Tectonics Festival 2023: The Report

With key figures behind the scenes on both festivals, it’s easy to see the two major experimental festivals that bookend April in Glasgow as two sides of the same coin. While Counterflows early in the month had a cross-genre focus on the forward-thinking, Tectonics leans towards contemporary classical, centring around the Scottish Symphony Orchestra, whilst a cast of venerable experimental icons runs parallel. This, combined with the brief gaps between sets mean that this year's Tectonics feels like a relentless cavalcade of quality. 

Saturday 29 April

Carl Stone is an early highlight of Saturday. The esteemed legend of sampling shifts away from the recent pop-warping brilliance of his Unseen Worlds records, previewing works from his upcoming release that edges back towards the long-form abstraction of his early works. The opening piece is gorgeous. The colossal but weightless landscape of warped synths sounds like a field recording of purgatory, provided that purgatory is spent in the bootup screen of a Playstation 2.

The set's centrepiece, an extended work that pushes into some of the most bracing music of the weekend, is a remarkable display of his virtuosic manipulation of samples. He mulches and reforms the briefest of vocal snippets into the kind of plasticky swoops that SOPHIE made her own, building and building until it’s an utterly cacophonous, completely oppressive but somehow soothing whirl of sound. Amid this, Stone stands there centre stage in his zip-up fleece, waving his iPad like he’s trying to manoeuvre a toy helicopter with a gammy remote control. It’s just brilliant. 

Lucrecia Dalt too is magnificent, and a real get for the festival, given Dalt has gone relatively supernova following last year’s ¡Ay! becoming the breakout experimental hit of the year. In person, it’s clear to see why. Dalt has been putting out superb work for nearly two decades, and handles the new focus immaculately, bringing real charisma to the ¡Ay! songs she presents tonight and slinking about the stage in an immaculate suit to the magnificent syncopations of her live-wire drummer. He perches amid a nest of myriad percussive options, building from sparse delicate rhythms to spinning and ricocheting into a tornado of clattering intensity. The highlight is a simultaneously swooning and snarling rendition of La desmesura, its seasick atmosphere lingering long after they’ve left the stage.

Image: Lucrecia Dalt live at Tectonics Festival, Glasgow by BBC / Alex Woodward

The SSO, though, are the dominant figures in the festival. Acting as headliners on both nights, they draw the biggest crowd and remain what you most hear discussed across the two days. The two shows they perform are great, primarily premiering unheard material by some of the finest composers around.

The opening piece on Saturday in the Old Fruitmarket – the stones in the river by our camp / the space on the ground where we lay – is an incredibly evocative Rufus Isabel Elliot commission, and possibly the finest new work on display across the two nights. An unhurried piece built through slowly unfurling string movements, it moves in drifts more than any direct fashion. It's so delicate it feels as if it could collapse at any moment, but never cloying in any way. Sunday’s highlight is the debut of Ian Power’s BYE BYE LOVE, a hulking monument of mounting tension and discord, as well as a version of Margriet Hoenderdos’ Hunker, schor & hasselaar; an infinitely more grand work than her usual chamber compositions, but no less moving. 

Sunday 30 April

The rest of Sunday is, by and large, a more toned down affair with less abrasive edges, as if the programme itself is nursing its hangover. Limpe Fuchs has an incredible presence that comes with having been producing influential work on the margins for a good six decades, and her percussive show feels as much a statement on manipulating the tension in a room as a musical one. She prowls amongst her grand, homemade wind chimes that look like giant, brutalist jellyfish, often vocalising with squawks and yelps in a manner that is quietly captivating in terms of spectacle if not necessarily musically enrapturing. Lucy Duncombe & Feronia Wennborg too create interesting, subtly abrasive soundscapes, but their foregrounding of monotonous spoken-word – a trope that long ventured past self-parody – means they don’t quite hold the attention as they do on Duncombe’s solo records where she is singing. 

Image: Limpe Fuchs live at Tectonics Festival, Glasgow by BBC / Alex Woodward

There's an unavoidable split at Tectonics' core, between the contemporary classical world and the more abrasive performers on display. That split is quite literally demarcated, with the Grand Hall given over to the SSO and the more classically minded, whilst the downstairs Old Fruitmarket plays host to the avant-garde luminaries that make up the lineup’s other half. It does make for some interestingly breakneck tone shifts, no more so with the closing set from Jérôme Noetinger.

Following the headlining SSO means that many opt out of the set altogether, and some of those that have come just for the orchestra emphatically aren’t having his heavy tape loop distortion (it gets me an ‘I’ll see you at home’ from my partner). But those that stay are in store for a sublime set. His manipulation of his constantly rolling tape loop that he alters and attacks is a sight to behold, turning the Old Fruitmarket into a sonic war zone with the sheer intensity of sound he creates. The brilliant physicality of his disruption brings a real sense that this is electronic music in the truest elemental sense of the word; born of mishap and chaos. It’s a totally battering display and a magnificent closer. 

Noetinger’s set is indicative of a festival that brings truly brilliant things to the table, and while it may not necessarily bring all of its audience with it, it marks a decade of brilliant work, challenging them the way it always has, daring them to experience something new.