I attended the first day of yet another Forest of Sounds.
Performing were
May 3, in cooperation with O!Vācija
19:00 Hauschka (Karaoke Kalk / Fat Cat)
20:00 Altera Veritas performs Līga Celma’s work Waves
21:00 Marcus Schmickler & Farn (A-Musik, Editions Mego, Karaoke Kalk)
22:00 PuseH PuseW
23:00 Laub (Kitty-Yo, AGF Producktion)
There was also an anime festival taking place in Riga, but I missed the bus and didn’t make it to “Tales from Earthsea” by the younger Miyazaki, based on the book by Ursula Le Guin (a pretty good book, by the way). There were no tickets left for the next bus (I knew that would happen, but my punk and anarchist friend muddled my head, so I didn’t buy a ticket in advance).
The concert was once again held in old factory workshops, though not the same ones as before on Andrejsala, but near the Grīvas mēbeles furniture store. As it turned out, it wasn’t even merely near it—I was actually in the same building as the store, and you could even see furniture through the glass doors at the entrance.
We arrived after the concert had already begun, but it had been delayed by an hour, so we caught the first performer too. We did have to stand for a while, though, because all the chairs (ordinary ones this time, not cardboard stools) were occupied by the audience. Hauschka is a man who dissects a piano, hanging nuts from its strings and sticking them on with tape. Judging by peer-to-peer networks and the festival brochure, he is famous and influential. It was amusing to watch alternative types and indie kids sitting politely on chairs in front of an intellectual-looking man at a grand piano and listening attentively. They even applauded very loudly; Volker Bertelmann came back for an encore and played a cheerful little piece without any preparation.
To be honest, his music evokes little emotion in me. As far as I’m concerned, he didn’t modify the piano radically enough: it merely sounded battered and slightly broken, rather than like a different instrument altogether. It seems rather dull to me, and I don’t understand the hype around it. Volker himself, meanwhile, walked around the hall between other people’s sets, talking to the audience and smiling kindly.
After Volker, Latvian performer Gunta Davidčuka performed an avant-garde vocal work almost a cappella, with small electronic flourishes, composed by Līga Celma. Gunta’s voice is piercing and pure, one might say slightly operatic. I don’t know any details about the women, but judging by the booklet, both are also known for work in popular genres. The piece sounded like “Beauty and the Beast.” Gunta would sustain one or more long vowel sounds at great volume and intensity, then fade away with sounds like those made by the dying. She was answered by an uneven, low-roaring electronic bass at moderate volume, while the performer quietly clicked her tongue as if she were suffocating. The piece itself, entitled “I Am a Lonely Lighthouse,” was composed by Līga specifically for Gunta’s voice. Overall, excellent, though unfortunately very short—barely 15 minutes. Then again, I would have worried about Gunta’s vocal cords if she had sung with such intensity for long. Curiously, unlike the other sets, the sound was very acoustically sparse, creating a strange sense of insufficiency. This was more than compensated for, however, by the vocalist’s powerful voice.
Next came the well-known gentleman Marcus Schmickler, accompanied by visual artist Farn, who supplied video for three screens. We were sitting comfortably and could see all three very well. The sound was dense, highly structured noise at great volume, clearly reminiscent in character of the “wall of sound” from Marcus’s project Pluramon—oh, Schmickler certainly has a fondness for that sort of thing. The video was more interesting: white dots resembling both stars and flies pulsated, multiplied, circled, and faded in time with the music. For the first ten or twenty minutes, I watched without looking away, trying to understand the ideas and their software implementation; it was interesting. Then Schmickler really turned up the heat, so much so that an elderly gentleman sitting nearby fled. Then many glamorous party girls fled as well, while those who remained plugged their ears against the unbearable volume. What I cannot understand is why you would torture people with such loudness if the essence of your music is not mindless noise but something more sophisticated.
Then something thoroughly unpleasant began, at least for me personally. It turned out that spotlights stood along the edges of the screens, and they began flashing and blinding me—as a computer freak who has spent his whole life sitting in a dark room, I find such special effects extremely unpleasant, so I closed my eyes and barely saw the dots turn into stripes and triangles.
My fake punk and anarchist friend, meanwhile, who had slept through the entire set by Ural Owl that I had enjoyed at the previous Forest of Sounds, was thrilled by Marcus and was glad he hadn’t stimulated himself with active substances —otherwise he would have had a hard time. Incidentally, the elderly gentleman’s companion, a middle-aged woman, sat through the entire set, though she covered her ears with her hands and her eyes with a newspaper.
After Marcus came Latvian musicians working in the psych-folk vein—PuseH PuseW. The resemblance to bands such as Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Vibracathedral Orchestra was hard to miss, but overall the music was up to scratch, if not for the excessive “cement mixer” bass and the general smearing of the sound into a low-quality drone. I am entirely in favor of “plasma” and “fluidity,” rather than eternally slick, bright sound, but when all the music sounds the same, in the style of “a bubbling cauldron of bass and non-aggressive noise,” it becomes tiring. It was more fun when PuseH PuseW brought out instruments such as a saxophone, flute, and bells and plinked them into the microphones. This entire ritual was accompanied by an intriguing video —a magnified mouth and tongue twisting in different directions. What impressed the audience most, however, was the live performance: a woman in a black cloak, with the hairstyle of a Greek statue, held a paper rose in her mouth and made graceful, supple movements in time with the flowing music. Halfway through the performance, she threw off the cloak and remained naked. Her body was covered in white makeup, and she looked less like a human being than an animated statue of the kind often encountered in European capitals. Overall, the performance was excellent, entirely world-class, whatever that mythical standard may be.
The final act was the well-known duo Laub. I only learned about them from someone’s LiveJournal post, but I couldn’t find who wrote it just now. Laub consists of the woman Antye Greie-Fuchs, also known as AGF, and the man Von Jotka. Here I am expressing myself just as idiotically as my favorite reviewers at walkabout_d. The musicians stood behind an aluminum table with Apple laptops and performed clicks-and-cuts pop, bright and good-natured, though quite noisy in places. Antye can unleash the avant-garde beast as well, since she has plenty of collaborations with Japanese artists and other champions of complicated music. This time, however, we ended the night with sweet lullaby pop. I must say that at first the audience reacted coolly and did not even respond when the musicians tried asking them something. Right at the beginning, Antye asked whether they could start, trying to make out whether there were many people in the hall, but everyone was huddled in the corners and couldn’t be seen. I tried to tell her YES, but my squeak sounded quiet and silly :-) The musicians were clearly offended by the chilly reception and left the stage very quickly, plainly unimpressed by the Baltic temperament. At that point our lovely alternative crowd showed some persistence and once again burst into furious applause. The musicians cheered up, came back out, and played what were, to my taste, the best pieces of the set—long, meditative ambient noise pieces with small flourishes of whispering, one old and one new. Antye said they had not performed the old one live for a long time. Perhaps they decided to play it after seeing how gratefully the audience had swallowed even Marcus Schmickler’s harsh noise. At the end, Antye thanked us for the warm reception and said that this was their first time in Latvia.
Afterward, I walked for a while in the light rain and hailed a taxi, which carried me off to distant lands—all the way beyond the Rīga sign. The driver followed his GPS and asked me for directions in case there was a shorter route. But there wasn’t. And he had no change either, so I had to scrape together everything I had, even the lat coin with the snowman.
This is the only picture in the post because my camera battery died completely, and I only ordered a new one today.
Overall—not bad, but nobody inspired genuine delight. We’re waiting for Friday and Saturday, when Zavoloka, Colleen, Six Organs Of Admittance, The Bug and even superstar nu-folk diva Marissa Nadler will be playing.