturday. Luke Fowler takes inspiration from traditional Indian instruments and has invented gourd instruments with cello and guitar strings for his set of wobbly, growing drones with John Chantler on a 1970s Serge modular synth.
New York ensemble Yarn/Wire have fun with Thomas Meadowcraft’s Walkman Antiquarian, a many-textured jumble of foley effects, grand piano and junk spinning on a turntable. The BBC SSO push their boundaries in the first of many directions with a performance of Lori Goldston’s beautiful That Sunrise, with the composer slowly shredding on her amped-up cello. Watching conductor Ilan Volkov draw out visual codes for his players in an improvised piece with Austrialian trio The Necks is an intriguing look at what happens when free-style process leads the way, rather than precise composition.
Headliners Triangulum, the trio of Cat Lamb, Laura Steenberge and Julia Holter, finish with an ultra-minimal, pindrop piece, made from hushed harmonies and warm, if underwhelming and laboured experiments on gamba, viola and keyboard. It's a cautious experiment that doesn't quite work, but it doesn't dampen the day’s curiosities, just adds another few ingredients for the open-minded audience to chew on and chat over in the pub afterwards.
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