Instal 2010 @ Tramway, 12-13 Nov

Since its inception in 2001, Instal has established itself as one of the most important events in the UK’s sound art/avant-garde music calendar. This year, the venue has shifted from its former home at the Arches to the Tramway. The change has been good for the festival: as a dedicated art space, the Tramway is ideal to host the disparate mixture of live music, performance art, film, workshops and discussions on this year’s programme. With such a diverse approach, organisers Arika continue to challenge assumptions about what such events should involve: while Instal might, in earlier years, have been broadly characterised as an experimental music festival, this year the range of artists performing, and the emphasis on conceptual work, confounds such reductive definitions.

Evidently keen to emphasise this point from the outset, the organisers schedule several of the most bizarre and challenging work on the Friday. In the large central space of Tramway One, a highlight is the piece from performance artist Diego Chamy with improv musicians Jean-Luc Guionnet (saxophone) and Seijiro Murayama (drums). The latter pair open the performance with ten minutes or so of tentative improvisation, referencing a tradition that has developed its own conventions and orthodoxies since the 60s and 70s.

Any sense of implicit boundaries and understandings, however, is immediately lost when Chamy makes his appearance. With the musicians continuing to play behind him, Chamy explains to the crowd that he has received an email from a friend who has decided not to attend. Chamy then asks questions from the email to random audience members, along the lines of “why do you think improv is only liked by specialists and musicians?” and so forth.

It’s a clever conceit, encouraging the audience to reflect upon the value and relevance of improvised music, from which Chamy wrings plenty of humour. Things get truly surreal when, in response to the enquiry from an audience member “why don’t you just play a song?” (a one-liner which would be funny when uttered at more or less any Instal performance), Chamy suddenly launches into a Pythonesque pantomime song and dance routine.

There is less overt humour in Basque sound artist Mattin’s closing performance in Tramway One, but an even greater dependence upon audience participation. Using only two highly sensitive microphones placed in the centre of the room to generate sound, with a long delay loop of five minutes or so to gradually increase the level of noise, Mattin’s piece demands interaction to make things interesting. For the first ten minutes or so, almost nothing happens beyond some unintelligible muttering from Mattin; but as the crowd begin to interact, asking questions, the noise level gradually increases.

It is an ominous and unsettling experience to be trapped within these echoes and traces of your own activity; the sheer inexorability of increasing noise levels as the feedback grows posits the performance as a form of self-reflexive, collective narcissism. Towards the climax, as huge loops of feedback reverberate throughout the room, the lights are dimmed, alternating with bright flashes; this emboldens the crowd, some of whom are even inspired to dance.

Saturday moves away from Friday’s emphasis on audience participation. A performance from Pascal Le Gall consisting of the playing of four records, manipulated by pitch changes and surface noise, explores the idea of what constitutes live performance. The haunting strains of slowed-down strings, buried beneath layers of crackle, recall The Caretaker’s use of old gramophone records to investigate cultural memory.

Similarly, the screening of some of filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ found footage, featuring TV interviews with citizens of Harlem following the assassination of Malcolm X, encourages an attendance to the role of the artist in presenting works ostensibly created by others. Both pieces emphasise the inevitability of mediation – be it vinyl crackle or editing decisions – between source and art object; but the political charge of the latter piece gives it greater strength.

The most explicitly political piece of the night, however, comes from Christopher DeLaurenti, who presents an hour-long collection of field recordings capturing the anti-globalisation World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle in 1999. This is a painstakingly edited collection: crowd chants, drumming, sirens and screams are time-indexed alongside police radio recordings during the event. By turns rousing and disturbing, DeLaurenti’s work functions as a call-to-arms for protest movements – giving it a timely relevance in the UK’s current political climate – but also works as a purely aesthetic piece. It has a distinctive integrity and internal coherence that a visual document of the same events could not capture.

Saturday night culminates in performances from Florian Hecker and Catherine Christer Hennix, probably the two most high-profile artists at Instal this year. Hecker’s entwining arpeggios of hard-edged, acid-inspired noise fill the cavernous space of Tramway One, using something like eight different audio channels through speakers positioned around the room; the crowd are encouraged to wander around, experiencing the variations in sound. Despite (or perhaps because of) Hecker’s fondness for tortuously high frequencies, the piece sees more dancing, and is met with more rapturous applause, than any other events I attended.

Sonically, a sharp contrast follows, with Hennix’s piece Zero-Time. Conversely, this focuses exclusively on unremitting, immersive and gut-rumblingly heavy bass drones. Hennix’s work is underpinned by a heavily theorised interest in quantum physics and mathematics; the total subjection to sound that it enforces is the polar opposite of Friday’s highly interactive and conceptual works. Such intelligently-themed scheduling, and the diversity of approaches it allows, ensures that five years in, Instal continues to be both relevant and stimulating. As funding cuts in the arts loom, Arika have curated a programme this year that provides a powerful argument against them.