Go Rapid!

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(A rare non-music piece…)

With my son and I having become regulars at the home games of Rapid Vienna this season, it’s my fervent hope and expectation that they will run out champions of the Austrian Bundesliga this year. The men in green and white have been in scorching form of late, with their recent run of scorelines telling its own story: 5-2, 5-1, 5-0, 8-1… At the time of writing they are a mere three points behind leaders Salzburg in the table, with plenty of time to make up the deficit before the end of the season.

There are of course two Bundesliga teams in Vienna, but Rapid’s deadly rivals FK Austria, who play at the Horr Stadion in the 10th district, need not concern us for long. Connoisseurs of the beautiful game are advised to head instead for the Gerhard Hanappi Stadion near Hütteldorf station, where around 18,000 committed fans make their way each week to see Rapid play their exciting, attacking style of football.

Rapid’s star striker, the 6’8” Stefan Maierhofer, has had a stunning season so far, scoring 18 goals in 20 games. He forms a highly effective partnership with the team’s captain Steffen Hofmann, who creates frequent chances in the air for Maierhofer and displays a Beckham-like precision with free kicks.

There’s a certain choreographed beauty to the activities of Rapid’s hardcore fans, the Ultras, in the west stand of the stadium during a game. They let off flares, sing intricate chants and display fiercely worded banners declaring their fervent devotion to the team. On match days the streets around the stadium are thronged with real Viennese; this is about as far from tourist Vienna as it’s possible to get.

(originally published in Ether Magazine)

Ether column, December 2008

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For once I don’t have any concerts at all to recommend in Vienna this month; there just doesn’t seem to be much going on here as the year draws to a close. Come with me instead, then, to Bratislava, where those willing to make the short journey across the Slovakian border will be rewarded with a festival featuring some of the key names in European experimental music.

Regular readers of this column will not be surprised to learn that my top tip for the Next Festival is the German free improvising saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, here performing in his well established power trio with bassist Marino Pliakas and drummer Michael Wertmueller. By the end of this year Brötzmann will have played over 100 gigs in Europe, Japan, North and South America, a remarkable achievement for a musician of any age, let alone one of 67 whose performances are as high-energy and draining as this man’s are. But that is Brötzmann’s way: to play until he can play no more, because there’s nothing else for him to do.

Other artists appearing at the festival this year include Phil Minton, Ilpo Vaisanen and Hildur Gudnadottir. Minton is a great English eccentric, a free improvising vocalist who has spent the last thirty years exploring the possibilities of the human voice as a sound source. In Bratislava he will be presenting his unique Feral Choir project, a workshop followed by a performance with non-professional singers. As Minton says, “anyone who can breathe is capable of producing sounds that give a positive aesthetic contribution to the human condition.” Vaisanen is one half of Finnish electronic duo Pan Sonic, a forbiddingly loud and fierce unit who blend industrial-strength drones with ear-bleeding techno rhythms. When I lived in London in the early 90s I once spent a memorable evening watching them drive around an empty car park in an armoured vehicle which had been kitted out with a massive speaker system and was spitting out wave after wave of abstract noise. It made a lot of sense at the time.

Gudnadottir is a classically trained cellist from Iceland. She played on Pan Sonic’s most recent album and also arranged the choir that graced In the Shadow of the Sun, the live soundtrack to a film by the late Derek Jarman which was performed by Throbbing Gristle at the 2007 Donaufestival in Krems. She, Vaisanen and Dirk Dresselhaus (a.k.a. Schneider TM) will be performing together at the festival as Angel, a collaborative project which has so far released two albums on Peter Rehberg’s Editions Mego label. And that’s your lot for 2008.

Concerts and albums of 2008

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Concerts of the year

Here’s a list of the ten concerts I enjoyed most this year. It’s been an exceptional twelve months for live music around these parts, and it was very hard indeed to whittle it down to ten shows. There’s not much of an order to these ten, with the exception of No. 1, which was far and away the best night of music I heard all year.

1. Okkervil River (Porgy & Bess)
2. Neil Young (Austria Center)
3. Peter Brötzmann/Ken Vandermark/Marino Pliakas/Michael Wertmüller (Porgy & Bess)
4. American Music Club (WUK)
5. Marissa Nadler (Vorstadt)
6. Whitehouse (Rhiz)
7. Leonard Cohen (Konzerthaus)
8. Anthony Braxton (Krakow)
9. Heather Nova (Gasometer)
10. A Silver Mt Zion (Arena)

Albums of the year

I haven’t listened to much recorded music at all this year. Take five:

1. Kathleen Edwards – Asking For Flowers (Zoë)
2. Okkervil River – The Stand-Ins (Jagjaguwar)
3. Mary Hampton – My Mother’s Children (Navigator)
4. Original Silence – The Second Original Silence (Smalltown Superjazzz)
5. Anthony Braxton – The Complete Arista Recordings (Mosaic)

Anthony Braxton, Krakow, Poland, 6 December 2008

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With the memory of Anthony Braxton‘s inspirational concert at Porgy & Bess last year still remarkably fresh in my mind, it was a no-brainer to make the 600-mile round trip to Krakow to catch the maestro in action again. Playing with the same septet as the last time I saw him, Braxton did not disappoint, playing two engrossing hour-long sets (for the record, they were Compositions 356 and 183).

There was real group interaction onstage; I’ve never seen a group of musicians exchange so many signs, nods, glances and smiles on a stage as this lot did. This degree of communication between the group’s members was testament to the fact that there was a fair old degree of improvisation going on, even though all of them had scores in front of them and appeared to be following those scores pretty intently for most of the time.

Braxton was the star, of course – an utterly formidable onstage presence, powering the music along with his endlessly vital saxophone work. Of the rest, I particularly enjoyed Mary Halvorson’s contributions on guitar. There was something very Fripp-like about her playing, with its hard, splintery quality. I wasn’t greatly impressed by Taylor Ho Bynum on the brass, he seemed rather smug and histrionic to me (in marked contrast to the more focused energies of the rest of the group) and at times the brashness of his playing threatened to drown out the subtleties of the music altogether. Ultimately, though, this – my last concert of 2008 – was an enthralling performance.

Tindersticks, Vienna Arena, 4 December 2008

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A great pleasure and a relief to see Tindersticks live again after so long (five years, by my reckoning, my last time having been the Old Market in Hove in 2003), when at one stage it looked distinctly unlikely that they would ever perform together again. Inevitably something has been lost with the line-up changes. It’s not the same without Dickon Hinchcliffe, for one thing, and of course the new album doesn’t measure up to anything they did with the old line-up. This is not just the disgruntled bleat of a long-time fan who hates change. I’ve lived with The Hungry Saw for months now, and the fact of the matter is that it is sadly lacking in the melodic inventiveness and sense of bruised drama that every Tindersticks album up to now has luxuriated in.

As expected, this sense of disappointment translated fairly accurately into the live setting. The group knocked out dutiful renditions of every song on the album, but the guts, emotion and romance that I have grown to love Tindersticks for were only present in the pre-Hungry Saw songs. On the other hand, the upheaval has clearly lifted a weight from Staples’ shoulders; I’ve never seen him smile more often during a concert.

An irate footnote to wish no thanks at all to the girl with short dark hair near me who talked in a loud voice to her friends throughout the entire show, including the quiet songs. At the end of the main set Staples even commented on her rudeness, saying “it’s been great playing for you… except for the woman down there.” But she can’t have been listening. She just kept on talking.

Letter to The Wire, December 2004

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[Just unearthed this old letter to The Wire which I wrote after the death of John Balance.   It was never published, but I feel like putting it up here anyway.]

My enjoyment of Chris Bohn’s account of John Balance’s funeral (The Masthead, The Wire 251) was marred by the rank theorising with which the piece concluded.  I read with disbelief Bohn’s comment that “Balance’s commitment to such exacting creative methods inevitably took its toll.”  Balance was a sick man, an alcoholic, and the alcohol coursing through his body was not a life force but a death force.  It ill behoves The Wire to imply that there is something creatively important about the alcoholism of Balance and other artists that sets them apart from the great mass of people suffering from this addiction.  The suggestion that Balance drank in order to “experiment with [his] own and [his] audience’s senses” is as gratuitous as it is offensive to the thousands who, in their daily struggles with alcoholism, don’t have the benefit of cutting-edge magazine editors giving them the respectability conferred by the notion that it is all heroically being done in the name of Art.

Evan Parker/Alex von Schlippenbach/Paul Lovens, Porgy & Bess, Vienna, 3 December 2008

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Evan Parker was the first free jazz/improv saxophonist I ever heard, and the one who made me fall in love with this kind of music. Before I had heard Ayler, Braxton or Brötzmann, Parker was the one who showed me that the saxophone could be a source of great passion and intensity. Live, his serpentine solos and jaw-dropping circular breathing technique burned themselves into me in a way that very few rock performers had ever done.

It’s been a long time since I saw Parker live – there was a stimulating collaborative show with Zoviet France, a phenomenal trio gig at the old Vortex in Stoke Newington, and a concert in Brighton with Spring Heel Jack – so it was great for me to see him for the first time in Vienna, this time as part of his long-standing trio with pianist Alex von Schlippenbach and drummer Paul Lovens. Their improvisational instincts honed by many years of playing together, the trio proceeded to play two long and engrossing sets. Schlippenbach was an agile and eloquent pianist, Lovens an enthralling presence on the drums. Parker was the star for me, but at the end of the day this concert, like all the best group-based improvisation, was an extended conversation between these three gifted musicians.

Peter Brötzmann/Mats Gustafsson/Ken Vandermark, Fluc Wanne, Vienna, 2 December 2008

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Just another evening of great intensity from Sonore, following on from the last time I saw them in the summer. Entertainingly, the gig took place in the blasted post-holocaust surroundings of the Fluc Wanne, not a place where beardy jazz fans are often seen. I know Einstürzende Neubauten played some early gigs under an autobahn, but is there any other venue in the world that sits in a former pedestrian subway?

Funnily enough it was Mats Gustafsson who emerged as the star of this particular show, for me at least. I loved the way he wrestled with his outsize reed instruments, looking as though he was fighting to bring them under control. His resonant low-end horns provided some vestige of a rhythmic structure to these short, hard-hitting pieces, around which Brötzmann and Vandermark improvised forcefully.

Rhys Chatham, Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna, 28 November 2008

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These pages are seriously backed up, so there’s only time for brief reviews of all the recent gigs, starting with Rhys Chatham at the Tanzquartier Wien (which is actually in the Kunsthalle). This was a fine evening of avant rock, with Chatham joined onstage by eight other guitarists (including Eric Arn of Primordial Undermind) and Bernhard Fleischmann on the drums. Together they made a fearsomely powerful noise which was, nonetheless, controlled and rigorous in its execution. Chatham’s instinctive understanding of crescendo and release was hugely impressive.