BY ANDREW MESSENGER
Dots+Loops: Radio Rewrite
Nonsemble and friends, Armas Quartet, Armilla Quartet and Joe Fallon, Airport
The Triffid, Newstead, 20 March 2015
What’s it like to listen to a classical concert in a bar?
That’s Dots+Loops: the newest music in the trendiest place. In this instance, John Collins’ massive Newstead airport hangar bar called The Triffid.
Dots+Loops (pronounced Dots and Loops) is the latest hip attempt to bridge the gap between art and the mainstream; to find that happy medium between the musicianship of high classical and the laid-back coolness of contemporary indie, pop and even dance music. And Dots+Loops succeeds.
It certainly isn’t easy listening. Nothing middle-brow here. Much of the time in music, ‘crossover’ means ‘compromise’ – think Montserrat Caballe singing with Freddie Mercury, or the atrocious Andre Rieu. But the music of Dots+Loops is anything but a compromise. The gig started with Bryce Dessner’s outrageous, exhausting Aheym (played with fire by the Armas Quartet). It finished with the Queensland premiere of Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite – that is Reich’s 2012 rewrite of Radiohead (Everything in its Right Place and Jigsaw Falling into place). I think Reich might actually be pretty pleased to hear his work was premiered in a bar.
Nonsemble already has a well-earned reputation as a great, tight band. Pianists Sam Mitchell and Cara Tran were standouts, as well as conductor Jenni Thomson who somehow steered the ship. But for me the highlights of the concert were Robert Davidson’s gorgeous Landscape (1999), inspired by the Glasshouse mountain region, but heavily subverting the traditional Australian landscape music format. It’s a great piece. So is Bryce Dessner’s Aheym and Little Blue Something, jazzyish Jewish/Czech minimalist chaos of the best sort. My kind of music. Both wildly, absurdly difficult, of course. The Armilla and Armas quartets are to be commended for keeping it together in an unfamiliar venue without good foldback.
All the music was mic’d, of course. Not all of the sound balancing was perfect, but that’s the risk of playing in a bar like The Triffid – the sound balancing is as important as the playing, and you need to put a lot of trust in the sound technician to get it right. I’ve often thought that orchestras should have their own assistant conductor who sits in the tech box and bosses around the tech engineers. This might be a plan for next Dots+Loops? The sound certainly was not as clean as it might have been, despite 20-foot speakers.
The great irony of the gig is that most of the music was written by pop musicians. Aside from his career as genius avant-garde composer, Bryce Dessner is the guitarist with the National (a band you will know from Game of Thrones). Steve Reich’s piece is loosely based on Radiohead (though if he left much of a melody intact I couldn’t pick it). Rob Davidson (double-bassist, composer and Renaissance man with Topology) is as home in punk as he is in minimalism, and you can hear its influence. Everything had the same electric pulsing energy that works so well in a pub format. It’s almost the punk rock of the classical world. Personally, I’m pleased whenever I can drink a nice beer while listening to some great music.
Image supplied.
