Harry’s Place Arts

The North Sea Radio Orchestra at the Roundhouse last year

In the past couple of days, I’ve booked tickets for the following:

• two different shows by the North Sea Radio Orchestra, one supporting the excellent Ted Barnes at the Purcell Room on the 27^th SEPTEMBER [EDIT - apologies for putting wrong date previously] (with a free open rehearsal in the afternoon) and one headline show at St Martin-in-the-Fields church on 18^th November. The NSRO are a fabulously indefinable entity, featuring contributions and compositions from an ex-member of The Cardiacs, and able to combine traditional English folk song, a very modern kind of indie/prog rock with a strong hint of Kate Bush and gorgeous, angular instrumental sections that recall Bela Bartok without ever seeming forced.

• A performance by Fernando Corona aka Murcof, also at the Purcell Room on 20^th November. This Mexican ambient electronica composer has long used samples of modern orchestral works of the Arvo Part / Gorecki / John Taverner ilk, so it is a logical extension for him to work with classical musicians – this is his first UK live show with viola, cello and trombone by players from Barcelona ensemble Bcn216.

• Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s opera Monkey: Journey To The West which is going to start a long run at the O2 after their success at the Royal Opera House.

…and also bought this album of Aphex Twin cover versions.

All of this reminded me how much of the interesting music that is made nowadays exists in a zone which doesn’t have its roots in the “classical world” but nonetheless uses orchestral instrumentation. Calling it “experimental” or “left field” doesn’t do any of it justice because of the baggage of awkwardness or inaccessibility that comes with those terms: so much of the music that exists in this fertile zone – this anything-but-grey area – is straight-up lovely, and even, as Monkey’s success shows, populist.

It’s a bugger trying to get coverage for this stuff, though – and has really thrown into relief for me how much even the most open-minded media outlets still rely on genre categories for comprehensibility. Despite the existence of Radio 3’s very wonderful Late Junction show – specialising in exploring precisely the territory we’re looking at here – again and again I find myself frustrated by the sharp divisions that otherwise exist in the minds of commissioning editors around their own territory, and how fenced off the world of “serious” or “art” music (as designated by the presence of typically orchestral intruments) remains in many people’s minds. Perhaps it’s a residual horror thanks to some of the vilenesses that were committed in the name of “classical rock” in the last century, but it doesn’t reflect the way that music is today, when a generation has grown up seeing Cage, Glass, Xenakis, Stravinksy, Satie and whoever else not as something to be learned about in school but as part of the continuum of music they feel ownership of just as much as, say, Aphex Twin or Portishead or Pink Floyd are.

I will write more on this topic and on the specific acts in HP Arts in future, but for anyone who fancies a little light listening for the weekend, without even going into orchestral interpretations of artists like White Stripes, Squarepusher, Jeff Mills and Metallica which have all been done with varying degrees of success, here’s a fairly random round-up of acts I’ve enjoyed lately:

From the “post-rock” / All Tomorrow’s Parties world, there’s Thee Silver Mount Zion Tra-La Band (an offshoot of Quebecois stalwarts God Speed You! Black Emperor - check out the beautiful ‘13 Angels’ on the MySpace), Rachel’s, Clogs (led by Australian composer/instrumentalist Padma Newsome) and the generally excellent Manchester-based Type Records which releases artists like Ryan Teague and label co-owner John “Xela” Twells

There’s an entire sub-genre of Nordic twinkletronica, for example Icelanders Amiina (whose work will be familiar if only thanks to their string parts for Sigur Rós cropping up on a million wildlife documentaries), Múm, Jóhann Jóhannsson (who composed a wonderful, morosely funny piece based on the workings and user manual of an IBM 1401 computer) and sometime Björk engineer Valgeir Sigurðsson, Danes Efterklang (who include an entire choir in their lineup) and Norwegians Xploding Plastix (this MySpace page features more jazz / hip hop tracks but their forthcoming album ‘Treated Timber Resists Rot’ is a move much more towards electronica and classical instrumentation)

From the club world, Gabriel Prokofiev (yes, a descendent of Sergei, but also producer of Lady Sovereign, Spektrum and his own alter-ego Caspa Codina) runs a label and clubnight that brings electronic producers and remixers and orchestral players into collaborations, most recently on the excellent-in-parts Cortical Songs project which featured remixes from Thom Yorke and Simon Tong among others. Also The Heritage Orchestra take strong influences from jazz-funk, psychedelic soul and blaxploitation soundtracks to produce something really rather distinctive.

That’ll do for now, but as I say, I’ll return to this theme anon…