The Thing with Neneh Cherry, Vienna Porgy & Bess, 1 July 2012

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I’ve reversed the order in which this collaboration is normally billed, since it’s fairly clear to me, both from the LP The Cherry Thing and from this concert, that what we have here is The Thing with a guest vocalist, not Neneh Cherry with a group. This would have come as a shock to many of the Neneh Cherry fans in the audience at Porgy & Bess, who greatly outnumbered fans of The Thing such as myself on the night and who may have been expecting a nostalgic run-through of her 80s chart successes. What we got instead was an unapologetic performance of bristling free jazz, given a vivid extra dimension by Cherry’s powerful vocals.

Take “Call The Police”, an old zydeco song by Stephanie McDee. In my review of the last time I saw The Thing in Vienna, I noted how saxophonist Mats Gustafsson leapt with glee on this tune’s memorable riff, transforming it from a rickety little phrase into a juggernaut statement of intent. They played the song again tonight with equal relish, only this time Cherry was on hand to lend her effervescent voice to the song’s defiant exhortation to party. All the while, the astonishing rhythm section of Paal Nilssen-Love and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten drove the music along with extraordinary energy and vitality.

Throughout the concert, Cherry showed an instinctive and formidable understanding of the Thing aesthetic. Channelling the ecstatic wordless vocalising of Linda Sharrock, her cries on the Stooges’ “Dirt” were the perfect complement to Gustafsson’s mighty blowing. Taking the temperature down several notches, Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” smouldered with a longing entirely absent from Alan Vega’s perfunctory reading of the original.

However unfamiliar Neneh Cherry’s audience were with The Thing and free jazz at the outset of this concert, the response was overwhelmingly positive (save for a few delicate souls blocking their ears and one or two uncomprehending shakes of the head). The well earned encores reflected both sides of the Cherry Thing experience – a tender reading of the old ballad “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams”, then a final frenzied blowout impishly introduced by Gustafsson as “an old Scandinavian jazz standard”. Like many of the tunes the saxophonist plays with Swedish Azz this one may have begun life as a standard, but it certainly didn’t end up sounding like one tonight. And it’s that unique, alchemical force that puts The Thing in the boldest and most exciting territory anywhere in creative music.

Efzeg, Vienna Porgy & Bess, 17 June 2012

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In one of the most pitifully attended concerts I’ve ever witnessed in Vienna, last weekend saw a deserted Porgy & Bess play host to the first gig in seven years by electroacoustic improvisation quintet Efzeg. The meagre turnout was probably inevitable, given that it was a hot Sunday night and that this music is not exactly a crowd-puller at the best of times; but it was also unfortunate, since what we had here was a reunion gig (oh, how I do love reunions) by a group containing some of Europe’s leading exponents of the electroacoustic genre.

I missed Efzeg the first time around, of course, which makes their 2012 reformation all the more pertinent. I’ve long admired guitarist Martin Siewert’s work, though, having seen him play both with avant rock unit Heaven And and in a trio with saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and turntablist and Efzeg member dieb13 (Dieter Kovacic). Kovacic, meanwhile, turns up in Swedish Azz with Gustafsson, who was a guest at Heaven And’s last Vienna gig. You get the picture.

In marked contrast to those previous, bracing encounters, Efzeg are all about duration, the lengthy accumulation of sonic detail. During the concert, I found myself in an unfamiliar, somewhat disquieting mode of listening. I’m not used to the kind of patient unfolding of sounds that Efzeg present us with; years of close attention to free jazz and improv have conditioned me to enjoy, perhaps even to expect, a succession of thrilling events. Such expectations are clearly not part of the EAI aesthetic. The closest I’ve come would be the few AMM concerts I was lucky enough to see in London in the 1990s, before the deplorable schism that led to founder member Keith Rowe leaving the group. Come to think of it, Rowe’s tabletop style of guitar playing is clearly a direct antecedent of Siewert’s, although Siewert often plays in a more conventional style as well. Anyway, what AMM taught me, and Efzeg reminded me of, was the importance of concentration and close listening as a means of situating oneself within a musical environment.

That makes the whole thing sound like some kind of bloodless sonic experiment; nothing could be further from the truth. Over the course of two longish sets, the group’s four instrumentalists proposed a layered approach in which the saxophone, guitars and turntable each traced their own paths before coalescing into a pulsating and vertiginous wall of sound. The amiable Boris Hauf’s spare, astringent sax was bolstered by the quietly flickering guitar of the studious figure next to him, Burkhard Stangl. On the other side of the stage, Siewert was in abstract tabletop mode for the most part, occasionally exploding into fractured power chords. Next to him, dieb13 was to be seen thoughtfully looking through his records before deciding which one to play next, their soft drones adding layers of snowy interference. Meanwhile, visual artist and fifth member Billy Roisz was using the group’s audio as input for her analogue visual feedback projections. Constantly evolving in response to the shifting textures of the music, Roisz’s bold grids and insectoid patterns provided a hypnotic visual correlative. Taking the music and the visuals together, the overall effect was of a mysterious and unresolved entity stubbornly resisting capture. I sincerely hope the group continues to play live, despite the depressing lack of interest shown in this outing.

Codeine, Vienna Szene Wien, 30 May 2012

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Of all the groups to reform in recent years, Codeine must have been one of the least likely to do so. When I first saw the announcement, I simply assumed that it must have been another band using their name. But, of course, there can only be one Codeine. The story goes that the original line-up of vocalist and bassist Stephen Immerwahr, guitarist John Engle and drummer Chris Brokaw were persuaded to reunite for some live shows by the Numero Group label, to mark the unlikely release of a colossal Codeine box set. There are no further shows planned, and no new material, which is probably just as well.

I never saw Codeine during their original incarnation in the early 90s, but I quickly fell under the spell of their two LPs, Frigid Stars and The White Birch. As a Swans fan, I detected something of Swans’ unremittingly gloomy muse and fondness for sledgehammer percussion in Codeine, although Codeine were sparser and more interested in exploring space and texture than Swans ever were. What I liked most about the records was the grinding sense of bleakness that pervaded every aspect of Codeine, from their anaesthetized name to the austerity of the White Birch cover, from Brokaw’s (and, later, Doug Scharin’s) dispassionate thud to Immerwahr’s cracked pleadings. This was music that knew it had nowhere to go, and was in absolutely no hurry to get there.

Codeine played live in Vienna three times during the 90s, and Immerwahr told the Szene audience how much they had enjoyed their previous visits. (In a further quirk, the cover of the Barely Real EP is a photo of the Upper Belvedere.) Eighteen years since the last of those, Codeine played a spellbinding set that dwelt heavily on the frozen isolation evoked by their past. Immerwahr intoned spare, haunting texts in a hesitant voice laced with caution, mixed low down to blend in lugubrious harmony with Engle’s stark strumming. Brokaw’s percussion, meanwhile, dictated the funereal pace at which the concert unfolded.

Brokaw, Engle and Immerwahr seem like genuinely nice guys, not above chatting at length to fans at the merch table both before and after the gig (this was the first time I’ve ever seen all the members of a headlining group work their own merch table, by the way) and with many a smile and a nod to each other onstage. There was the faint trace of a smile on Immerwahr’s face, too, as he introduced the evening’s final song, the tender and strangely moving “Broken-Hearted Wine”. Acknowledging that many of the foregoing songs had dealt in unutterable pain and sadness (I’m paraphrasing), he hoped that this last one would send us home with some good cheer in our hearts. Since the song in question went “you can come on over, cry on my shoulder and drink broken-hearted wine”, it could only offer a moderate amount of comfort. But by that time Codeine had given so much that it hardly seemed to matter at all.

Tindersticks, Vienna Theater Akzent, 7 and 8 May 2012

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Not much to add to my review of Tindersticks’ March concert in Vienna, in which I tried to articulate my ambivalent feelings as a long-time fan about the group’s change in direction since their split and subsequent regrouping. I will say that, over the course of this two-night residency, the Something Rain songs gained a sense of confidence and purpose that had certainly been lacking in the rather cautious earlier performance. Terry Edwards’ extended sax solo at the end of “Come Inside” was simply gorgeous, while the importance of David Boulter’s role as musical director was underscored time and time again by his shimmering and lustrous keyboard arrangements. On the other hand, Boulter’s spoken word narrative on “Chocolate” fell wretchedly flat. I’ve heard this song described as a close relative of “My Sister”, but there’s really no comparison between that early masterpiece and this mundane tale with its silly twist.

In six years of concertgoing in Vienna, I’d never previously been to Theater Akzent. The venue’s location was interesting in that it allowed me to gawp en route at the Theresianum, the famous private school next door, which I’d never seen before either. I hope the Akzent is used for gigs more often in the future, since the acoustics on these two evenings were full and clear. In fact, this was one of the principal benefits of these shows as against the March one. The Akzent was quite a bit bigger than I had expected, with circle as well as stalls seating, and the group were able to crank up the levels nicely compared to the rarefied atmosphere of the Radiokulturhaus. The girl sitting next to me was even blocking her ears during the loudest parts, which was not something I ever thought I’d see at a Tindersticks show. We’re not talking Swans levels here, but there was definitely a sense of the group using volume to enhance the impact of the music.

This turn to loudness made the transported demeanour of Stuart Staples all the more understandable. Looking like a respectable country gentleman from a Hardy novel, Staples closes his eyes while singing as if physically affected by the bittersweet intensity of his songs. And one can hardly blame him, confronted as he is by the painful resignation that dwells deep within songs like “Factory Girls” – a post-split song, to be sure, but also one of the evenings’ saddest and most deeply affecting moments. Having given so much stylish pleasure over the years, Tindersticks continue to enchant and delight.

Philip Glass: Einstein on the Beach, London Barbican Centre, 5 May 2012

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Like many people of my generation, I suspect, my first exposure to Philip Glass was via his soundtrack to Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. I probably saw this film for the first time sometime in the late 80s at the Duke of York’s in Brighton, where it was a staple of late-night double bills, and it quickly became a firm favourite thanks to Glass’s pulsating score just as much as to Reggio’s mesmerizing visuals. Some years later, I saw the Philip Glass Ensemble perform this piece and Powaqqatsi as live soundtracks at the Barbican, which seems to have been the venue for almost all of my live encounters with Glass. I also saw him present one of his symphonies (no idea which one) at the Barbican sometime in the early 2000s, which was filmed and broadcast live on BBC4, oddly enough; and I even caught up with him in Salisbury City Hall, of all places, at around the same time. In 2007, I travelled to London from Vienna to see Book of Longing, his collaboration with Leonard Cohen, and the epic Music in 12 Parts, my favourite of all his compositions. Now, five years later, I found myself doing the same thing again, this time to see his opera Einstein on the Beach. (Although Glass is a globetrotter, frequently giving performances of his own music, he has never played in Vienna in the six years I’ve been living here.)

Glass is by some distance my favourite composer of classical music, yet I’m well aware that he is regarded with sniffiness by some elements of the classical establishment. The reasons I like him are, I suspect, not entirely dissimilar from the reasons for that sniffiness: his prolific output, his high public profile, what many consider a relative lack of complexity to his work, his readiness to appeal to the heart over the head and his persistent exploitation of a number of specifically limited musical tropes. In short, Glass behaves almost like a rock musician, an attitude that is fine with me.

What I like most about Glass’s music, though, are his glorious, pounding ostinatos and arpeggios, those vast maze-like constructions in sound that seem to go on forever, endlessly multiplying and revivifying themselves. There are few more vital and euphoric sounds in all of contemporary music, to my mind, and they are all over his score for Einstein on the Beach, his groundbreaking opera realized in collaboration with theatre director Robert Wilson. Wilson was known to me – I vividly recall his haunting installation HG, shown at the old Clink Prison in London in 1995 – but this was the first time I had seen one of his theatrical productions. It couldn’t really fail, and it didn’t, instantly becoming one of the most beguiling and memorable live performances I’ve ever witnessed.

In its advance publicity, the Barbican made great play of the fact that audience members were free to come and go as they wished during this five-hour, no-interval performance. In practice, though, very few people left their seats. I certainly didn’t leave mine until the time came to give the cast a hugely deserved standing ovation at the end. Consisting of nine 20-minute scenes and five interludes known as “knee plays”, the opera proceeded with scant attention to plot or narrative but still kept me engrossed from start to finish. There was just so much to marvel at, so much that took the breath away: the dancers with their beautifully choreographed movements, the spaceship scene with its stunning wall of light, Andrew Sterman’s powerful tenor sax solo in the ‘Building’ scene, the virtuoso violin of Antoine Silverman, the miraculous, word-perfect singers, the uncanny calm of the infinitely repeated numbers: in sum, the transcendental interplay between light and darkness, sound and silence, words and music, movement and stillness. Einstein on the Beach is a landmark achievement, nothing less than a reimagining of the limits of theatre in the modern age.

Michael Gira, Vienna Chelsea, 23 April 2012

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There’s not much that can stop Michael Gira from singing when he’s in full-throated rage mode. Those who foolishly spend their time talking instead of listening will probably earn themselves a caustic putdown. The last time he played solo in Vienna, some hapless individual with a video camera (who was, unbelievably, part of the promoter’s team) clambered onstage and started filming Gira in close-up, causing the singer to break off in mid-song and shout “get off the f***ing stage” repeatedly until the miserable cur backed away. And last month at the Chelsea, Gira met a new nemesis: a wasp. He called it a bee, but I was close enough to see it, and it definitely looked like a wasp to me. The wretched vespid landed on Gira’s microphone mere inches from his mouth, whence it could easily have flown had he not expectorated forcefully in mid-song and driven the little bugger away.

That was just one of many fine moments in this intense and draining concert, during which Gira presented stripped down acoustic versions of Swans and Angels of Light tunes, plus several as yet unrecorded songs. For all Gira’s easygoing onstage banter, what came across most strongly were the anger and tragedy that flow through these relentlessly bleak songs. There seems little room for warmth or hope in Gira’s universe, little sense that the despair he evokes is anything other than an immutable condition. He communicates that despair not only via his texts – long, discursive lyrics shot through with violent and apocalyptic imagery – but in his stark, bony guitar playing and the extraordinary reach of his baritone. That voice dominates the performance. Stricken, vulnerable and brimming with pain and rage, it is a voice of immense and unutterable sadness. And listening to the inexorable force which with Gira sings, you come to the conclusion that his harrowing worldview is the only one that makes sense anymore.

Shearwater, Vienna Chelsea, 13 April 2012

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A very stimulating evening in the company of American art rock quintet Shearwater, playing their first show in Vienna to a sold out Chelsea crowd. By way of background, I only got to know about Shearwater because singer and songwriter Jonathan Meiburg is a former member of Okkervil River, whose last four albums I’ve admired immensely.  Not to mention that Okkervil River’s 2008 concert at Porgy & Bess is in the running for best concert I’ve ever seen. (Despite touring extensively all over Europe last year, they have of course come nowhere near Vienna since that superlative show.) Meiburg appears to have left Okkervil River sometime after 2008’s The Stand Ins, although a close reading of the credits to that and the two previous OR albums reveals that he had no hand in writing any of the songs on them. In theory, therefore, liking Okkervil River was no guarantee that I would also like Shearwater.

As it turned out I needn’t have worried, since Shearwater were a highly impressive outfit in their own right. Meiburg may have lacked something of Will Sheff’s dramatic and powerful stage presence, but he more than made up for it with his searing guitar work and beautifully controlled vocals that constantly threatened to erupt into a stentorian roar – and, indeed, frequently did so. If it was next to impossible to make out most of the words, that was less due to any lack of clear delivery on Meiburg’s part and more a case of his texts having to fight it out for supremacy against the overwhelming force of the group’s sound. With two keyboard players also doubling up on guitar, and a drummer whose unrelenting rhythms were pushed way up high in the mix, the effect was frequently breathtaking.

What I liked most was the gravity and seriousness of it all. Although Meiburg and the rest of the group were relaxed and funny between songs, once in flight (to borrow a metaphor from Meiburg’s beloved birds), they invoked total commitment and an almost confrontational fervour. A song like “Animal Life” begins with a placid tone and an elegant vocal line, before straying unsettlingly into an environment laced with claustrophobic anxiety. Like many of their songs, it ends abruptly and with a minimum of fuss, as does the exuberant cover of REM’s “These Days” with which they close the evening. Stripped of all histrionics and melodrama, Shearwater possess a brooding and ominous attitude that grips the listener tightly by the throat.

Ken Vandermark’s Resonance Ensemble, Vienna Porgy & Bess, 12 March 2012

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Ken Vandermark as big bandleader; here was an element of the workaholic American’s repertoire that I hadn’t previously heard.  Needless to say the saxophonist is no stranger to large ensembles, having for years played a key role in Peter Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet.  And while the Resonance Ensemble has certain formal similarities to that formidable aggregation – many-headed reed and brass sections, bass, twin drummers – it’s also a jazzier, more swinging collective than the Tentet.  Those qualities were much in evidence at a reasonably full, but by no means packed (it being a Monday) Porgy & Bess, still my favourite live music venue in Vienna.  The opening 30-minute section was a kaleidoscopic swirl of moods, kicking off with a long, devastating tenor solo from centre-stage sax man Dave Rempis.  As the piece wore on, it morphed into a graceful and flowing ensemble piece in which each musician was given a chance to shine.

Having experienced Vandermark mostly in full-on improv mode alongside the likes of Brötzmann, Mats Gustafsson and Paal Nilssen-Love, it was salutary to see him work in a more composed environment.  Every so often he would give signals to the rest of the ensemble, presumably to communicate some desired course of action, while the music stands dotted around the stage carried the implication that the music was at least partly prepared in advance.  Whatever the extent of composition, though, the music was never less than fresh and immediately appealing.

The second set saw the group leap headfirst into its most positively enjoyable territory, and this was the part of the evening that seemed to bear Vandermark’s imprint most strongly.  There’s no finer sound in jazz than when he crashes into a delirious, overdriven melody and tussles with it into oblivion, and when that sound is reinforced by nine other gifted musicians, responding to his lead with their own joyous contributions, the results are simply overwhelming.

Tindersticks, Vienna Radiokulturhaus, 2 March 2012

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It was a great pleasure to make a rare visit to one of my favourite venues, the Radiokulturhaus.  And what made the evening even more memorable was that it was for a Tindersticks concert, my first since December 2008.  Not just any old Tindersticks concert, mind you, but the opening night of their 2012 tour and an exclusive radio session for FM4.  As is usual with such events, tickets were only available to competition winners.  I didn’t win one, of course, but that didn’t stop me from getting in.

This wasn’t planned as the first night of the tour but it ended up that way, the group’s shows in London the week before having been cancelled due to Stuart Staples suffering from a throat infection.  The singer was obviously aware of the need to go easy on his voice, and the set was rather subdued as a result.  It was also only nine songs long, but that’s par for the course with these radio sessions; no doubt I’ll get my fill when they return to Vienna for two nights in May.

As for this evening’s concert, it encapsulated everything that makes Tindersticks so precious, but also gave an awkward reminder of what has been irretrievably lost.  The group’s first six pre-split records constitute a body of work that has, over the years, affected me more deeply than that of just about any other artist.  The juxtaposition of swooning romanticism, crepuscular intimacy and gloomy resignation etched a view of the world that I immediately recognized and took to heart.  Somehow, though, the split and the later reformation have irrevocably altered Tindersticks’ DNA.

Staples has always maintained a frustrating silence on the specifics of the break-up, but he did signal that he felt the group had reached a creative impasse after 2003’s harrowing Waiting For The Moon which they needed to overcome.  Unfortunately, the resulting transformation involved not only the departure of violinist Dickon Hinchcliffe (whose weeping strings had been central to the group’s sound) but also a shedding of some of the key songwriting impulses that had made those first six albums so essential.  Each of the three post-split albums – The Hungry Saw, Falling Down A Mountain and now The Something Rain – has contained one or two gems, but on the whole they’ve been mild, tentative affairs, lacking the orchestral sweep and wired emotional impact of their predecessors.

And so this abbreviated set, consisting as it did of four old songs followed by five new ones, presented a microcosm of Tindersticks’ musical journey.  Staples may have been guarding his voice but he was in fine mood throughout, persuasively conducting the five gifted musicians around him and throwing joyful moves on guitar and tambourine.  “Cherry Blossoms” was sublime in its stillness, “If You’re Looking For A Way Out” raw with soulful anger.  Of the new songs, I especially liked “Slippin’ Shoes” with its infectious chorus, and the climactic rush of “Show Me Everything”.  They may never recapture the greatness of their earlier incarnation, but Tindersticks are still the masters of sombre, intelligent songcraft.

Hermann Nitsch, Vienna Donaucitykirche, 25 January 2012

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Not really a concert, but still an event worthy of note, this was the first time I had seen Hermann Nitsch play the organ and the first time he had done so in Vienna for many years. Although I’ve made a couple of passing references to Nitsch on this blog, the man’s importance to my way of thinking has never been properly acknowledged here. This review is not the place to rectify that, except to note that in the six years I’ve been living in Vienna, the life and work of the Viennese Actionists, and Nitsch (the only one of the four still active) in particular, has become increasingly central to me. I was, though, an admirer of Nitsch’s work before I came here, and attended his 2002 action at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Since moving to Austria, I’ve made three pilgrimages to his castle at Prinzendorf, as well as attending CD and DVD presentations at which he was present. I arrived just a couple of months too late to witness his stunning eight-hour action at the Burgtheater in 2005, but he’s planning another six-day action at Prinzendorf in 2014 and I fully intend to be there.

In the meantime, this was a fairly bizarre event for Nitsch – a launch event for a new book on the subject of the Catholic Holy Mass, Die Heilige Messe: Kultisch, Szenisch, Sinnlich, Mystisch, to which he had made a written contribution. Having participated in a lengthy panel discussion with the other co-authors (which of course went completely over my head), and having politely sat through seemingly endless iterations of a short choral piece composed by the book’s publisher Peter Jan Marthé and sung by the church choir, the Actionist stationed himself at the Donaucitykirche’s, let’s face it, rather small organ, and improvised on it for half an hour or so. Two assistants stood either side of him and presumably (since it was impossible to see what they were doing) helped him to play the thing.

It was also an unusual event for me, in that it was the first time I had been to the Donaucitykirche for several years. A stone’s throw from my former workplace at the UN, this unassuming place of worship was also the venue for a number of winter concerts organized by my son’s former kindergarten, at which he was a vocal and enthusiastic participant.

My only previous exposure to Nitsch’s organ playing was the magnificent Die Geburt des Dionysos Christos box set, with its 1986 audio and video recordings of him playing the massive Brucknerhaus organ in Linz. Given the vast scale of that performance, I was rather taken aback by how puny the Donaucitykirche’s instrument looked and sounded. Of course there was no comparison between the two, although I still found Nitsch’s layered durational tones in this brief performance to be celestial and inspiring. At around the twenty-minute mark the volume increased markedly, causing Nitsch’s exquisite drones to hover and drift mesmerisingly to the end.