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

themilkman on Apr 22nd 2010 12:39 am

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). Continue Reading »

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