This year's Sound Festival opened with a sort of gathering of the new music clans – an industry boot camp as much as a public showcase – because on top of the regular programming, Aberdeen and Banchory played host to the inaugural conference of New Music Scotland, a recently formed conglomeration of various movers and shakers in the new music scene.
And there is no shortage of action here. I dipped in for less than 24 hours and caught seven shows. (Unfortunately I missed the keynote speech – Oxford’s Jonathan Cross discussing the state of new music today – and a performance of James Clapperton’s Passing Place, which for many was an early festival highlight.)
Of what I saw, the stand-out was Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen with Mr McFall’s Chamber at the Lemon Tree on Sunday afternoon. Strønen writes whimsical folky jazz inspired by Hardanger drones and cycling poses; that he honours Graeme Obree with a piece called Crouch is surely reason enough to listen.
He adds chime bells and thumb piano to his drum kit, and loops the results into delicate, catchy grooves. It was sweet stuff, and could use a little more fleshing out in the strings, but the intricate percussion sounds were masterful. An ECM recording is planned for release in 2012 – definitely one to watch out for.
I’d arrived the previous evening in time to catch some of the JAM concert at St Machar’s Cathedral. Conducted by Matthew Bawtree, the vocal ensemble – chamber choirs from Edinburgh, Aberdeen and St Andrews universities – sang with warmth and earnestness for Paul Mealor’s Now Sleeps The Crimson Petal. Thomas Tallis’s scrunchy hymn setting O Nata Lux was followed by Rory Boyle’s even scrunchier new work based on it: Tallis’s Light pitted chunks of the original (rescored for brass ensemble) against heartily dissonant organ chords, to bold effect.
Out to Banchory, where the Woodend Barn was in the full convivial swing of a Red Note Noisy Night. A round of composing challenges was wrapping up (one winner was Stephen Deazley, who in five minutes had devised rhythms complex enough to happily flummox the performers). Pieces written by Highers students during three days of Go Compose! workshops were fun, confident and quirky; the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra then played for half-an-hour and lost my interest in the first minute.
The night ended back at the Lemon Tree with a so-so double-bill: Hanna Tuulikki’s female vocal trio sang cutesy loops derived from birdsong and what sounded like baby talk, followed by tedious speaker feedback and tendonitis-inducing guitar-strumming in Matthew Collings’s Flag Of A Dead Ship.
The next morning was devoted to electroacoustic bits and bobs at the University’s Johnston Hall, from the carefully frenetic piano-percussion duo Mustek, to four laptop-generated ambient noise numbers. Graeme Truslove’s Portal, with its sharp contrasts and quixotic patterning, was the most interesting.
And finally to the mysteriously named Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, whose 20 Cassette Recorders involved, well, 20 cassette recorders, and whatever the audience felt like doing with them. We were told that the nature of obsolescence and recording culture were under examination, but with a room full of composers and new-music aficionados, the results were (thankfully) fairly playful.
Sound continues until November 13.
HHH
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