Issue 87 / April 2018

REVIEWS
100 Demons (Keith Ainsworth / ark images.co.uk) Oliver Coates (Keith Ainsworth / ark images.co.uk)
100 Demons
+ Vessel
+ Oliver Coates
Manchester Collective @ IWF Substation –
02/03
Conditions are Siberian outside Invisible Wind Factory,
but the world premiere of Daniel Elms’ 100 Demons is enough
of a pull for the crowd to opt to battle the elements and make
sure they’re present. In fact, tonight’s show draws the biggest
crowd of any show by Manchester Collective in Liverpool, in a
programme designed to explore the relationship between live
strings and electronics. Unfortunately, Elms himself isn’t present
as blizzard conditions in Yorkshire mean he isn’t able to hear his
new composition live for the first time.
There is a perceived wisdom in football about players who
come out of the tunnel wearing gloves, and I’m concerned to see
some members of the Collective appear on stage wearing woolly
hats, but any such anxieties are immediately dissipated in the
electric tension.
The first set showcases new material from VESSEL.
The Bristolian electronic maverick, real name Sebastian
Gainsborough, recently scored the trailer for Park Chan-Wook’s
award-winning film, The Handmaiden. This is the first chance to
hear material from Vessel’s forthcoming album, Queen Of Golden
Dogs. What we hear tonight hints at new directions since his
2014 album Punish, Honey. Where that record had an intense,
hermetic interiority, using homemade instruments to create an
intangible sound world, the new material feels more expansive,
drawing from a range of musical sources, including chants and
hymns.
It is a dense weave, featuring a fragment of fugue on
piano; a chanson; the chiming bells of a religious ceremony;
even an absurdist harpsichord passage. Each musical gesture
is decomposed, and twisted into something more sinister. The
effect is of a collapsing labyrinth, but Vessel’s touch is always
there guiding us, riding the tremendous momentum of the piece.
The upcoming album promises to be essential listening,
but Vessel’s role here feels ambiguous, as the substance of the
collaboration with the Collective is unclear. The musicians, having
introduced the music, exit the stage, leaving nothing to see.
Whether by accident or design, Gainsborough then plays the
entire set crouched down on the floor, where only those audience
members on the front row can see him. Everybody else is left
looking at an empty stage, in a general air of uncertainty. It would
“It feels almost as if
we are being protected
from the seductive
danger of desire and
consumption, instead
of being exposed to it”
be great to see Vessel performing live with the ensemble, but
perhaps we’ll have to wait for another occasion.
The second set features two works for solo instrument. First
up, the Collective’s Music Director, RAKHI SINGH, performs Steve
Reich’s Violin Phase. This is the most well-known piece of the
evening. An example of ‘Process Music’, the work is scored for
three violin parts, with two pre-recorded, and one playing live.
These musical ‘cells’ are shifted gradually out of sync, creating
new textures and rhythmic complexity. It’s a mesmerising
performance, and a privileged opportunity to see an important
work of the 20th Century played live.
The next work calls for solo cello, and features special guest
OLIVER COATES, who has just completed an international tour
with Radiohead. Industry, a piece for solo cello and distortion
pedal by American composer Michael Gordon, requires a delicate
balance of power and restraint, exploiting the cello’s natural
potential to sustain, with precise finger technique giving way to
sawing bow motions and open chords, as the distortion builds
and builds. Coates demonstrates total mastery of the instrument,
and of the conceptual impetus of the music.
The dialogue of instrument and electronics that emerges
in these works is significant, because it bridges perceived
gaps between academic music, and more popular forms.
This is a polemic that can be traced from Reich and Karlheinz
Stockhausen, through to Paul McCartney’s experiments in
such tracks as Tomorrow Never Knows. All the pieces offer
perspectives into this discourse and underline its continuing
relevance.
The question having been stated, the stage is set for the
evening’s climax: the anticipated premiere of 100 Demons.
Manchester Collective aim to commission one original work per
year, and for 2018 they turned to Daniel Elms. The Hull-born
composer is fresh off the success of Bethia, a work written for
the British Film Institute, to mark the City Of Culture year in his
hometown. Elms has also written for the screen, with his music
featured in such films as Ralph and Library Of Burned Books, as
well as for the TV series Taboo by Ridley Scott and Tom Hardy.
Elms is defiantly political in his writing, and for this latest
piece he has chosen to explore the modern phenomenon of
fake news, of internet conspiracies, and the populist hijacking of
media. 100 Demons achieves this by using a pre-recorded string
quartet that engages with the live performers, blurring the truth
of what we are listening to, as the audience becomes unable to
trust which sounds are real and which are fabricated.
The musical inspiration comes from a Japanese folk story in
which one hundred demons come at night to terrorise a village.
The inhabitants are forced to hide indoors and resort to magic
incantations to protect themselves. Elms uses fragments of these
incantations in the composition, but the most striking feature of
the adaptation, in his hands, is the way that the strings imitate
the playing of traditional Japanese drums.
As is to be expected with a premiere, the creation of the new
work is as challenging for the performers as it is for the audience.
The quartet of players are called on to use their voices as well as
their instruments, in a very demanding piece, to which they give
their all. Rhythmic intensity is the standout quality of the material,
sustaining a powerful tension, with a sense of latency, something
on the verge of taking place.
This is complex music that would reward further listening.
Is the full range of possibility for the de facto octet explored?
Audience members are looking at the speakers, wondering what
unexpected sounds might emerge, but the doppelganger quartet
on the recording are limited in the main to atmospheric thickening
of tension, rather than bold intrusions.
Likewise, as an effect of the brooding insistence on density
of texture, the natural urge of the violin to express itself in melody
is constantly restrained. The jingoistic seductions of propaganda
seem to lend themselves to melody, but that is the element of the
music that has been suppressed as an artistic choice. I’m waiting
for a tune, even a bad one in the mode of Gustav Mahler’s
treatment of banality in music, or a sarcastic development, as of
Sergei Prokofiev’s sonatas.
There are rich possibilities for the ghostly violin in
the speakers to call to the listener with melody, tempting
them outwards, or just to give contour to an exterior that is
undifferentiated. In the absence of such devices, it feels almost as
if we are being protected from the seductive danger of desire and
consumption, instead of being exposed to it.
100 Demons is, however, a detailed and ambitious work, and
one that promises to reveal more of its secrets on a second listen.
Deeper immersion required.
James Davidson
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