Music

Tectonics

City Halls and The Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow

Claire Sawers

four stars

DAY two at Tectonics began by blasting away the cobwebs with a group jam on the floor of the Old Fruitmarket. Twenty-odd festival performers – including composer/multi-instrumentalist Julia Holter and drummer Tony Buck from The Necks – dressed in multicoloured metallic tabards for Eddie Prévost’s Spirals; a garbled, fun conversation between whacked gongs, stroked cellos and wind instruments sounding like wild geese playing kazoos.

Upstairs in the Grand Hall, Morandi by Toronto’s Linda Catlin Smith was a gossamer-light classical composition, played with delicate precision from Yarn/Wire’s quartet on grand piano and percussion. It was her third piece performed at this year’s Tectonics, and a reminder of another thing this festival gets right – a commitment to a gender-balanced line-up of composers and artists. James Saunders and Tim Parkinson’s double act of lo-fi rhythms and suburban wordplay went down well, and was a reminder for the doubters that the sometimes chin stroking world of experimental music can still have a good sense of humour. Making up wonky parlour games out of plastic milk cartons and squeaky toys, they reappeared later in smart suits for a deadpan Morecambe and Wise style collaboration with the BBC SSO.

Ash Reid’s dense and powerful performance art piece was a welcome injection of politics, where her all-female cast played surreal, stale bread volleyball, soundtracked by a midi cover version of Kylie Minogue’s Locomotion, grappling with problematic topics of “disobedient wives”, foodbank users and DWP assessments.

Another enlightened weekend lineup wrapped up with a jaw-dropping blast of Roscoe Mitchell’s saxophone, playing solo in his own Conversations. As co-founder of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, his love of musical genre-melting seemed a perfect fit as the opening and closing act for this year’s Tectonics.