Instal 2009, a Year on the Quiet

Instal festival has become, for those in the know, one of the most important musical events in the calendar to hear thrilling music from around the globe; and, for those not in the know, a faultless primer into this 'experimental' music thing they’ve been hearing all about. However, having cemented its reputation, Instal focused this year mostly on ultra-minimal music – doing little to dissuade popular parodies of the avant-garde – leaving the majority of 'brave new music' to the Giant Tank curated side stage.

Friday evening was a spectacular affair, set in the grand nave of Glasgow University Chapel. Why? So a handful of leading contemporary composers could go to work on the large organ housed within. First up was Eva-Maria Houben, whose enthusiastically minimal work featured but one note for the first twenty minutes, and little more than a handful more over the next 45. Rather than seem pretentious, though, this highly prolonged piece served rather as a meditative opportunity: difficult, it must be said, to critique in any usual way, but an interesting experience that was simultaneously transporting and a bit boring, and well worth being part of.

Following this, Toshimaru Nakamura and Jean-Luc Guionnet offered an entirely different mood: their rasping playing - the organ, aggressively used, with static-heavy sonics, no less aggressive, as its partner - proving genuinely frightening, exhilarating, and investigative in its commitment to finding new sounds.

The evening's headliner was the legendary Hermann Nitsch, who had sat through the previous performances looking like a be-suited Santa Claus, unafraid to mingle with an audience who will have been there mostly just for him. His recital was both stunning and frustrating. For most of his hour long performance, escalating chords and relentless yet harmonious horizons of notes were both staggeringly beautiful and blade-like in their sharpness. The only reservations about this performance were to do with the pauses, during which time the audience didn't know entirely how to respond, at times sitting quietly, at others clapping awkwardly. The Skinny has since heard that these pauses may simply have been the result of the octogenarian Nitsch struggling to maintain the fierce playing demands of his own piece; understandable, for sure, but an ever so slight mark on an otherwise inspiring performance.

Often, the actual highlights at Instal rarely tally with the predicted. On the Saturday, Steve McCaffery’s sound poem, Carnival, an aural equivalent of smashing typewriters together, was everything experimental music should be: bold, exhilarating, hilarious and invigorating. Elsewhere, locals Helhesten pretty much stole the whole show with their ultra-theatrical blend of awkward sea-shanties and exorcism ritual.

Most of the other exhilarating moments throughout the festival also mined this seam of different ways of using the voice as an instrument. Phil Minton’s spectacular 100-piece Feral Choir was a particularly awesome highlight. Volunteers signed up for vocal improvisation workshops with Minton, culminating in a staggering performance of conducted sweeps, wails, chattering and squawking that reverberated around The Arches in a study into the acoustics of the human voice.

Long-standing abstract singer Joan La Barbara showcased her best techniques such as circular singing and resonating a single note around her skull. However, for the most part, they were just that – a showcase of techniques rather than a complete show. Although when she performed a piece consisting of multiple conversations she proved herself an overwhelming and disorientating performer, a haunting drone to close her set was equally wonderful.

Unfortunately, the dominance of ultra-minimalism that dominated the program served to frustrate even the most seasoned deep-listener with a plethora of sets of forced contemplation while musicians undertook scores based entirely on restraint and almost absolute subtlety. That is not to say there weren’t moments of exquisite and minute beauty, such as Radu Malfatti and Klaus Filip’s duo for trombone and sine wave, doing the barest possible minimum to be considered a ‘performance’, dazzling not least of all for the technique required in blowing into a trombone without making a sound. But after numerous sets of near-silence – Michael Pisaro’s piece for 11 improvisers to do nothing and Seymour Wright’s wholly unsatisfying saxophone micro-fumbling – even the entertaining spectacle of watching a room full of people trying to be very, very quiet was wearing thin.

Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide’s Filament duo perhaps suffered from an audience tired of silence and seeking something with more velocity. Although their set consisted of satisfactory noises, they did not really hang together as a set and did not come across as the seasoned innovators that they are.

Also suffering from the minimal prevalence were the noisier acts, who had to fall upon ears attuned to utter calm.
The French duo of Jérôme Noetinger and Jean-Philipp Gross made a ferocious racket of altered electronics which bounced around an impressive surround sound set-up with noises circulating the room. Although, on the Giant Tank stage, Jean-Philipp Gross’s trio with members of Fordell Research Unit and muscle Tusk, was a lot less extravagant, but the blistering home-made electronics drone was more enjoyable, if less immersive.

Following a workshop of doing nasty things to radios, Tetsuo Kogawa’s intricate spectacle of manipulating circuit boards which then interfered with shortwave radios, resulting in him making a kind of DIY theremin as he went along, was, like so much of the programming, interesting conceptually, but not as a performance.

Nikos Veliotis was playing back every note possible on a cello in an hour long drone; whilst simultaneously powdering the same cello into a fine dust, which was then being bottled. Well, he would have been, had the blender not kept tripping the fuse and bringing the whole show to a complete stop, repeatedly. The absolute functionality of the show rather than using the acoustics of the cello deconstructions put this performance somewhere between gimmicky performance art and just watching two guys working.

The trio of Tamio, Shiraishi, Mico & Fritz Welch raised a gorgeous hullabaloo of no wave clattering and polyrythmic pummelling. It was a rare moment of the high-octane thrills that Instal used to provide constantly. Then they rather wonderfully closed the night with a brief glimpse of traditionally beautiful piano playing, a telling reminder that this is all music, after all.

Overall, this year’s line-up was relatively disappointing but Instal is still, and always will be, infinitely more entertaining and refreshing than the increasingly common music-festival-by-numbers. It is always special.