Sunday afternoon, one concert remains!

What a couple of days.

Friday night started with the combined might of POING and the Norwegian Wind Ensemble performing Eivind Buene's Into The Void. I really enjoyed the concert - a real mix of stuff, including a full on funk sound during the Theories of Mass Construction Void. Worth listening out for again. Dror Feiler's Noise Orchestra were astounding. Very, very noisy. The piece was called music is castrated noise. Well that was music with cojones. They were even giving out earplugs before the concert.

Saturday was a mix of stuff. Started off with Anton Lukoszevize performing on cello and electronics. Of particular note were Juste Janulyte's Psalms, Karlheinz Essl's Sequitur IV and Richardas Kabelis CCCC. The Arne Deforece / Richard Barrett concert I didn't really get too excited about. The Samuel Beckett video Not I (featuring Julianne Moore's mouth) was quite interesting, but the music passed me by.

The Saturday evening had a real feeling of the HCMF letting it's collective hair down. First off the musikFabrik performance of Stockhausen's KLANG: 9th hour was excellent, but even better was the second half of the programme when they performed outer nothingness and Pleiades by Sun Ra. Absolutely beautiful pieces of music (especially Pleiades). The entrance of the wind and brass sections down opposite sides of St Pauls Hall will remain with me for a long time. Sun Ra's combination of free jazz and melody was like a drink of water after some of the more abstract stuff that I've been exposed to.

The hair shaking continued into the evening with the ascolta / Zappa concert at Bates Mill. This was by far the longest performance (12-hour marathons excluded), but the audience was gripped throughout. The band even did an encore! I have a little knowledge of Zappa's music, and I have to say that ascolta did it proud. Really amazing performance. Props particularly to Hubert Steiner's blistering electric guitar (proving that classically trained guitarists can rock) and Lukas Schiske's drum solo during the penultimate medley. What's particularly sickening, as I said to my friend, is that this isn't even their day job! On a slightly more serious note, it was really interesting to hear the original synclavier recording of Samba Funk, which ascolta then played along with. That is as close as I will come to hearing Frank Zappa performing live.

So Sunday morning, and the last day of the festival. Nice start to the day listening to the New London Chamber Choir performing works by Mauricio Kagel and Stockhausen. Kegel's Gegenstimmen was excellent, but the performance of Stockhausen's Litanei 97 was superb: full of movement (literally, as the choir pirouetted about the hall).

So just the final concert to go, but what a concert: a full-on four-and-a-quarter hours John Cage tribute (with breaks, thankfully!). Bring it on!