Reviews

BOX #28 - 28 September 2003 - Christine McCombe - Cleaning Lady - Jim Denley

Review by Jamie Hume

After two years and four months, two venues and dozens of performers drawn from academic and underground backgrounds we arrive at this point. The three performers on this evening represented these two basic strands (which cover a lot of sub and micro genres).

From the academic side of things comes the first performer of the evening Christine McCombe. Now located in Brisbane Christine has studied composition in Melbourne and Edinburgh and had had compositions performed and released across Europe and Australia.

Described as being influenced by electroacoustic composition Christine's two pieces that night were multi faceted which drew differing responses from audience members.

The first one, which bore the name of ?Tidal?, was accompanied by repetitive images of toy boats bobbing up and down near a dock and a bay with the tide out. The piece itself consisted of low-level ambient swathes with soundbytes of conversation and seabirds. With the field recordings incorporated into the wash along with the images perhaps she was trying to make a comment on time and memory but she didn't quite pull it off as the music and images didn't really quite gel. One audience member made the comment she needed a better editor, while another complained that SBB performances in general tend to have lousy visuals. Valid points both.

The second piece (?Sarabande?) had no images to complement it. It went through a number of movements comprising ambient washes, a processed and deconstructed harpsichord, ear shredding noise and an unprocessed harpsichord passage at the end.

While Christine's pieces were enjoyable they were pretty much composition by numbers constructed to a rigid formula. One could use the term generic. Still she was better than the god-awful Masteneh Nazarian at last years February SBB (I still shudder at the memory of it).

Next up was Cleaning Lady who is in reality Stephen Richards who has been involved in various group and solo projects like Imperial Leatherman, UPO and Evil Twin among others. This was the second of appearances that weekend (The night before he DJed at the Phonoscape Fabrique).

Prior to starting his set he explained that on the night he selects which effects pedals he'll use and improvises on the night. For this performance he used a noise generator and a bank of pedals which would have made a shoegazing band green with envy.

The music? Well it was very full blooded. Using no instruments at all, he generated a palette of sounds which alternated between harsh dissonant squalls and ominous rumblings within the infrasound range. If Peter Jackson should return to his schlock horror roots (let's face it, he does have mainstream respectability nowadays) he could do now worse than to have Cleaning Lady provide the score.

All in all a masterful performance.

Last up was Sydney-sider Jim Denley who has been working in international experimental circles since the early eighties and been involved with collaborations galore like The Relative Band with Eugene Chadbourne and Don Burrows(!?!) amongst numerous others too lengthy to go into here.

Denley that evening presented an exercise in instrument deconstructionism. The instrument which was the focus of this was the bass flute (generally used sparingly in an orchestral setting) in conjunction with a laptop.

With the computer providing the grating bed, Denley proceeded to literally rip the bass flute apart and put it back together in ways its creator could never have foreseen.

The sounds he produced could in no way be mistaken for genteel. Denley's blowing on the bass flute brought to mind pterodactyl flying above an active primordial forest. His Frankenstein approach to the bass flute was a spectacle in itself. Throughout his set he gradually stripped it down until there was a just a small tube left with blowing which was on a par with the lung bursting efforts of Peter Brotzmann.

You could see the saliva glistening all over his chin.

It was unmissable. For those who did....

Don't fret he's going to be back in November for the "Make It Now" Australian Festival of Improvised Music.

Tonight demonstrated the fact that the avant-garde is open to many different ways of approaching many different instruments.

Let's hope SBB continues to foster and showcase all these varied manifestations of the experimental impulse.