Tectonics 26

On May 12, 2026 By thelostpenguinIn music, sound designLeave a comment

Once again, we find ourselves in the season to take a walk on the wild side musically, with the return of the annual Tectonics festival to the City Halls (and Old Fruitmarket) in Glasgow. It was a damp and chilly bank holiday weekend, so really ideal weather to be attending and indoor music festival. And given how much of it I always end up spending sitting crosslegged on the floor of the Old Fruitmarket, my raincoat was definitely a welcome companion.

Avant garde tuba playing is not a sentence I ever expected to write, let alone in a complimentary fashion. Yet, Danielle Price’s performance was both lovely and deeply weird. It was, arguably, everything I’d hoped for from a brass focused experimental music piece. (I’ve complained at various points over my years of attending this festival that composers often neglect the brass section when I know from experience just how weird and wonderful are the sounds that a determined and curious brass player can coax out of their instrument when they put their minds to it.) All the gloriously weird internal noises of the tuba were on display here, the fluttering valves, the clicks, creaks and outright bubbling noises, amplified and looped to delightfully weird effect. It was a short set – Price is still working out some of the pieces, and has yet to fully commit to the stage name of Chops – but I knew from the first piece that it was going to be one of my favourites of the weekend.

There’s alway some kind of weird – and often wonderful – sound installation taking place in the Recital Rooms and this year it was a particularly delightful performance. Frederic Le Junter was this year’s artist, and while the chairs were neatly placed around the walls, he encouraged as forwards to watch close up as he set his performance going, constantly tweaking and adjusting both the instruments and the mix on the sound board. There’s something delightfully homemade and improvised about these instruments. At the end of the session I attended, someone asked if the motors were the kind you got for model railway sets, which delighted me somewhat as my own first thought was of the little motors you used to get with LEGO Technic sets. They felt, pleasingly, like they’d been crafted in someone’s shed, not shiny and perfected, but fragile and ever changing as though that were the point. That they could be easily disassembled and reassembled in a different configuration as the need or the artist’s whim took them.

All the pieces in the Saturday night SSO concert performance were interesting, compelling in very different ways. Things Are Against Us was probably my favourite of the pieces, though I can’t say that I liked it – in the sense that I wouldn’t sit down to listen to a recorded version of it – I did enjoy it, in that I found the performance both arresting and compelling. That feels as though it was a bit of a theme for my feelings towards all three pieces in that concert – I really enjoyed the performances even when the ‘musicality’ side of them wasn’t really working for me. (Angélica Castelló’s solo performance didn’t ever seem to live up to it’s own potential, but she was on fire in her collaboration with the SSO, making something intense, lively and wonderful of the piece she provided synths and other electronic weirdness to.) The soloists for all the SSO pieces – though particularly the Saturday night adventures – were particularly good this year, Lore Amenabar Larrañaga’s self designed quarter-tone accordian shenanigans on ‘Minding the Hive’ were particularly pleasingly weird.

Having really enjoyed GBSR Duo’s contribution to Laura Bowler’s piece the night before, I was pretty excited to see them on their own on Sunday afternoon, and they did not disappoint. The stage set was a joyfully chaotic melange of altered and improvised instruments – a deconstructed xylophone, wine bottle percussion, an awful lot of bluetak and clamps – that was apparently inspired by the duo’s own instrument strewn flat. As though we’d been invited to step inside their creative process. I particularly enjoyed the decision to have them both mic-ed up so that we could hear them counting time, foregrounding the need to communicate constantly to keep a piece as complex and changeable as this one from spinning out into dissonance. The interplay of irrationality and ritual, the way that routine and reassurance can descend into compulsion and superstition. (As a radio operator this is particularly interesting to me, as I know that I give more counts and cues to presenters and producers when either I or they are stressed. There’s a lot that exists outside your control in a live environment and those – often unconscious – acts of mutual reassurance can be both necessary and compulsive.) The way the piece plays with this while also remaining playful and experimental makes the things it has to say about the joys and the dangers of collaboration, all the more compelling and effective. Also there was a waterphone, I love a waterphone – though this was the first time I’ve seen one bowed instead of struck.

One of the really refreshing parts of the orchestral concerts at this year’s Tectonics is that – most notably with the Sunday night concert – the various composers, while doing all kinds of interesting an experimental things with sound, seemed to cognisant that they had an entire orchestra to play with. One section or other might come to the fore for a movement, but overall you never forgot that you were listening to an orchestra. A whole range of interesting sounds came out of the instruments in all sorts of unusual combinations – Nicole Mitchell made her flute to all kinds of delightful things, I’ve never seen someone employ loop boxes with a flute before! – and at no point would you have mistaken it for a classical concert, but they were all melodic in a way that I haven’t often heard in Tectonics orchestral performances over the last few years.

Tectonics 2025

On May 12, 2025 By thelostpenguinIn music, sound designLeave a comment

It’s Tectonics season again. Time, once again, to spend a weekend listening to strange and interesting musical performances in, around and between the City Halls and the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow. This year’s selection has been significantly less avant garde – though definitely adventurous and occasionally downright playful – which has been a huge relief to me. Even the sessions that weren’t my jam this year were things I could at least appreciate the skill involved in them. I summed up last year’s festival with the sentiment of ‘better luck next year’ and I was relieved to discover that that proved to be true, I enjoyed the festival much more this year.

I was a little worried that this year’s sound installation was going to be a bit too esoteric and abstract. When it talked about resonant listening spaces I was dubious. When the blurb mentioned creating a sanctuary for deep listening and called the sessions workshops I worried I was in for something pretentious and new age-y. However, thankfully, Baudouin Oosterlynck’s Deep Listening was something rather more whimsical and pleasing. It’s a collection of strange and wonderful gizmos, mostly with stethoscopes attached so you can listen to sounds that largely aren’t producing enough resonating frequencies to be audible without the stethoscopes. (Everyone I spoke to in the exhibit said ‘oh have you tried the autoharp’ and it was indeed fabulous.) I was reminded of my own adventures with contact microphones and hydrophones over lockdown, and the compulsion to share the joy with other of hearing the world from an entirely different perspective. It’s just that he’s taken it to the extreme of making whole instruments – over the course of roughly a quarter of a century – to charm listeners into listening to the world differently with him.

Picking a favourite session this year has been difficult for the opposite reason that it was difficult last year – there were so many that I liked! From Canadian percussionist Jennifer Torrence’s Sunday opener to Beatrice Dillon laying down some fabulous grooves in the dark of the Fruitmarket late on Saturday night to the Scottish String Collective’s pleasing strangeness. But I think Oyvind Tovund’s Symphony performed by the SSO in the most comprehensive use of the space I’ve seen in all my year’s of attending Tectonics Festival. There was a percussion set up in the middle of the staircase, synths and electric guitar on a landing, the string section were tucked away in the bar area with the conductor, while the brass section looked a little lonesome on the stage of the Grand Hall, with only a solo saxophonist up in the balcony for company. The audience was encouraged to wander around the building to take in the various parts of the performance – like a mini festival within the festival – so there was a constant shuffle of audience members trying to move round the building as quietly as possible. The acoustics of the foyer combined with the pick ups all over the place mean that if you were at the very top of the stairs you could hear latecomers coming in the door downstairs and having the performance explained to them. (A bloke standing behind me at the end commented to his friend that he’d wanted to ask if anyone had a phone charger he could borrow but was in fear of hearing himself in the recording when it goes out of Radio 3!) It also felt like the performance had been designed by someone who’s alway secretly wanted to get up and move around during an orchestral performance to listen to a piece from different angles as the piece moves around the orchestra sections and there were a fair few audience members that fully embraced the experience – myself included – and followed the piece round the building until they found their favourite listening spot and settled there. (I was also amused during the following orchestral performance there were significantly more people in the side balcony seats upstairs as though they’d discovered during the Tovund piece that there was a different/preferable perspective to be had from up there – with this kind of performance it’s almost more important to me that I can see what particular artists/players are up to when they make particular sounds than the overall ‘better’ position accoustically.
Definitely a clear winner on the ‘understood the assignment AND showed the audience a good time’ fronts.

On the other hand, my favourite session musically was the Sunday night SSO concert. Opening with the UK Premiere of Argentinian composer – who’s just marked her century – Hilda Dianda’s 1965 piece Lundus 1 which was a surprisingly fresh piece for something written half a century ago and a timely reminder that you don’t have to sacrifice musicality in the pursuit of doing something experimental and different. (The programme described her work as exploring ‘playful avant garde textures’ and that is true but the emphasis in this work is definitely on the ‘playful’ part.) Also I’ve complained before about some composers seeming to forget that an orchestra is more than the string section, and this – in fact the whole selection in this performance did a decent job of this – was a piece that remembered that not only are there woodwind and brass sections to play with but also gave the percussion section plenty to do too.

Everything felt rather more, enthusiastic, than last year – one of the double bass players was giving it so much laldie that he broke a string! And then had to carry on into another piece afterwards – I’m not sure how much of that was my own projection from being somewhat burned out when I attended last year, but I don’t think it was entirely that. A sense of the artists experimenting for the joy of it, comfortable in the weirdness and exploratory nature of what they were up to rather than being too self-conscious or arch about it.

Tectonics 2024

On October 21, 2024 By thelostpenguinIn musicLeave a comment

This year’s festival definitely had more of an emphasis on the more experimental end of the genre. The word ‘improvisational’ featured heavily in this year’s blurbs. Ironically, a the start of one of Saturday’s sets a bloke sitting behind me said, in slightly disdainful tones, that this year’s festival seemed less experimental than previous years’ programmes, I wanted to turn round and ask if he’d been at the same performances as me! There was definitely less electronic elements this year, more experimental usage of analogue elements, traditional instruments and vocal work than in previous years I’ve attended but I definitely feel there was more of an art music leaning this year.

All my favourite performances on Saturday featured the SSO, whether in their entirety or in part. I missed the start of Sarah-Jane Summers and Juhani Silvola’s collaboration with the SSO strings, but I knew pretty much immediately that it was going to be a highlight. (You know when a guitarist pulls out a violin bow and starts using it on his electric guitar you’re not going to be in for a boring show.) In fact, over the years, some of my favourite performances at Tectonics are where parts of the orchestra engage with a musical ‘folk tradition’ for their experimentation – there was a brilliant one in 2022 which involve a percussion set that looked like it had been borrowed from a Thai temple – I feel as though it grounds the experimentation, it might get haunting and strange, but it remains musical and doesn’t veer off into, well, noise. It was certainly strange and experimental at various points but not in an alienating way – I was imagining wide open windswept landscapes and coastlines, shades of whale song and seabirds, a natural rather than a mechanical desolation.

And while I wouldn’t say either A Point in the Landscape or 6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra in their evening concert could be described as being my kind of thing they both worked as interesting sonic experiments and pieces of music. Most importantly, from my perspective, is that everyone involved seemed to be having fun – there was a playfulness about the performances, a kind of joy in trying something different and having a good time doing so. Often I’d much rather see something that doesn’t entirely work for me, where the artists/musicians are having fun, than something than is objectively musically more to my taste but is taken too seriously/feels essentially joyless. Also, A Point in the Landscape did one of my favourite things about this festival, using the space available to great effect, there were wee groups of performers up in the balcony on either side and in the choir stalls behind the stage, which did fun things to the acoustics so even when I wasn’t that into the music it was a visually intriguing performance.

I do feel there was some attempt in this year’s programme for the artists to engage more directly with the audience. In previous reviews I have been moved to complain about the audience taking the artists too seriously, and several artists this year seemed determined to push us to react with more than polite applause, opera singer Elaine Mitchener was the most explicit on that front, stepping right down into the audience, and talking to and riffing off her interactions with audience members as she made her way through the crowd.

Yaron Deutsch was definitely my favourite non-orchestral performance of Day Two – enjoyment that was definitely enhanced by listening to him talk about his process for interpreting some of the pieces during Sunday’s Meet the Artist session. It was somewhat amusing to hear him talk about one of the pieces that had been written especially for him, that he’d used loop pedals in his interpretation of it, because – essentially – otherwise he didn’t have enough hands to pull it off! (This was the first time I’d been to one of the Meet the Artist sessions since, I think, the first year I went, usually it works out that the one I want to go to is on either at the only time that works for me to go eat or to go see whatever is on in the Recital Room. It was definitely interesting, but not enough to forsake the weird sound art we usually get in the Recital Room.) It’s not at all the kind of thing I’d listen to as music at home, but as a performance it was fascinating watching someone push an electric guitar to it’s limits, and there was definitely something compelling about his performance in person that doesn’t come across in the filmed version of it.

My favourite of the orchestra pieces was Mirela Ivičević’s ‘Überlala. Song of Million Paths. for violin and orchestra’ with Ilya Gringolts on violin, which was odd and adventurous without being alienating. I also had high hopes for Charles Uzor’s piece ‘Breaking of the Vessels for orchestra and tape’, as he was both interesting and quite charming in the Meet the Artists session. I really enjoyed the orchestral elements – I do appreciate an experimental composer who remembers that the orchestra is more than just strings and percussion, the brass section gets a good workout here – the tape element worked less well for me. Largely because it got lost to the extent that I really couldn’t hear it, couldn’t identify what it was doing/adding to the piece. I’ve heard tape elements used to greater or lesser effect in previous years Tectonics but here, even knowing it was there listening back on the website I still couldn’t identify it. Essentially, it was a really good orchestral piece but I couldn’t hear the soloist!

Looking back at this review, I realise that the most common compliment I pay to artists in it, is that the pieces weren’t ‘alienating’ which does rather suggest that that was my main point of contention with the acts and pieces that I didn’t enjoy. There was a higher than usual rate of acts that I didn’t enjoy, not for the usual reasons – bit joyless, too close to industrial noise, just plain not my jam – but rather for less easily identifiable reasons. While there were a couple of acts that I gave a couple of tracks and then turned heel and left because I wasn’t enjoying myself, I expect that from a festival of new and experimental music. (I’d be disappointed if I didn’t to be honest, if you’re pushing the boundaries it won’t all work.) Ultimately I think that’s at the heart of my issue with several acts and pieces that I sat through, never quite moved to get up and leave but fundamentally a bit alienated by what I was listening to, unable to engage with it enough to form a coherent positive or negative opinion on it. Better luck next year.

Tectonics 2023

On May 22, 2023 By thelostpenguinIn art exhibits, music, sound design, straight up reviewsLeave a comment

This year marks the tenth anniversary edition of the Tectonics festival. Which prompted the realisation that the first edition of the festival that I attended was in fact the first time it ran. No wonder it was a very different beast back then, they were still trying to figure out what would or wouldn’t work for the festival. It also made me realise that even discounting it’s purely digital pandemic variants, I’ve attended more than half of the times it’s run. I guess that makes me a regular in a strange way. I feel like I should have something more sweeping and general to say about the arc of the festival, but I don’t really, just that I’m glad that it’s one of those interesting events that didn’t just happen once or twice but has become a fixture of the cultural calendar.

I definitely feel as though I spent a disproportionate amount of time over the weekend – on Saturday in particular – sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Old Fruitmarket listening to something unusual. An early highlight was Semay Wu, cellist and sound artist, whose set started small, cross legged on the floor, with oversized clothes pegs and empty tins, before building via interesting loops and effects peddles into something deeply strange but really quite wonderful. Definitely an act that made me want to dig out my own collection of oddities and makes something strange of my own, inspiration in the best way.

I was less enamoured with this years sound art installation than in previous years. I think the installation had some clever ideas – converting the sound energy of pure tones into electrical energy to run lights – but the execution didn’t really work for me. Largely because the range of tones in use were all sounds guaranteed to set my teeth on edge. One of the things that makes me good at being a sound recordist is that I can usually hear that light buzzing or piece of kit humming before I even turn on the recorder. This was a piece of sound work that seemed to emphasise and amplify the sounds of the every day that people tune out and stop hearing. (Attenuation my old friend!) But for me it was an exercise in going – speaker hum, line up tone, hearing aid feedback, flourescent tube, old fridge, the sound the electricity pylons make – and led to me sitting through the whole performance willing someone to make it stop. Which isn’t the best state of mind to appreciate someone’s skills and artistic ideas.

Lucrecia Dalt was the closing act of the Saturday night and while I often describe the festival’s acts as ranging from the sublime to the excessively avant garde, this one unreservedly blew my socks off. (There always seems to be one act over the weekend that I come away absolutely loving, that justify the ticket price – and all the very much not my jam stuff I’ve sat through over the years – all by themselves.) Dalt joked about the merch stall during the gig, but if they’d had one, I’d absolutely have bought a copy of her album. I was pretty much hooked from when she first appeared on stage, it was abundantly clear as she danced back and forth between her boxes of electronic tricks that we were in for something special. She’s currently touring with an excellent and highly eccentric drummer called Alex (last name unknown…) who deserves a mention in his own right as he was a delightful and compelling on-stage presence – using a high hat that was indeed up high – and together they made a slick and eccentric live band. A certain amount of the acts at this festival always seem slightly taken aback to be on stage in front of an enthusiastic audience but this felt like an actual touring band – they even played an encore!

Not that I object on principle to the more avant garde acts on the bill at this festival. Limpe Fuchs who opened the show on Sunday was thoroughly avant garde with her percussion rig of home made instruments. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the set until I realised she kept glancing off to the side at the audience – presumably the only part of the crowd whose expressions she could see from her position in the pool of light – as though accessing how far she could push us, what she could get away with, that gave the whole performance a sense of quiet mischievousness, that I enjoyed. It left me with a sneaky suspicion that the audience in general was taking her work far too seriously and that it was intended to be rather more lighthearted, and that she was just having fun with her fabulous new toy of an instrument.

I definitely enjoyed the Sunday night SSO concert more than the Saturday night one, largely because I felt that the composers for the pieces involved really used the orchestra to it’s full advantage. Sometimes the pieces feel only incidentally for orchestra, while these were all pieces that all the strengths of different parts of the orchestra and really had fun doing unusual things with them. I hadn’t thought about it until last night, but you don’t often get orchestral music in this genre that really exploits the oddities that the brass section are capable of – I was a trombonist at school, we messed around a lot with our instruments when bored backstage at concerts – as though they forget there are sections other than the strings that like to have fun. I’ve no way of knowing whether composer William Dougherty has first hand experience of panic attacks but nonetheless he managed to create a soundscape that sounded very much how the inside of my head feels when I’m having a panic attack – just, you know, scored for orchestra. Which was rather a moving, if deeply discombobulating experience. The piece is an exploration of nostalgia – it features a damaged wax cylinder recording of Home Sweet Home – and but I’m reminded forcibly that nostalgia used to be considered an ailment, a variety of melancholia. Actually, I think that all the pieces that formed this concert, could be said to evoke a mood or a moment in time, they all felt like scores for a film we weren’t seeing, that they should have been underscoring and enhancing emotions and actions projected ten feet tall. If these composers aren’t already working in the medium, then I definitely want to draw directors and editors attention to them, because based on these pieces they’d be great at it. A succession of successful attempt at walking the line of making something new and interesting, without being so challenging as to turn off their audience.

The festival was, as ever, an experience, something strange and wonderful, to cleanse the musical palette and rearrange the listener’s expectations. Here’s to another ten years.

Tectonics 2022

On May 31, 2022May 31, 2022 By thelostpenguinIn music, straight up reviewsLeave a comment

After two years of being a purely virtual endeavour, this year’s Tectonics was live and in person once again. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m actually quite a fan of virtual festival, and the way that they open up more unusual or specialised events up to audience that couldn’t normally access them, for geographical, financial or other reasons. However, it was undeniably better to be at the festival in person again. It was definitely a smaller scale festival than it had been in the last few years before the pandemic – there were no late night sessions this year – and apparently until a couple of months ago they weren’t even certain that they’d be able to run it in person which no doubt impacted various parts of the festival. There are undoubtedly elements of the festival that just don’t work as well virtually: the sound art installations in the Recital Room – this year a piece called Noiseem by Japanese artist Fujiiiiiiiiita involving a self-made pipe organ, some aquarium bubblers and some hydrophones – are notably more engaging in person.

The weekend got off to a promising start with Silvia Tarozzi in the Grand Hall. All the music was taken from her 2020 album which was apparently inspired by the work of Milanese poet Alda Merini, and based on this concert is well worth tracking down. The band were a delight, their little interactions and asides were a delightful reminder of the sheer pleasure of live performance both for audience and musicians. They were an excellent choice as an opening act, being avant garde enough to be constantly surprising and delighting the audience but not so left field that they would alienate someone not there to see them specifically. I felt like they set the tone for the year’s festival, finding joy and pleasure in the absurd and experimental, rather than taking it all too seriously.

Oddly enough, in the best part of a decade of attending Tectonics, both in person and virtually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a concert that featured either of those stalwarts of electronic/experimental music the theremin and the prepared piano. Yet on Saturday two different acts were using the theremin and on Sunday two different acts used prepared piano in very different ways. Despite my longstanding fondness for the theremin, while I was delighted to see it in action, I was considerable more excited to see the prepared piano. Particularly James Clapperton tackling Janet beat’s tape machine and prepared piano extravaganza, Piangam, perhaps because a theremin is an instrument that while decidedly esoteric and arguably hard to master, you don’t get on stage with a theremin unless you’re already confident you can use it, but if you’re using a prepared piano, especially when you’re going to have to change the preparation between movements, during the piece, there’s far more danger of something going wrong, or at least not turning out the way you hoped.

It was as always a please to see the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in all their glory, I take particular enjoyment in watching an orchestra tackle something esoteric or at least outside their wheel house – though at this point I’ve seen this orchestra wrestle with more avant garde and modern classical music than I have the more traditional fare, to the point that it was downright weird to see them play Tchaikovsky a couple of years back. This year was no exception with their Sunday session being a particular joy. A lot of this year’s orchestral pieces had a heavy influence of the natural world, as though a lot of composers had spent an unexpected amount of time outside by themselves lately and been changed, or a least influenced by it.

And I can’t really talk about this year’s festival without taking about Janet Beat whose work was at the heart of this year’s Tectonics. I managed to miss the interview that Radio 3 did with her over that weekend – she’s in her 80s now so isn’t performing any more – but it’s always a delight to discover new female electronic music pioneers, especially Scottish ones! There were two sessions specifically revolving around her work one on each day of the festival. I preferred the Sunday session in the Grand Hall, with it’s focus on showcasing her compositions, rather than the one on Saturday that was more about showcasing her influence and impact on other musicians. I’m sure the Saturday session was great if you knew her work and could read the interactions and influences going on there, but as someone who had been previously been unaware of her work, I think I’d have got a lot more out of it if they’d been scheduled the other way round.

Nearly every time I’ve attended Tectonics in person there’s been a stand out performance, something almost transcendent that makes everything else, good or bad, fade into the background of memory. It almost always happens in The Fruit Market – not that every session there is stand out, I’ve seen my share of duds in there too – and nearly always a piece that takes into account and advantage of the space itself. This year’s was no exception, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s collaboration with members of the BBC SSO was something extraordinary. This is apparently her first work for orchestral instrumentation, but you wouldn’t know, it really exploited the potential of both the instruments and the space, using timbre and exploring sound waves – it felt very much like someone had thought hard about attack and decay in sound wave and decided to play with it – to delightful effect, and leaving the audience feeling a little unmoored in time.

I’ve done my share of sitting on the floor of The Fruit Market at Tectonics, I’m short enough that if the artist isn’t performing on the actual stage I need to be at the front to see, but tall enough that unless I get there first I can’t do that without looking obnoxious, so cross legged on my coat it is. (I’m not as organised as the woman who was sitting along from me in this session, who’d brought her own cushions – I salute that level of commitment!) But this is, I think, the first time I’ve attended a session where it was not only permitted, but actively encouraged. To the extent that the two or three people in the middle of the circle who chose to remain standing were definitely being glowered at by their neighbours.

The musicians were arranged in a wide circle, with conductor Ilan Volkov on a small low podium in the middle and the vast majority of the audience sitting on the floor – or on one of the handful of chairs provided for those who would struggle to get back up from the floor once they got down there – around him and facing out to the musicians. It was immersive and strange and wonderful and would have been a perfect end to the weekend had there not been another session after it, which I felt suffered in comparison to it’s immediate predecessor which was in fairness a very hard act to follow.

Virtual @Tectonicsglas Festival

On May 4, 2020May 4, 2020 By thelostpenguinIn art exhibits, music, sound designLeave a comment

This weekend is Tectonics weekend.

It’s not as though I manage to attend every year, or even most years, and generally I can’t make the whole thing so end up doing only the Saturday or only the Sunday. Nonetheless, I was originally supposed to be off this weekend and I’d vaguely planned on taking the long weekend and heading to Glasgow to attend. Then of course, everything changed in March and all those plans went to dust.

In common with many other small festivals, Tectonics has made a valiant attempt at creating a virtual festival over the course of it’s scheduled weekend. Unlike many other small music festivals, because the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is involved, most of the proceedings are recorded for Radio 3 and some of the performances even get filmed, so we aren’t talking a shoogly Youtube playlist with lots of unwanted feedback and peaking. All the strange noises are intentional strange noises!

In a nice touch, they’d laid out the virtual programme in the same style and structure as the actual festival programme normally takes, with artist talks and interviews – some archive and others clearly recorded on Zoom specifically for this event – early in each day, alternating concerts between the intertwining strands that would normally take place in the Fruit Market and the City Halls, with set piece concerts later and late night experimental DJ sets to finish it off. Giving the whole thing a feel of a fantasy line-up rather than an apology.

(To add to the verisimilitude of my own experience, I only discovered that the virtual festival was happening, a few days before, after spotting a stray post on twitter.)

One of the available gigs is Syzygys from 2018, which I actually saw live at the Fruit Market and were the highlight of that year’s Tectonics for me – the kind of gig that if you have to leave before the encore, makes you seriously contemplate missing your last train home just to hear one more song. They make such strange and wonderful experimental music, with such confidence and competence. However off the wall the results, it’s never random, the music has a clear internal logic that I appreciate – I find both serialism and minimalism compelling rather than cold when it comes to modern classical music – and there were definitely elements that were pleasingly reminiscent of the medieval end of Western Early music, along with some rather more learning toward the Middle East. Such a pleasure to hear their set again.

I was particularly delighted to see that the sound installations got their moment in the sun too, with extracts from Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums and Sounds from the Farmyard both of which I’ve written about previously – in fact at the start of the clip of the latter, the more eagle-eyed of you may spot me in the audience!

Prepare to be amazed at what you can do with a ping-pong ball. Relive Alvin Lucier's installation from 2013, Sarah Kenchington's musical inventions, and Lucie Vítková's make-up scores from 2019. #tectonicsrewind https://t.co/xMc2YGThCq

— Tectonics Glasgow (@tectonicsglas) May 3, 2020

The whole programme has been a delightful companion this weekend, whether I’ve been actively watching concerts in the evenings, or letting the audio only recordings run in the background while I’ve been working from home. All the clips are available for the next 30 days, so if you didn’t get a chance to watch the festival as it unfolded over the weekend, you’ve plenty of time to enjoy something charming, challenging and occasionally baffling, in the coming weeks.

Symphonies, Sound Art and Scandinavians @Tectonicsglas

On May 14, 2014July 20, 2014 By thelostpenguinIn art exhibits, music, sound designLeave a comment

Last weekend saw the return to Glasgow of the Tectonics music festival. A joint venture between Iceland and Scotland, the festival has settled into an annual role with two sibling festivals running in Glasgow (in May) and Reykjavik (in April) with artists and orchestras from both countries coming together to provide a strange and often wonderful mix of electronic and symphonic music.

Despite having attended and enjoyed the Glasgow edition last year, I nearly missed this year’s festival. Most of April was lost in a haze of Gàidhlig assignments, and any post that wasn’t of a vital or time sensitive nature got put to one side in the interim. On Saturday I sat down with intent to go through said abandoned post and deal with anything that needed dealt with. I didn’t get very far, as fairly early in the pile I came across a programme for this year’s Tectonics festival and discovered that it was in fact that weekend. So instead I spent time frantically rearranging my schedule to fit in the Sunday programme of the festival. Definitely worth it though.

I think this year’s selection was a little more esoteric than last year, either that or Sundays are reserved for the more Avant-garde side of the festival because there were a couple of acts that were…very Avant-garde (including an act that felt like I could have stumbled on them in one of the odder venues at the Fringe) and I seem to remember picking Saturday over Sunday to attend last year for that reason. Nothing quite blew me away the way the transcendent beauty of Guth na eòin/Voice of the birds by Hanna Tuulikki did last year but then the only live experience I had that improved on that in the entirety of 2013 was Skunk Anansie and I’d wanted to see them live since I was 12…

There were some definite highlights to this year’s festival. The always excellent BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, were on form, making their instruments do strange and wonderful things. At the other end of the scale S.L.Á.T.U.R. (pleasingly, slàtur is apparently the Icelandic equivalent of haggis) a Reykjavik-based collective, composing and creating experimental music with both electronic and analogue (very analogue, during one piece they all played instruments that looked as though they had been made from long, square cardboard tubes) instruments, and performing them with an innovative and entertaining form of animated notation that proved most interesting and amusing. Also it made the audience participation in the last song rather easier to follow and stay in time for. (I was a foot. That’s all I will say on the matter)

Despite their Scandinavian charms, it was the Sound Art performance that stole the show for me. Sarah Kenchington’s installation Sounds from the Farmyard was open all day for concertgoers to play with and on, and it was fabulous. Kenchington creates instruments out of every day and found objects, alongside deconstructed conventional musical instruments, and she brought a selection of her creations from the last ten years for the audience to play with. My personal favourites were a contraption where you rolled large metal ball bearings into a giant metal maze where the motion swung the balls on ever changing paths and chimed bells made out of wine glasses. Also a much smaller contraption seemingly made from some kind of metal tom-tom and a metal slinky, which made a brilliant noise that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a 1950s sci-fi film. On both days of the festival she managed to gather together a collection of musicians and enthusiastic amateurs to perform all the instruments in something like harmony, that managed to show case the charms of each of the instruments. By all rights it should have been the most discordant and weird of the performances, the performers were almost all strangers to each other, they had no real rehearsal time and there didn’t appear to be a central score, yet somehow they created something not only strange and wonderful, but completely musical as well.

Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums @Tectonicsglasgow

On September 30, 2013 By thelostpenguinIn art exhibits, music, sound designLeave a comment

Back in May, I set off on a quest to see an orchestra live in concert and ended up attending a very odd (but very good) music festival involving collaborations between orchestral and electronic musicians and composers. The Glasgow incarnation of the Tectonics festival deserves a piece in its own right, but for now I’ll focus on one particular element in the festival: a sound installation by Alvin Lucier.

The festival stretched over the City Halls and the Old Fruitmarket across the weekend, but this particular piece took up residence in one of the recital rooms all weekend. It was pre-programmed to run at regular intervals throughout the weekend, but I was lucky enough to get to see Alvin Lucier perform it live. Generally when you see sound art, its entirely divorced from its original performance, in most cases pre-recorded and unchanging between repetitions. (Not necessarily a bad thing, and some might even argue that the fixed nature of these pieces is what makes them art installations rather than musical performances.) This on the other hand was far more like a musical performance, the score he was playing from might have been exactly the same but the way he performed it was full of little differences in tones, expression and timing. Sitting on the floor of the room amid dozens of other people squished together cross-legged engaging with or being baffled by the performance in front of us.

Technically Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums (for slow sweep oscillator, loudspeakers, bass drums and suspended Ping-Pong balls) is really just four bass drums being hit by Ping-Pong balls suspended on fishing line, with the vibrations being converted by an attached to sine wave oscillator into very different sounds. However, that really doesn’t do justice to the swooping strangeness of the sounds produced, or the surreal yet whimsical experience of watching it being created. I’m sure there are other ways (easier ways even) to hit the drums in the same manner but something about the Ping-Pong balls hanging from one of the beams on fishing wire, made it seem both tailored to the space it inhabited (as though it had been designed specifically for the space, even though it had not been) and to inject a sense of fun into the whole proceedings.

Equally it was interesting to compare the experience of watching him as a performer in a small space and later seeing one of his lesser known orchestral compositions get the full wide-screen interpretation at the hands of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

This felt very much in sync with the spirit of the wider festival, that all these performances and pieces were both serious, sometimes challenging, works of art and fun experiments that pushed the boundaries of what is possible or practical with the instruments at hand.

The Words Of The Lost Penguin

Tag: tectonics