Team Brick (and friends), Headfall and Freeze Puppy, Saturday 18th September at the Cube Microplex, Bristol
Freeze Puppy seems to have his whole performance all wrapped up. Entering in contemplative mode, he ceremoniously circles his guitar, before picking it up and slowly putting it on... Armed with a toy saxophone, he stalks the microphone centre stage. The atmospherics in the background quieten, and the madness begins. I don't think there is anything quite like Freeze Puppy. He is at once hilarious, insane, musical, atonal and thought-provoking. OK, mainly thoughts like, what the hell is going on inside this man's head?, but with lyrics like I've got a frog in my throat and it's hungry, you have to wonder. He stares wildy about himself and gesticulates to rhythms that seem hidden in the music, pausing only to fix the sampler that seemed to get stuck in a loop which we hadn't realised wasn't part of the performance. His melodies are as random as his lyrics, but have a real comedic charm about them. This was a very special performance, which left me with a feeling that all was right with the world, if a bit off kilter.
Throughout Headfall's set I wished a few things. Firstly, that Freeze Puppy had just played for another hour. Other dreams included bands being able to tune guitars, being able to sing, originality... I liked the lyrics though. What we heard of them. Musically, echoes of Godspeed You Black Emperor and Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia - but out of tune, directionless and frustrating. They've been playing together for a long time - since 1997 - and I really don't understand why bands think it's cool, clever or musical to sound so bad. Personally I hate the White Stripes for the same reason. And I mean hate. There is potential for powerful emotions in there, some beautiful moments, but they were just moments which soon disappeared when the clumsiness returned. I don't want to rant too much. Critics seem to love this kind of music, they use words like 'raw' and 'honest' and 'increasing tonal awareness'. But I really think after 7 years of playing together people would work out that music is a bit more than playing out of tune and shouting.
*Breathes Heavily*
On to the main show. Team Brick + friends. Or 'fun with delays'. It seemed that the Cube was packed with friends of TB, the atmosphere was good, the band self-conscious, and the music - well - eclectic, drone-noise, was enlightening, soothing, frightening and indetermined. Every member, save perhaps the guy who stood in the back left corner behind a box of wires had some kind of strange delay effect to play through. In some tunes this worked to great effect and in others it was a little bit annoying. The drums sounded terrible, flat, cheap. I don't think this was intentional, and our man certainly bashed them as best he could in one of the louder numbers. For the finale a ramshackle choir sang a short round about fish or something - I'm not really sure where this fitted into the grand vision of things but while at the time I thought it was awful, in hindsight I can't imagine the evening ending any other way.
I have a few gripes, mainly about indeterminism and how I never liked it the first time round. Well when I was learning about it - obviously I wasn't born when Cage and their ilk were deliberately breaking the rules of all that's good and beautiful about music. When I studied modernism and postmodernism all I could think about was that this sort of 'music' should be left to the scientists and mathematicians - read about but never listened to - because they are merely reactions to aestheticians' attempts to quantify why music is such a powerful art. As soon as someone writes down music is beautiful / sublime because... there is always someone to react and write something that contradicts it, calling it music without realising that the result proves exactly why the first statement is closer to the truth. Think Stockhausen's Gruppen for three Orchestras. You either need a surround sound system or to experience it live to hear the true effect. Why can't you have three orchestras playing 3 different modern mathematical musical pieces in different time signatures and keys at the same time? Oh THAT's why.
So some parts of Team Brick's set - ones where real composition was involved, or seemed to be involved (I'm sure there are those who would disagree) - were absolutely amazing, the instruments weaving around each other, gorgeous chords and delay (of course). Others, well there was an element of improvisation around an idea just play this til I tell you to stop, which didn't really seem to mean anything. The highlight was the bass player asking if there was a sound engineer in the house because he couldn't hear himself, followed by a rant at how he'd been to two rehearsals while another member of the band had been more interested in playing Morrowind than practising.
At times it was fantastic at others shambolic, but I think this is what most people expect from such a dynamic and random performer. Most of the charm is that he saunters over to things and music just happens... It doesn't matter what. It was pretty much the direct opposite of Freeze Puppy's set, where he obviously had everything worked out to it's finest detail, random as it may sound, TB just went with what people felt like at the time. I'll definitely be going again, although I'm not sure why...
