Follow

Share

Home
News
News – UK
Reviews
Articles
Newsletter
Latest Jobs+Opportunities
Upcoming Events
Upcoming Deadlines
Festival Calendar
Add a Listing
Register
Log In

News
News – UK
Reviews
Articles
Newsletter
Latest Jobs and Opportunities
Upcoming Events
Upcoming Deadlines
Festival Calendar
Add a Listing
 Register
Log In

Follow

Share

Retro Disco performing at Music Current (Photo: Dublin Sound Lab)

Adventures in the New Music Fringe

The Music Current contemporary music festival – which took place last week in Dublin – has a radicalism in curation tha
can give listeners a real feeling of discovery. Adrian Smith reviews the four days and asks: can it grow its 'fringe' status in
the Irish new music scene?

Adrian Smith

Even in the outré world of contemporary music there is such a thing as ‘mainstream’ and ‘fringe’, ‘established’ and
‘underground’. It is the latter genre that Music Current has tended to specialise in, featuring smaller ensembles, more
intimate spaces and a real hands-on approach to collaboration between composers, performers and technicians. This
method of working has been the festival’s major strength and is the vision of the festival director, Dublin Sound Lab’s
Fergal Dowling, who has consistently uncovered some of the most interesting up-to-the-minute international trends in
European and US new music. Now in its fourth year, this year’s festival (10–13 April) was expanded from a three-day to a
four-day event and featured three major groups from the European contemporary music scene: the Swiss-based groups
Ensemble Tzara and Retro Disco as well as members of the experimental music collective Stock11.

Much more so than New Music Dublin, the exciting thing about Music Current is that it actively courts a radicalism that
can go either way. Whereas much of the music that features in New Music Dublin has already been ‘proofed’ by
audiences in Europe long before it ever reached Dublin, most of Music Current’s repertoire still has the feeling of
discovery about it. The festival therefore has a buzz that the larger festival lacks. Of course, it goes without saying that
not all of these experiments are necessarily successful, and some efforts land well wide of the mark, but if the risks are
greater, so too are the potential rewards.

Day 1: 10 April

Irish panorama

The first concert of this year’s Music Current may seem an exception to the trendy ethos but although he’s an established
figure on the Irish scene, Frank Corcoran is probably not the first composer one thinks of when it comes to electronic
music. Therefore this presentation of three of his tape ‘masterworks’ was something of a curiosity in itself and gave a
glimpse of this little known aspect of his work.

The first piece, (1999), was based on a selection of ‘God-utterances’ extracted from two millennia of
Irish religious sayings. These short fragments were enunciated by three voices, one of which was clearly Corcoran
himself, while the other two were obviously given lessons in how to copy the distinctive inflections of Corcoran’s own
speaking voice. It started well with the three voices in a tightly controlled canon that gradually sped up producing an
attractive polyrhythmic texture. The following sections blended these fragments with recordings of recognisable sounds –
fog horns, water, birdsong, Tridentine mass, a bodhrán, old women keening, snatches of lilting, etc. – to produce a
panorama of Irish religious and cultural expression.

Although it started violently with a scream, (2004) maintained the focus on language, this time on
phonemes featuring recordings of similar words and syllables in different languages layered over each other. Most of this
was quite interesting although Corcoran’s obsession with elongating syllables meant that it was impossible not to hear
‘how now brown cow’ coming through the texture at one stage. Overall it was a more sophisticated piece than
but it was far too long and the inclusion of choruses of uilleann pipes and screaming seemed extraneous.

The third piece, (1997), a continuation of the composer’s Mad Sweeney series, was an essay in the
familiar seascape subgenre of electroacoustic composition. This was the least successful of the three although there was
one very striking passage in the second section which seemed to be based on whale sound or underwater nautical sounds.
After this it was unfortunately back to the waves and seagulls which bookended this also quite lengthy piece.

An hour-long concert of tape pieces by a single composer is a curatorial experiment worthy of Mad Sweeney himself, but
it managed to get a very healthy turnout and had some good things in it. That said, the composer might be more likely to
win over listeners to his cause if he didn’t always have to over-egg the pudding with his programme notes. Consider the
following description of :

It is both abstract opera and theatre of suffering; the torture-chamber, beside the pipers’ sound-ocean.
is my ‘uttering’, human ‘muttering’, beauty and horror. There is a musical growth out of the phonemes.
Active and passive suffering, fascinating and terrible, flow from my icon of the scream, Gabriel Rosenstock’s
lovely Haiku whose original version in Irish and my translations (but remember…) into inadequate English
and German.

Unlike some, I don’t have an unhealthy obsession with programme notes, but this kind of vainglorious blarney seems
more designed to bamboozle the hapless new music punter and is quite likely to put off potentially sympathetic listeners.
A more restrained, and dare I say, modestly informative approach might better serve his music.

Black & Decker aesthetic

The later concert that evening featured three members of the Stock11 collective: Hannes Seidl, Michael Maierhof and
Christoph Ogiermann. It would be great to be able to write that this concert had something genuinely ‘new’ in it, but for
me it felt like a manifestation of Adorno’s concept of ‘the aging of new music’. The concert had an almost nostalgic tone
and exhibited an overreliance on the same jaded strategies that went out of fashion decades ago.

A particularly choice example would be Ogiermann’s , an extended improvisation of scratching on the

violin delivered with the typical swaying gestures of the Romantic violinist, a parody that Mauricio Kagel had exhausted
back in the 1970s.

There was also a video piece by two of the collective’s members Sebastian Berweck and Dick Raaijmakers, that
documented – naturally in high definition – the destruction of microphones with an assortment of vices, drills and blow-
torches. Presumably, the sound that one heard in the video was recorded by microphones in the process of their own
destruction – hence the indispensable .            
While these pieces at least didn’t take themselves too seriously, Maierhof’s illustrated the collective’s more
self-indulgent aspects. It consisted of Maierhof using overpressure bowing on the bridge of the cello to play a live part
that was a half second ahead of a prerecorded tape part consisting of much the same thing. A plastic cup, which appeared
to contain some vibrating motor, was pressed against the fingerboard in various ways, changing the timbre so that it
sounded like a variety of different power tools, thus forming a continuation of the Black & Decker aesthetic from
earlier. This went on for over ten minutes and illustrated the kind of proud one-dimensionality that characterised virtually
all the pieces in this concert. 

Perhaps it all goes down well in the safe spaces of Darmstadt and Donaueschingen but to listeners familiar
with the Fluxus movements of the 60s, Kagel in the 70s or even the far more imaginative antics of Johannes Kreidler
these days, this all seemed very routine. 

Day 2: 11 April

Brittle puppets

What made Ensemble Tzara’s concert an infinitely better experience than the previous evening was the realisation that
such ‘aged’ new music gestures needed to be given a radically new context in order to reanimate them. In the case of
American composer Steven Takasugi’s (2009–15), this came in the form of a whimsical and darkly comic
theatricality inspired by the amusement parks of Coney Island at the turn of the 20th century.

This tone was set right from the beginning of the piece where the performers, after settling themselves, turned to the
audience one-by-one and pulled a forced smile. They then proceeded to plough through blocks of hectic pointillistic
textures made up of fragmented piano gestures, extended techniques and crackling noises – in other words, fairly standard
new music kitsch. Much of this was ‘mimed’ in that the music came from the accompanying tape part and not the
musicians themselves despite their physical gestures – an illusion that was also a feature of Stefan Prins’
cycle at last year’s festival. However, Takasugi’s exploration of this was far more engrossing and animated.

For much of the first section the double-bass player in the centre of the ensemble maintained a disturbingly fixed grin and
acted as the ventriloquist’s ‘dummy’, choking out a forced stuttering laugh. A variety of hysterical poses were shared
around between the members of the ensemble so that the performance resembled a deadly precise, surreal and slightly
decrepit freak show that transformed the performers into brittle puppets, subservient to the whims of the music.

The piece was also very well constructed in terms of pacing. The use of long silences between sudden bursts of activity
gave each block a hard-edged definition, and managed to negotiate a considerable range over its 50-minute
duration ensuring that the piece never succumbed to being merely a one-dimensional exploration of an interesting
concept. The theatrical and musical abilities of the charismatic Ensemble Tzara delivered a terrifically
engaging performance.
Day 3: 12 April

A word for that

Three of the members of Ensemble Tzara – Moritz Müllenbach on cello, Simone Keller on piano/synthesiser and Samuel
Stoll on French horn – comprise the experimental trio Retro Disco from Switzerland, a group whose eclectic tastes recall
everything from Dadaist theatrics to the synth-drenched style of the 1980s. 

The first piece, Swiss composer Jannik Giger’s (2016), was a conceptual dialogue between snippets of historical
recordings of Igor Stravinsky in rehearsal and the musicians from Retro Disco. Some of this was mildly amusing such as
when the trio played in lockstep with Stravinsky’s ‘dum, dum, dum…’ but the concept soon exhausted itself and tended
to resemble a medley of unrelated fragments.

Despite the fact that David Sontòn Caflisch’s ultra low-key (2013) barely raised above for
its entire duration, its material somehow managed to produce a strangely compelling experience. This consisted of
endless circling around a limited number of sine-tones in the middle register of the synthesiser counterpointed against a
more expanded range of pitches on the cello while the French horn added a variety of growling and breathy extended
techniques. The piece had a fascinating tension despite never leaving the same key.

Robert Ashley’s (2012) was based on the advertisements for books of contemporary American
popular literature translated into the Romansh language that is spoken in regions of south-eastern Switzerland. Each of
the performers took turns at walking up to the microphone to declaim the texts in the manner of a fiery political rally
while the other two accompanied with drone-like textures. There wasn’t much more to it than this and it was tough going
for the work’s 25 minutes duration. While there was some theatre, this was solely down to the performers’ committed
recitations rather than the material itself.

Karen Power’s (2019), a Retro Disco commission and world premiere, mixed recordings of
nature sounds – wind, the sea, waves breaking, water droplets – with what seemed to be improvised responses from the
trio. While I was initially sceptical that this would turn out as another ‘seascape’ piece, it gradually won me over as the
material emanating from the trio blended well with the natural recordings and the meditation brought to mind associative
sonic images such as a boat rubbing against a pier or a rope stretching with the pull of the current.

Eoin Callery’s (2017) was another low-key affair that began with slow melodic lines on
the cello and horn generating some mildly dissonant clashes between them while the synth provided a very retro
backdrop. It developed into a gently pulsing texture later in the piece producing a quite beautiful ambience. Perhaps
because of the synthesiser part, of all the pieces it best fitted what one might imagine as the retro disco aesthetic, being
both contemporary and nostalgic at the same time.
 samuel  stoll

Mixed  Blessings,  Indiana  by  Robert  Ashley

Day 4: 13 April

Blowing into the f-hole

An annual part of the Music Current festival is an open call for composers to submit work to be played by the featured
ensemble. The final concert showcased eight such works submitted by both Irish and international composers.

Maya Verlaak’s highly conceptual (2018) asked the performers to reconstruct a pre-composed piece for
harpsichord that had been deleted. From various pieces of ‘evidence’, including a written analysis and a melody derived
from the ‘natural harmonics’ of the original piece, the performers attempted to regenerate the work. Retro Disco’s
examination of the evidence led them in a very 1980s video game direction with the three performers using hand-held
controllers to manipulate live electronics while walking constantly around the stage. The piece did seem to be genuinely
‘fun’, and it would be interesting to compare the results of this puzzle with other ensembles’ interpretations to see how
close or far apart the musical results happen to be.

Luke Smyth’s provided a soundtrack to a video projection showing a series of

hyperbullet chess matches on the lichess.org player interface. The music coming from the ensemble did correlate, more or
less, with the movements of the chess pieces on the screen but these felt like unremarkable improvisations and despite
possessing a certain degree of humour, the piece suffered from its singular strategy. After a few minutes my
attention resigned.

In contrast David Bremner’s was an example of a piece that managed to stay in the one place and yet remain
interesting. The piece was a continuation of the composer’s ‘application of fractal, generative techniques to melodic
contour’ that was also a feature of his premiered by the Crash Ensemble at New Music Dublin last
month. did share the same kind of microscopic intricacy, but the result was far more immediate and less
opaque. For much of the piece, the cello kept circling around an eerily expressive melody confined within a limited pitch
range in the middle register while the horn produced a variety of gurgling sounds. In the background, the synth entered at
various intervals with what seemed like low-register chords on a Hammond organ as the composer controlled live
electronics that added additional layers of complexity. The piece was genuinely weird and never lost interest as there was
so much happening in what seemed like a very constricted space.

Continuing the video game theme was Claire Fitch’s (2016) which explored the reactions of the
performers to a video or ‘animated score’ that visually resembled what a game of Tetris or Dig-Dug might look like if
you’d taken some hallucinogenic drugs. The trio engaged in controlled improvisations, based on their reactions to the
visuals and soundtrack, and the changing nature of the projections ensured a variety of quite different sound worlds.

The stand-out piece of this concert for me was Weston Olencki’s (2017–18), a piece constructed in several
quite distinct blocks that possessed a hard-hitting impact when changing from one block to the next. The highlight of the
piece was a lengthy central section where a gloriously luminous chord was sustained through gradually shifting harmonic
and timbral colours. The piece was well-paced structurally and the tape track blended perfectly with the melodicas,
making possible the strange disjuncture between these modest instruments and the big sound.

Seán Ó Dálaigh’s explored the transition between states of noise and tone. The piece was very much
centered around the Korg MS-20 analog synthesiser which according to Ó Dálaigh ‘provides the flow with which all the
musicians interact’. The problem was that the Korg tended to dominate the piece to the point where everything else
seemed merely a decoration. Also, for much of the beginning of the piece the material emanating from the Korg had, for
me at least, the unfortunate association of a petrol lawnmower. The other instruments exerted themselves more strongly
from the midway point onwards, and therefore produced a more engaging overall sound, while the overall flow of the
piece had the sense of a continuum about it that was impressive. At the end of the night, Ó Dálaigh was awarded next
year’s Music Current Festival Commission.

Alessandro Perini’s (2014–19) utilised two metal plates positioned on either side of the stage to produce
resonances from the horn and synth. The actual material – initially long sustained pitches and then mostly clusters on the
synth – wasn’t the most fetching but the resonance aspect of the piece can’t have been helped by the Smock Alley
Theatre’s acoustic, which has the same resonance potential as a shoebox.
The final piece of the night was by Argentinian composer Patricia Martinez who was last year’s awardee of the Music
Current festival commission. Her piece,  had a darkly theatrical element with the starring role given to
horn player Samuel Stoll who walked onstage under the spotlight and began to raise his arms very slowly. As with
Takasugi’s , the impression was not of the performers being in control but rather having to submit to the force of
the music. Around the midway point, the music became quite brutalistic with a pulsing, industrial sounding riff. This led
into a very aggressive section with screaming sounds coming from the horn after which Stoll fell to his knees to offer up
the horn in what seemed like an act of submission. Up until this point the piece was utterly gripping and this dramatic
moment felt like it should have been the climax. The remainder of the piece couldn’t recoup this tension and the cellist
taking up his instrument and blowing into the f-hole near the finish seemed like an afterthought.

Martinez’s piece was a good illustration of a factor that came across very strongly in both of these Retro Disco
performances and that was the manner in which the trio completely gave themselves over to the music no matter what
style they were playing. There was a sense of care and deep love for the work that is one of the hallmarks of the best new
music ensembles and, as such, they were an ideal group for this festival.

Weston  Olencki

for  melodicas  [2017-­18]

Conclusion
This year’s Music Current festival once again proved what an indispensable fixture it is on the Irish contemporary music
calendar. It showcases a range of work that Irish audiences rarely have a chance to experience in such a concentrated
format. While the festival highlight was definitely Takasugi’s , much of the work by younger composers in the
two Retro Disco concerts also greatly impressed and, on balance, the festival managed to get comfortably into the black
in terms of quality.

Although Music Current was generally well attended and audience numbers seemed up on last year, I’m still convinced
that the festival should be attracting full houses for at least some of the gigs. Much of the events would surely appeal to
those in the rock and electronic music scenes as well as those in theatre and other performance-based artforms. Perhaps
there is a need to look beyond the contemporary ‘classical’ community and tap into these constituencies.

Nevertheless, if the new music momentum in Dublin can be maintained going forward, there is the real possibility that
Music Current can develop into a fringe festival to New Music Dublin, presenting lower-budget, riskier ventures in
smaller more offbeat locations. Of course there’s no reason why there can’t be some crossover but as a specialised festiva
with a coherent curatorial aesthetic, Music Current is much better positioned to deliver this kind of music to Irish
audiences. If this crucial distinction can be grasped by those in charge of dispensing the funding, then there is a real
possibility that Music Current will become a serious fixture on the European new music scene. 

Published on 18 April 2019

Sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter to receive our latest news, UK news, reviews, articles, jobs and events.

To add a listing see here. For advertising visit this link.

Related Content
 The Newest of the New: An Interview with
Fergal Dowling of Music Current
Pursuing the latest in contemporary music sounds is key to the focus of Music Current festival, which begins next week
in Dublin. Artistic Director Fergal Dowling spoke to the Journal of Music about the ethos of the event, current trends in
music, and the ensembles performing this year.

Ireland Past, Present and Future?

Marc Gregg
In the second review from our 2018 Northern Ireland Music Writer Mentoring Scheme – supported by the Arts Council o
Northern Ireland – Marc Gregg writes about the Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble's 'Involute' concert, which provided a range
of perspectives on Irishness.

Four Days of Cutting-edge Electronic

Music at 3rd Music Current Festival
Contemporary music festival takes place on 12–14 April at Smock Alley Theatre.
 Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

About / Contact
Add Your Concert
Reviews
Advertise
Listings Help

My Listings
My Account

Newsletter
Mentoring Schemes
© The Journal of Music, 2000—2018