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!

Friday early evening...

Just got out from hearing nearly all of The Game of Life Foundation's Wave Field Synthesis performance of Sternenrest. Very impressive rig comprising 192 speakers arranged around the audience. Well, most of the audience - I arrived late thanks to a doctor's appointment and had to sit outside the main area. Never mind. I think I got most of what was going on: random-sounding scratchy noises being moved around the audience accompanied by a guitar, then a percussionist playing a bunch of glassware and finally an ensemble. Nice meditative stuff, supposedly derived from measurements of a star. Nice concept.

The other thing this morning was Nicola Sani's AchaB, skronking solo clarinet of varying magnitudes (regular, bass and contra-bass) accompanied by / accompanying noises and video projections. I really enjoyed AchaB 2 - good visuals and noises and not too annoying a clarinet part. The others were less interesting to me.

Friday already

I can't believe I've been doing this nearly a week. How time flies. A mere 10 concerts remain. That means I've been to 25 concerts over the last week, and missed only two. I may miss another this afternoon, as I have an appointment with my doctor as a result of my continuing hacking cough.

Since last I wrote I've seen the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart again - this time performing 12 Madrigali by Salvatore Sciarrino. I have to admit to having very little recollection of the performance, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. As far as I can remember it was OK, but nothing special.

The second half of the Stockhausen KLANG was also good - as long as I remembered not to concentrate too hard. Much the same as the first half, except I didn't start off in a bad mood.

The final event was Bakin Zub performing Jeanne of the Dark. This promised much, and I was really enjoying some of the earlier music. I even came away humming part of it - not a common occurrence over the last week! The piece progressed through alternating ensemble pieces (entitled Vampire, Eroticism and Cannibalism) and slo-mo psychedelic videos showing a vampy woman with what appeared to be Minnie Mouse ears on. So far, so good. The final segment combined recordings of the earlier music (possibly done on the night), with additional visuals and live music. It was entitled Vamp. Erm, so far so obvious - the figure of a vamp is a combination of otherworldly sex and danger. A couple of the players then narrated over an old French silent movie Les Vampires. I found this rather entertaining, but I suspect not in the way that the creators had intended - it reminded me more of old editions of Whose Line Is It Anyway. A final flourish was added by one of the artists calling out the musicians names in the style of a really cheesy mittel european rock band. No need. It felt like 40 minutes of musical ideas squeezed into 65 minutes.