Broadcast/Oliver Coates & Anna Meredith/Andrea Parker, Ether Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 22/04/2010

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Posted on Apr 22nd 2010 12:39 am

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Broadcast/Oliver Coates & Anna Meredith/Andrea Parker, Ether Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 22/04/2010

The South Bank’s Ether Festival, now in its ninth edition, has already seen a host of memorable performances this year, with a weekend of events around the work of Edgar Varèse, the premiere of a new piece by Philip Glass and an evening with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio. Invited to take over the Queen Elizabeth Hall on this Wednesday evening were Birmingham’s finest, retro future pop stalwarts Broadcast, who in just a handful of records in well over ten years of existence have time and time again proved to be the most essential band the UK has produced in years.

Laptop and cello were the backbone of cellist Oliver Coates’s opening set, first in extremely minimal form with cello played over an arid and dissonant drone and clusters of distant field recordings (one could spot in turn the ebb and flow of the sea or the threatening pull of gusts of wind, amongst other things). The instrument, in turn bowed or plucked, its strings or body occasionally hit, provided the bulk of the textures, at times developed into small melodic sequences, at others limited to a handful of repeated notes. Things turned much more mechanical with the second, all-laptop based piece, courtesy of Coates’s guest, multi-media artist Anna Meredith, then with both laptop and cello working together. Soon though, the cello was taking centre stage again, but this time in much more distressed form, more akin to wood being painfully sawn than anything remotely melodic at one point, before melting down into much softer brushes. This shift of focus continued throughout, and while the laptop-based pieces, often formed of fragments of acoustic instrumentation laid over monotone beats, supported by Meredith’s visual animations projected on the giant screen at the back, proved interesting, the limitations of the computer as a performance instrument were all too apparent on the mostly empty stage. Combined with the cello, there were some pretty tense moments though, with at the pinnacle of the set, bagpipes, oriental flutes and processed cello blended into a gigantic magma-like noise formation, brining this excellent performance to what seemed like a premature end.

For some time now, Broadcast have partly abandoned the rigid format of conventional song-based sets to freely experiment with electronics and gossamer vocals as they improvised a soundtrack for Winter Sun Wavelengths, a Ghost Box short film, and it is this setting that they presented this evening. There were, at times, echoes of the band’s recent collaboration with Julian House’s Focus Group, but these were brief moments, and often more contextual than fully developed interpretations, the pair opting instead for effective old school electronic experimentations which find more than a passing connection with the Radiophonic Workshop. For all their modern presence, Trisha Keenan and James Cargill are increasingly appearing like the sole dignified heirs of the defunct BBC sound workshop.

Songforms and Story: a fair statement which introduced the more conformist second half of the set, where the vaporous electronics and vocals of the previous sequence were brought back into the more structured Corporeal, before the band headed towards more experimental songs again, close to the loose psychedelic pop of the Focus Group collaboration. Emulating some of the ethereal vocal textures of the first half, notably on Black Cat, rendered particularly acrid by Cargill’s use of an acidic electric guitar, Keenan’s voice was submitted to distortions, echo, filters and flangers, processed into the mix like it was just another instrument. Alternating between new and old material, at times revised to the point of being almost unrecognisable (Lunch Hour Pops), and with the inclusion of rare pieces (notably In Here The World Begins, from their magnificently chaotic Mother Is The Milky Way mini album), their sci-fi pop was ultimately blasted into fragments with a last élan of energy, as Trish obsessively strummed a small string instrument as James was processing the output.

Drafted in at the last minute to flesh out an evening which had lost Micachu & The Shapes to a lingering cloud of volcanic ash over European air space, Andrea Parker played a particularly refined selection of electronic records in the foyer afterwards, harking back to late nineties Autechre and Seefeel at one point and pressing on with fractured electronica for most of her set, of the sort that are currently making her Aperture imprint an exciting new entity on the scene, and bringing this evening of experimental electronic-based music to the most relevant of closings.

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