Activating Memory: Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival 2014 at Plymouth University

I'm sitting in the office on Wednesday morning watching the BBC News. A section of iron railway at Dawlish is wobbling like an elastic band as waves wash over the crumbled masonry below. This was my route to the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in Plymouth for the weekend.



After the wettest January on record, the UK is experiencing the worst flooding we've seen in years. The South West has been the worst hit, and now the storms are taking out the coast. My colleagues send me pictures of waves the size of mountains crashing over Sennen cove, waves engulfing churches and pubs. On the TV, another huge blue LOW is spiraling in from the Atlantic in a volley of curvy white arrows. "Should we abandon...?" asks an email from a music critic who I'm due to be travelling with. "The roads are clear from Exeter to Plymouth" Prof Eduardo Miranda from Plymouth University assures me over the phone. I book a hire car and co-ordinate trains with some of artists heading down from London: namely synth-pop legend Martyn Ware of Heaven17 and his assistant engineer Tom Belton.

I join them on the train at Paddington. Martyn's wearing a black and gold patterned shirt and a greyish cardigan. Closer inspection reveals the gold pattern to be Glock 17s. On the seat tray in front of him is a black polystyrene box about the size of a computer keyboard. "You won't believe this," he tells me, pulling out an even smaller creamy grey rectangle, "it looks like a toy doesn't it?" It is, in fact, some kind of new Japanese super-synth-sequencer-tape-loop combo that costs more than most people would spend on a laptop - a far cry from the giant wire-crossed analogue keyboards that Ware started out with. It's also what he'll be playing live in Plymouth later tonight night. "Otherwise it'd just look like I'm doing my emails". He's only had it for three weeks and still doesn't completely understand it, but he seems confident. It starts playing a loop as he tries to put it away. After a few attempts, he works out how to turn it off.

The train sails through the waterlogged paddy fields of Somerset in deceptively bright sunshine. We arrive in Exeter half an hour early and pick the hire car up with no trouble. After negotiating the Bluetooth connection, Martyn treats us to Beyoncé's new album. It’s the only music on his phone that doesn't require access to 4G. The sky in front of us darkens and lets loose in heavy squalls, but the road remains clear. Despite skipping half the tracks ("she could be the new Whitney Houston. She's letting herself get ruined by a man") we arrive in Plymouth before it's over. A five hour journey door-to-door. What travel chaos?

As Martyn and Tom set up for the evening's concert, I head to the Roland Levinsky Building where most of the 9th Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival will take place. Co-directors Simon Ible and Professor Eduardo Miranda declare the festival open over some wine and nibbles and introduce us to Duncan Williams, a young sound engineer in the University's Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research, looking relaxed in trainers jeans and a black shirt. His composition 'Choncord for Five Elements' has been been chosen as the first performance of the festival.

We file round into the Peninsula Arts gallery to discover the elements. A quintet of giant, five-tonne blocks of swirling Italian marble dominate the room. They've been carved by Devonshire artist Peter Randall-Page, who is exhibiting major new work between the Peninsula Arts gallery and Plymouth Museum over the road. Symmetrical, ball-like forms covered in perfectly polished rounded lumps, they look a bit like scale-up pollen or viruses. Above each one is a speaker. Williams has assigned a voice to each stone and a programme that allows them to interact with each other. The space is awash with sound, I can hear water and wind and what sounds a bit like the crackling of fire, but I struggle to locate what's coming from where until I find a sweet spot at the centre of all five speakers. People are swirling around the stones themselves, most running their hands over and around the bulbous marble forms. It's an extremely tactile environment. The marbling patterns are intensely hypnotic and perfectly teased out by the undulating surfaces of the beautiful shapes.



I'm introduced to the Lithuanian Cultural Attache who is here to see composer Linas Balthas and pianist Lauryna Sableviciute. We walk over to the next venue together, a chapel like building divided into lecture theatres on three floors. We're in the loft space, a high-beamed white vault with theatre-style seating. I spot speakers at the front and back, Martyn Ware's piece 'Recapture' is a 3D sound composition, so we chose a row of seats right in the middle.

Ware strides out onto the stage in a blue suit, and white shirt with polished midnight shoes to match, taking up position at a music stand. Tom follows, sitting side on to us facing a laptop to the right of the stage. A guitar refrain starts looping through the front speakers, followed shortly after by snatches of old lyrics about memory. Other noises start to fade in and out and I become aware that some of them are coming from behind me. There are no real beats, just washes of high end, slurred piano and strings rising up through the mix. "It's easy to remember but so hard to forget" croons a smooth voice from the front. It's not Ware, but it brings my attention back into focus on him. In a Guardian interview before the festival Ware describes how he is ‘fascinated with that meniscus between recognisable and unrecognisable’, like wind in the trees that sounds like a familiar pop song. There's some definite knob twiddling going in. Tom's not moving. The Lithuanian Attache finds this hilarious. I tell her that he's doing his emails. It's like a radio tuning in and out. The only thing I can compare the sonic experience to is Chris Watson's multi-channel live mixes. Two pioneers from Sheffield still pushing the envelope.


Next on stage is Remember a Day by Alexis Kirke, a researcher of both music and computer science at Plymouth Uni. Kirke explained his intention behind the project in a video posted online a few weeks before. It's an illustration his idea that singing might help those with dementia to remember important information. Wearing a grey suit and tie, he sits with a laptop to the left of stage, while a cellist and soprano take their positions. As silence settles, Kirke reaches for his phone, setting off a ringtone melody which is taken up by the cello. The soprano adds words "Ge-t u-p, wa-sh hair, bru-sh teeth..." intoned in slow operatic phrasing. It's a daily routine, punctuated by activities relating to a dog. This last word always sung as a long semitone note: "....brush d-oogg".

Then come numbers, one to nine, up and down in scale, like vocal exercises, before breaking out into recognisable 077.. telephone numbers. From out of these comes a new refrain "*Co-codamol* twice a day, twenty-five one hun-dred". It's the back of a medicine label. The cello throughout is really quite exciting, all sorts of strange rhythms. I'm later told this is a by-product of algorithmic composition, music written by a computer that can only apply a mathematical understanding of melody. In the third movement the mobile phone lets rip. Synthetic chimes ringing through space, cello chopping and slicing and sluicing through and around them. The vocals return and the ringing ends. The daily routine holds us steady. The chimes swing back in. Ringing up and down the scales like church bells. Heralding the joyous occasion of brushing the dog.



On Saturday morning I go to see Alexis talk about A Day To Remember with members of the local Alzheimer’s Society and Singing with Dementia, a local group that promotes the palliative benefits of group singing. They show us a video of one of their workshops. The interviews with husband and wife couples brings a tear to the eye and makes me wonder at the power of music to bring joy to even the most difficult of lives. Nicole Quin, whose Irish mother benefited from the group, tells us how the group activity helps to reduce social isolation, while familiar recordings can form the basis for desert island disc style storytelling.



I have lunch with Tim Grabham who is in Plymouth to film the festival and interview Prof Miranda for a film he's making on the incredible properties of slime mould, a single-celled amoeba-like organism. Apparently there are some exciting musical applications already in the pipeline for the 2015 festival. It sounds fascinating.

That evening Prof Miranda premieres his latest work 'Sounds from the Underground', which sees him duet on piano with Lauryna Sableviciute. The distinction between this and every other piano duet I've seen is that one of the two won't actually touch the piano. Prof Miranda will instead use an array of electromagments installed in an impressive array over the open strings of the grand. They will vibrate the strings according to an computer alogrithm that interweaves with the work of Sableviciute's fingers. The results are strange sonorities, pulses in pizzicato, bowing and percussive in accordance with Miranda's taste for the classical music of his own South American heritage. Another highlight of the evening is Linas Baltas Air, which sees two string orchestras play simultaneous pieces that sound like slithering variations on Air on a G String.



Concert over, Alexis and I hop in his red hatchback to drive down to the Hoe and watch the tail end of the storms that ravaged the coast at Dawlish. Most of the waterfront is cordoned off with hazard tape so we venture to the nearest wall overlooking the Hoe. The dark water of Plymouth Sound crashes into the stone cliff front below throwing up plumes of white spray. Earlier in the week the waves were coming right up over the road. A Chinese restaurant just below us is in tatters, its large windows smashed in by the same sea they were made to view.

We spot figures halfway down the front of the Hoe towards the Barbican, Young lads, an decide to join them, partly out of civic responsibility, but mostly due to our own thirst to get closer to the action. By the time we get there they're right down at the foot of the cliff where waves are crashing over the stone quay. We stop one of the lads from going down the last sea slicked flight of stairs. He's drunk, so I struggle to make out what he's trying to tell me. "it's alright" he shouts "I'm a poet."

A few months earlier Alexis had stood in front of Prince Charles and local dignitaries conducting the wave pool in the University's new Marine Institute. The pool was rigged with sensors and Alexis armed with hacked Kinect controllers that could sense his arm movements and relay them back to the pool controls. He's a poet too.



Biomusic, the 10th Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival, takes place at Plymouth University this weekend, 27 February - 1 March: http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/event.htmhttp://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/event.htm

Warp x Tate, 6 December 2014

How could you not be excited by Warp x Tate? Pioneering electronic music label teams up with top UK art institution for a night inspired by Jeremy Deller’s 'Acid Brass'. What a setting for a party. What a perfect way to see the re-hang of the newly refurbished gallery. As the day drew nearer, it became obvious that I was not alone. Twatter and Facewaste were abuzz. Asking around, it seemed that everyone was planning on going. This had the taste of a big rave, albeit it likely to be an above-board and respectable one.

By Friday afternoon @Tate was sending out cautionary tweets about limited capacity. I bolted out of work at 5.30pm on the dot, raced down to Vauxhall and hurried over the bridge. By 6pm the queue was already snaking around the block from the ramp to the lower ground, while the front steps were littered with groups of people. We made it in by quarter past, dodged the secondary queue for the cloakroom and headed up the stairs to see what was going on. 

The lights were out in the busy central hall with projectors casting Warp videos onto the walls. At the far end, a blown up version of Deller's Acid Brass spider map filled the space between two colossal columns. In front of this, Patten was onstage, emitting disjointed noise and geek cool. Unless you were crushed into a fairly small sweet spot at the front, though, the sound from two tiny speakers was quiet and echoey: lost in the cavernous hall with drinks queues longer than Mark Wallinger’s 'State Britain'. Instead we set off in search of Warp installations dotted around the newly rehung galleries.

First stop: Hudson Mohawke's 'Summer of Love' in the 'The Chapman Family Collection' room. It's packed with people wandering between the faux-African Macdonalds sculptures, chatting and posing for Instagrams, as an oil wheel projector casts psychedelic swirls onto the roof above. A short loop of ambient electronica pulses through a couple of small speakers on the floor. It’s a playful environment, which works well, but Hud Mo’s Dazed video made to preview the installation does a better job of evoking the spirit of 1987.

Just outside the door, a studio light has been set up to illuminate Deller’s original Acid Brass spider diagram, hung in a corner next to a colossal Peter Doig. Here we can read about the original 1996 performance, which saw a brass pit band playing acid house anthems. The diagram describes links between the two, tying the rave movement into a wider cultural context of pit strikes, electronic dance music and the North. I love this piece and can’t wait to hear the embodiment of it later. The rest of the room contains some Wolfgang Tillmans photos, a Fiona Rae painting, a rather nice black and white Keith Coventry and some large panes of crushed flowers which appear to be leaking down the wall. On behalf of the old Tate, I'm slightly shocked. This bodes well.

Having lost my friends, I leave the 1990s and time travel back towards the 1980s. I’m immediately be blown away by a Bill Woodrow junk sculpture, a life-size elephant head on the wall with AK47s for tusks, standing guard over a village-meeting-style circle of smashed car door windows. Its ears are maps of Africa, torn from large-scale Atlases. Rejoined by the group, we pose for photographs with the epic wall trophy and follow its sad gaze across the room to Mark Wallinger's ‘Where There’s Muck’ - the word ‘Albion’ spray painted in giant Tory-blue letters directly onto the wall, over a tableau of burnt wood, with a worker figure on the central panel. The date is 1985. Exciting stuff. We pose for photos with Barry Flanagan’s ‘Leaping Hare’. It lends itself well to narrative.

Floating further back in time, I'm drawn by the sounds of electronica, past a startling late Francis Bacon triptych and Richard Long's photograph of 'A Line Made by Walking', into a room of 1960s collage and bricolage sculpture. Anwar Jalal Shemza's 'Chessmen One', 1961, is a revelation of Islamic modernism. I love the Paolzzi, as always, and Burra's drawing-cum-photomontage 'Keep Your Head'. I didn't even know he made them. Through a doorway, Henry Moore's shiny, domed 'Maquette for Helmet Head' pulls me towards it like a magnet. I thought I knew Henry Moore, but this whole room is a physical rediscovery for me. Over the years his work has become flattened in my mind, by successive 2D reproductions and sketches. This is a powerful space to be in though, with all its myriad angles, air resonant with form and the ehoes of vintage synths from next door. Modern British sculpture might have it's associations with Britten at al but perhaps it should be displayed more frequently with early electronica in the background.

The 808 and 303 tribute room runs parallel to this one and features the two legendary synths on plinths at opposite ends of the room. They're not plugged in, but the plinths have movement sensors on them. Someone tells me that every time you pass one you add or remove a layer to the track which loops through the speakers on the floor. I never work out the exact configuration. Around the room are black and white photographs by Chris Shaw, one of the few British contemporary photographs still making good work in this tradition. Each is scrawled with their own quirky title in black pen. They're juxtaposed with prints from 1960s Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, whose impressionistic blurs of Tokyo nightlife have enjoyed a significant reappraisal in the West of late. The gritty aesthetics complement the raw sound. 

By this point we’re gasping for a drink so we decide to try my luck at the slightly quieter downstairs bar. There's still a huge queue outside, trickling through a barrier of security guards in ones and twos. One half of The Blessings (as I discover when I speak to him later) is playing some pretty tasty off-kilter beats next to the bar. He gets a few people moving, but it's hard to galvanize a dance floor bisected by a 15min drinks queue. Unable to take our drinks anywhere else, we elect to re-watch the Dazed videos in one of the screening rooms.

Back upstairs, we head in search of Melancholy. I find myself in Martin Creed's light room, which for some reason has a crowd barrier running through it. Taking the right fork I find myself channelled, in slowly strobing light, towards a closed door in the next room. A group of people is sitting in my way. I step over them to duck out of the channel. Later on I find out that this was the queue. Apparently, at it's peak people were waiting for Creed's light to go out and trying to push into the queue, only to be caught in the act as it flicked back on again. 

The last stop on the installation trail is Rustie, in the Turner wing. I find it by accident, following the sound while misdirecting a friend towards the 808 tribute room. It's the best sound I've heard all night. It draws us down the corridor lined with Turners and into a room with two speakers. There are no beats; only resonance, high and bright. People are sitting, walking around or staring intently into oily sunbursts and thickly textured rural scenes. When sound in our room fades, I realise it's getting louder in the opposite alcove. We migrate accross. There are another two speakers here. A group dressed in black, some with beards, join me. I head back into the corridor between the rooms, sound washing between them, and watch 'Hannibal Crossing the Alps'. The music is reaching euphoric cresendo. In the room I've just come from, a large man with a serious beard throws his arms into the air in semi-ironic elation. He's framed by a huge golden, greeny-brown painting. It's beautiful. We keep chasing the sound down the corridor. It's 10 channels in total, split between 5 rooms, in and out of which we wheel and glide. I could spend all night here, but it's 9 now and time for the main event: Jeremy Deller's Acid Brass Band. We head back to the main hall in anticipation.

Halfway towards the front we hit a wall of people and pause to drink newly acquired ciders, which we’ve now realised are cheaper than beer. It's as crowded now as it was at the start. Eventually, a figure in baby blue suit jacket pops up onstage, folllowed by another, and another. All carrying shiny brass instruments. The crowd whoops and cheers. As they strike up, we start to dance. We've been waiting all night for the opportunity. On the grand stone walls around us, scenes of dancing crowds in warehouses strobe and flicker. The people around us are fairly static, so we form a chain and start snaking towards the front. Reaching a impasse by a roped off artwork we stop and introduce ourselves to the people who's space we've invaded.  They're much more lively. It's all smile and grins as we groove through the set. The band are clearly having fun too, especially the conductor, whose manic grin and enthusiasm remind me of that guy who always climbs up on the speakers at the front to really let loose. 

When the set ends someone near us starts a joky chant of "One More Tune!" But it's all over. We drift out of the cavernous hall, out onto the grand steps, littered with people smoking and donning coats. Out into the night. The iron railings around the building are plastered with bikes, strapped on at jaunty angles. Waving farewell to my friends I weave through groups of fellow ravers over the river and back towards the station. I catch the eye of the guy boarding my train with me and we sit next to each other to loudly compare notes on the night. It feels like 5am in the morning. 

I get home and go to bed with the ghosts of artworks flashing on my retinas in the usual place of hi-hats and synths echoing in my ears. It’s 11pm. 

Chaps Choir at Union Chapel with Choir With No Name, 17 December 2013

Ever wondered what 50 blokes singing a Georgian Wassling song sounds like? Well now you know! 

A huge thank you to the wonderful Choir With No Name who invited us to support their Christmas Extravaganza at Union Chapel on Tuesday.What an incredible experience and what a brilliant project to be involved in. The choir - which now counts chapters in Birmingham and Liverpool, as well as North and South London - has been established to provide people on the edge of society with all the positive support that I've discovered since joining Chaps. It's an exciting, positive project to feel involved in, it provides a strong sense of community and it gives you the simple, uplifting pleasure of singing in harmony with other people. The Choir With No Name also share a meal after every practice, which is a lovely idea. 

Between the two London and Birmingham choirs we were treated to a very merry medley of Christmas classics, tender carols and even a festive version of The Specials. There was humour, There were brave soloists and there was plenty of tinsel. Before the finale we were introduced to Suzanne, who became homeless after struggling with her drinking but has now been with Choir With No Name for five months. She said, “the more I think about going there, and concentrating and doing what I’ve got to do, the better I feel. So the best thing I ever did is join the choir”. Here's their website where you can sign up to support the charity as a 'groupie': www.choirwithnoname.org 

I volunteered to run the Chaps Choir social media for the evening and was over-whelmed by all the Chappreciation from the audience. I think we can now count Janet Street Porter as a fan, as well as quite a few other women who apparently want to grow beards so that they can join us. Not bad for our second concert! Here's the Storify:

Chaps Choir début at the Union Chapel, Islington

 The performance begins with a huddle of men in dark t-shirts, not-so-subtly assembling near a platform that might be a stage. There’s definitely a bulk to the group, but I’d like to think that we carry a certain nonchalance which will take our assembled guests off-guard. With a huge grin on his face, ready to burst from the excitement of the last few months, Dom raises his arm and mouths to the count of *one, two, three, four….*  

“ALLE” we chant, swinging our fists in a jovial, encouraging fashion, bringing conversation around the room to a stand-still. “ALLE” we repeat, bumping, shuffling and drifting our ways towards our prearranged positions in front of the stage. “ALLE” we boom, growing more confident now that this is actually happening. “A-LE” we echo, settling into position: a large group of tenors to the left, a thin slice of baritones in the centre and a gruff wedge of basses to the right.

Here we are, Chaps Choir, on the cusp of our first performance less than three months after we all first met. It's a début at the Union Chapel no less, albeit in the second room. The main space is currently being filled by rapturous applause for a pint-sized youth choir in red t-shirts.

I think it’s fair to say there’s some apprehension amongst the Chaps at this point. Many of us have never sung in public before - at least not whilst sober or in tune – a fair few have only made it to about half the sessions and, although no-one had said it out loud, the pre-show rehearsal was pretty awful. To top it all off, those kids next door are sounding pretty good. Now we have a room full of 150 friends, family, wives and girlfriends who have turned up to see what we've been up to every Thursday night since April. I've even invited some friendly clients along. Oh, and there are members of at least two other choirs here to support us. No pressure then.

We can’t really mess-up the Finnish reindeer chant so long as we all keep a close eye on Dom, our beat-boxing choirmaster. It‘s a nice number to warm up with and we’re re-assured by the surge of applause that greets its final notes. We can do it! We are doing it! Huzzah!

The real challenge is the first lyrical song of the set, a harmonized version of The Logical Song by Supertramp (yes, Supertramp). If you don’t know it (where were you in 1979?), the verses are essentially lists of four syllable words that end in –cal, -ble and –ful; all easily confused and bloody difficult to remember. We also have the task of expressing the increasingly unhappy sentiment of the song’s lyrics, from the gentle a optimism of youth to the crushing disaffection of adulthood - all followed by a breathless ahhhhhhh--ah-ahh-ahhhhh-ah-ah-ahhh in the chorus.

As we hit the second verse I realise that we sound better than we've ever sounded before. Something’s just clicked. I can feel the resonance of our voices working together in harmony. We've nailed it. The crowd goes wild. This feels great. We ease into How Soon is Now with confidence, slowly building the energy as we creep towards the angst-ridden chorus... “I am hu-man and I need to be lo-o-o-v-ed” (Chaps can have feelings too, you know).

There’s a moment in the audience participation section of Cry Me A River when I question the wisdom of inviting members of two other choirs to watch us, but we pull it back with a powerful and very male sounding ending. The final triumph is a gentle but powerful rendition of The Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields, prompting a guffaw of giggles from the largely female audience after the first line - “The book of love is long and boring” - but rapturous applause to follow. We've done it!

There are cries for more, which we don’t have, so we sing Logical Song again with gusto: “Please tell me who I a-a-a-m, who I a-a-a-m”. More applause. We shake hands, we congratulate, we slap each other on the back. Some of us even hug. My wife (aka my greatest critic) who has banned me from singing in the house, tells me that we sounded brilliant.

We all arrived at Chaps in different ways, some through MeetUps or Facebook, a few through other choirs and many just through word of mouth. When we first croaked, clapped and squawked our way through Under the Bridge, I don’t think many of us imagined that we’d be performing to an audience by this point, but we did all enjoy the experience from the get-go.

I’m usually skeptical about jumping onto the latest bandwagon (choirs were so 2011 aren't they? Gareth Malone and all that), but for someone who doesn't know how to control his vocal chords the idea of learning in a safe environment (a huddle of other blokes behind whom I could hide if things went wrong) was very appealing. The revelation that everyone was so friendly and keen to talk about the challenges and rewards of singing together made it a highly enjoyable social-bonding experience. The fact that The Craft Beer Company has a pub on the other side of the road was the icing on the cake.

None of it would have been possible without the energy, enthusiasm and optimistic ambition of our choirmaster Mr Dominic Stichbury. I went to school with Dom many years ago and used to play in bands with his little brother Jim, so it’s been a real pleasure to reconnect with him at a point at which he’s realising his potential to make things like this happen. I hope we've done him proud and eventually go on to sound like a choir who people might like to listen to.

The week of our first performance I saw two reports in the news that affirmed my own positive experience. The first, reported in The Independent, showed that singing in harmony with others actually has a positive effect on our heart rate in a similar way to yoga breathing. Having tried both, I have to say that singing is much more fun, so that’s good news. The second, from a group called Vocality claims that bringing people together to sing can foster cohesion and better understanding in divided communities. Chaps, as you might expect,  is mostly made up mostly of middle-class media types at the moment, but it is open to all and it's definitely brought us together. Now if only there were enough choirmasters to go round...

Chaps Choir is open to all with a Y chromosome. It reconvenes in Islington to learn a new batch of songs from September 19. If you’d like to give it a go before then, Dom’s also running day-long workshop with the Chaps on 17 August. For more info visit chapschoir.wordpress.com

Eliane Radigue: Spiritual Resonance

St Stephen Walbrook

I’ve been spending a surprising amount of time lately sitting in churches, in a praying position. Not the result of a sudden calling to mend my agnostic ways, but for a series of concerts dedicated to the music of the little-known pioneering French composer Eliane Radigue.

Aged 80 this year, Eliane is enjoying her first major retrospective in the UK thanks to the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin organisation Sound and Music. It began last week with an evening of instrumental works at Christ Church Spitalfields, the second of which was last night, and continues through her on-going electronic compositions at St Stephens Walbrook. Having been to three of the six concerts to date, I now feel like I have enough of a grasp of her music to write about it.

First though, some background. After working as an assistant to the pioneers of musique concrète Eliane began composing music with tape loops and feedback during the 1960s. She was later introduced to synthesisers, to which she took and initial dislike, before discovering an affinity with ‘a tiny field of sound’ that interested her on an ARP500. As she explains in her recent Guardian interview “I just dug under its skin” and continued to do so, for many years.

Eliane Radigue

I attended one of the playbacks of these classic works at St Stephen Walbrook last week. Eliane’s music, extremely minimal and delicate, displays all the signs of someone that’s been playing with tape loops.  It repeats notes in gentle oscillations with slight and gradual shifts in tone and the occasional bright harmonic, often accompanied by feedback, hum or crackle. It’s hypnotic in its ebb and flow and you soon find yourself absorbed, eyes closed and head down. The position of Henry Moore’s magnificent circular altar of travertine marble under the centre of the dome lends to sitting in the round, so when you open your eyes in the spaces left by softer sounds, you realise that you’re sitting in a room full of others also entranced, reflecting, absorbed. As if praying. You leave with a heighten sense of the world outside.

In recent years Eliane has stepped away from the synth to focus on un-scored collaborations with a select group of instrumentalists, and it’s these that have been showcased at Christ Church as part of Spitalfields Summer Music Festival. Last week I saw the Lappetites perform Elemental II and the world premiere of Occam I, a piece for solo harp played by Rhodri Davies. The former was very close to her synth work, although perhaps with more texture.  In the latter, Davis uses the sawing motion of a bow to create buzzing pulses offset by occasional and increasing harmonic plucks. Sadly I missed the translation of Elemental II for bass guitar that followed, which I’m told resonated through the bodies of those present.

It’s in last night’s Naldjorlak trilogy that Eliane’s instrumental work seems best described though. Pt.I played by cellist Charles Curtis has similarities with the bowing of Occam I – a slow, oscillating sawing, like a chair being scrapped around your head, although altogether more brooding. Offset by harmonics and the scraping of the bow, it’s almost like feedback on an electric guitar. The work rises in pitch, imperceptibly at first, and by the end Curtis is playing the hyper taught string-not-to-be-played below the bridge, creating a sound not unlike the echo of braking and screeching traffic or electric trains, at once both gentle and piercing. It blends with the traffic noise of engines and sirens on Commercial Road outside and by its end you feel a weight lift.

Eliane Radigue, Bruno Martinez, Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson

Pt. II sees a tone we’ve not yet heard, that of Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez’s basset horns. Edging gently into our perception like all of Eliane’s work the notes come through with increasing force.  Sitting opposite each other, the push and pull of their alternate circular breathing begins reminiscent of a didgeridoo, but morphs into pulses of a spaceship force field or slow motion lightsabre. Towards the latter half it tails off to the sound of fingers on the rims of glass or the warm evening sun spilling through lead lined windows into the whitewash ceiling of Christ Church. I’m reminded of yoga sound bath meditation, before the piece tails off into a quiet aesthetic that seems to prefigure early 90s ambient goa music. While the meditative influence of Eliane’s Buddhist faith is apparent throughout her music, this is one of the few places it seems to reflect any existing traditions.

Pt. III combines its preceding parts to great effect in a way that I’ll leave to your imagination rather than fail to describe. A long meditative silence followed the last note before the eventual rapturous applause. I’m told that Naldjorlak is due to be recorded in Paris soon, but if you want to catch Eliane’s electronic works in London they’re at St Stephen’s Walbrook until Saturday 26 June. I also recommend visiting her installation works played through Sonic Beds designed by Lappetite Kaffe Matthews in Waterman’s, Brentford and the Rich Mix, Shoreditch. They’re like an aural sonic body massage.

For tickets and info visit: www.soundandmusic.com