What are our expectations when we go to a festival? The reason that makes me decide is probably that of listening and watching musicians that I love, but then there is the desire to discover new things, to learn something, to face questions that will probably have no answers, to listen to music I don’t usually listen to.
Another reason to go to festivals is visiting places, meeting people, hopefully having fun and Mulhouse looks like a nice city, the location of the festival, a former textile industry plant renamed as Motoco, is beautiful and the atmosphere is relaxed and friendly.
A tiny bit of history:
The festival, born in 1983 as Jazz a Mulhouse, was initially dedicated to traditional jazz but, under the direction of Paul Kanitzer (from 1987 to 2006), soon developed in to something more explorative focused on improvised and experimental music. In 2009, it was renamed Météo (French for weather) to take account of the wavering of musical movements that are just as unpredictable as the weather is. So now you can be exposed to all kind of music and genders as the name of the festival reminds you: - Mulhouse Music Festival Météo – musiques aventureuses –
And let’s talk about the weather, I live in Italy where we had a very hot and dry summer, I arrived in Mulhouse on the 20 of August and it was raining…
Day 1, August 20
At 7 pm, after an introductory speech, the festival begins in what is called Motoco Club, the hall of the venue where there also is a bar, the ticket office and various stalls selling CDs, records, books and various merchandising.
To be true, the festival had already began at 11:30 am at the Public Library with section called Bambin Bamboche in which artists that will exhibit in the evening section of the festival, perform short concerts (about 30 minutes) and discuss their music in front of a public of young listeners. These events are performed on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Just to have an idea: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1452176199363505
Back at 7pm, the festival starts with the bagpipe of Erwan Keravec who plays a 20 minutes solo introducing us into a minimalistic atmosphere which would then be one of the main trends of this festival. Keravec is followed by a bagpipe duo that focused on a more traditional repertoire but always in the line of the search for an imaginary folklore. The fact that I am not able to tell you the names of the two players points out one of the few downsides of this festival: the choice to avoid producing any printed material to support the program, even if it is environmentally wise, nonetheless creates a few problems also because the information on the site isn’t always exhaustive or updated and sometimes is deleted leaving no possibility to recover the information. Anyway, the music is really charming and provides a good introduction for the evening concerts.
Outside it is raining, but not that much…
The evening concert is Kahil El Zabar Ethnic Heritage Ensemble with Kahil El Zabar drums, percussion and voice; Corey Wilkes trumpet; Kevin Nabors sax; Ishmael Ali cello. As you can expect it is a performance full of energy that engages the audience into a groovy atmosphere with some Ellington quote to mark the living heritage of this music. The concert ends with a vocal encore that Kahil dedicates to his mother.
Pause, then at 10:30 the second concert of the evening: Le Recueil des Miracles, a swiss ensemble with Louis Schild bass and shruti box, Antoine Lang voice and jaw harp, Anne Gilot flutes, Laurent Bruttin clarinet, Clara Levy violin, David Meier drums. A sudden change of atmosphere and the minimalist flavour of the early evening resurfaces, drums and clarinet and recorder develop (sometimes unison) motives on which the other musician build their intense melodies and patterns.
End of the first day, it is still raining.
Day 2 21 August
The first event is at 5:30 pm, the sky is cloudy but the rain has (almost) stopped. Motoco Club hosts a solo from Slovakian sax player Michaela Turcerova whose instrument is augmented with microphones and electronics to catch and amplify every sound and noise. In her hands the sax becomes a percussion that develops rhythmic patterns out of thin air and when played without mouthpiece, it sounds like a breath amplifier. Small percussion instruments, sand and stones add sound on sound.
- a digression to share some open questions - do extended techniques and electronics transform every instrument into a sound generator allowing to create a closer relation with the environment of the concert which is, as Cage suggested, a sound generator by definition or do they make every instrument just sound the same?
At 9 pm There Will Be No Miracles Here… well maybe there will be - Yolann Dahnier, Gweltaz Hervé, Erwan Keravec, Lionel Lepage, Enora Morice, Pierre Thébault, Quentin Viannais: bagpipes / Géraldine Foucault-Voglimacci, Hélène Labarriére, Erwan Lhermenier: basins. When on day one of the festival I heard Keravec playing the introductory solo gig, I must confess that I had no idea of his music, I just had a vague memory that he played in the Fire! Orchestra with Mats Gustafsson, now on day two I have done my homework and I am well aware that he is the man who has given the bagpipe a place in the contemporary music scene with a real interest in minimalism (one of his last project being a version for bagpipes of Terry Riley’s In C ). The setting is fascinating, in the white light of the Motoco post industrial hall seven bagpipe players in a semi-circle and in front of them three basin players and when the music starts, it is like being in a tank slowly filling with music, a drone irradiating and reflecting from the walls to the ears of the listeners and punctuated by the friction, the humming and the beats produced by the basins … a night to remember. Outside the first stars appear amid the clouds.
A pause, then at 10:30 pm Endless Breakfast with Gabby Fluke-Mogul, violin; Paula Sanchez, cello; Maria Portugal, drums. The trio offers an energetic mix of noise, extended techniques augmented with electronics, vocal melodies, quiet moments that let every single sound float and again a dive into the density of music. More than appropriate the quote from Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman.
In the midnight hour Selvhenter Maria Bertel, trombone; Sonja LaBianca, sax, Anja Jacobsen, drums; Jaleh Negari, drums. As you can imagine another energetic set with the trombone weaving bass lines, the sax creating a rhythmic structure for the two drummers to freely wedge in their lines. Sometimes a pause of filtered drumless sounds to build an intro to the circular beats that Jacobsen and Negari develop in a close dialogue. A nice way to stay awake in the night.
End of day two. More stars in the sky but no diamonds.
Day 3, 22 August
The sun is finally shining to bless the day early start at 12:30 pm with the Paula Sanchez solo at the Kunsthalle (the Contemporary Art Centre of National Interest of the City of Mulhouse). Her performance is preceded by the exhibition of the participants to the week-long workshop Souffler à l’Oreille organized by the Swiss musician Antoine Läng (Le Recueil des Miracles). The workshop and the exhibition are dedicated to the voice and the experimentation of materials articulated around breathing and related sounds, with bare voice and objects (megaphones, jaw harps, bird calls). And then Paula Sanchez's performance for cello, cellophane and electronics, all centered around gestures and postures and feedback inducing procedures caused by the friction of cellophane on the instrument, on the strings, on her body and on the bow and all the possible combinations of the above. You need to see it.
Late in the afternoon at 5:30 pm Kotekosk is a duo formed by Florian Borojevic and Louise Billaud, both on percussion and electronics. Their music is based on minimalist structures created on self-made metal percussion instruments, filtered and modified by vintage electronic instrument and gears, loops and cosmic sounds.
- Digression n 2 - electronic music, minimalism, ambient, free music, noise, industrial… As it has been recently observed on this blog, electronics is a common and constant feature in the work of many artist working in the niche of free/ experimental/ whatever music and as a consequence of the use of common technologies the boundaries among genders have become fuzzier and fuzzier (pun intended). But it is not only electronics, one of the most noticeably common element in this patchwork is, at least for me, the resurfacing of minimalistic structures and techniques which can be found in various and different context and that will probably add new layers of sense to the aesthetic of a movement which seemed, for quite a long time, frozen on its principles.
The evening concert at 9 pm was Irene Bianco, percussion and electronics. With a very neat setting Irene Bianco offered to the public an accurate mix of bass drum, electronics, gestures, tuned percussion and toys, generating a fragmented sonic and visual territory, the perfect soundtrack for an augmented reality experience.
A pause and at 10:30 pm DRANK a duo formed by Ingrid Schmoliner, prepared piano and Alex Kranabetter trumpet and electronics. With absolute precision Ingrid Schmoliner produces percussive minimalistic droning structures that hold up the sounds, the noises, the rustlings produced by Kranabetter’s trumpet. The result is a lush music that fills every available space.
Midnight is the hour of the shadow play and Pierre Bastien (cornet, objects, various inventions) and Louis Laurain (cornet, percussion, birdcalls) love playing - CNT is the name of their project and ambiguously stands for bunch of different things: abbreviation for Valve C(or)N(e)T ; acronym for « Confederación Nacional del Trabajo », a Spanish libertarian union based on the recognition of the human group; a group of two humans who play the valve cornet, a musical instrument commonly, and hardly ever, referred to as a trumpet.
The stage is framed by a white screen on which the shadow of the musician, of their instruments with their bizarre attachments, of their moving hands are projected. The first thing that strikes the public is the visual aspect: pataphysical machineries for a mechanical jungle, Jean Tinguely in a miniature… but then sounds and bruises and noises and music start emerging from these machineries and from the two human beings that manoeuvres them: organic techno and free jazz. To paraphrase Pascal Wyse of The Guardian two musical mad scientist. Mesmerizing.
1 am, Emotional Support - Emma Souharce, Aya Metwalli, Beatrice Beispiel (all of them electronics and voice) offer a polyphonic noise show in which voices and electronic sounds fuses and crashes to depict a loud nocturnal urban landscape. The windows of the hall vibrates producing parasite noises, outside the sky displays stars and clouds. End of day 3
Day 4, 23 August
- digression n 3 - many of the concert in this festival have a relevant visual component which works as an integral part of the music itself. Is music evolving into the Gesamtkunstwert (total work of art) that Wagner was wishing for? And is this a good thing?
5 pm, Gabby Fluke-Mogul solo. Alone with her violin, her effect pedals and her voice she produces a sort of synopsis of the American music with traditional melodies immersed into a distorted noisy Hendrixian bath. The violin sometimes is a fiddle, sometimes a guitar, sometime a noise-maker. At the end a vocal solo and a violin taken back to its acoustic bring it all back home. Circular and thought provoking.
The sky is dark blue after sunset when at 9pm the duo Ava Mendoza and Hamid Drake starts playing: dark blues saturated sounds and polyrhythmic drumming with infinite variations in volume and energy level. It has been a while since the two of them are playing together in various combinations and as a duo and their level of interaction is now honed to almost flawlessness. Hamid Drake plays with the usual variety and subtleness and his drumming has a level of expressivity that makes each of his concerts an event. Ava Mendoza creates both harsh and insinuating lines that effectively find their way through Drake’s pattern and in the final part with Drake playing the frame drum and chanting and Mendoza producing winding melodies the whole thing seems to make sense. A perfect evening.
The Mendoza-Drake concert has been quite an extended experience (in every sense of the word) and so the next one Exapist Euphoria+Weird Legs+Frantx starts at 11pm. Andrea Giordano (voice) Fanny Meteier (tuba) Pierre Prodier (guitar) and Marco Luparia (drums) organizes their performance in different phases. The opening is led by a solo of voice and electronic noises by Andrea Giordano and when she is joined at the centre of the hall by Fanny Meteier, they develop a duet of whistles, hisses and vocalises. Recorded voices marks the entrance of drums and guitar accompanied by chanting voices. Then music evolves in to instrumental noise-techno patterns with prominent drum sounds.
Prominent drumming is a good introduction to the midnight concert, which really happens at 0:30 am. Otto is a percussion trio with Camille Emaille, Gabriel Valtchev and Pol Small. They create a powerful crescendo introducing different rhythmic patters and using the harmonics produced by the metal percussions (and they have a really big bell-like object).
The last act of the festival is Das Schrei Nicht So Orkestra (Jonas Albrecht, drums; Ilayada Zeyrek, tournables; Carlo Brülhart, sax; danis Koblic, sax; Jasmin Lötscher, trombone; Fabian Mösch, clarinet, Miao Zhao, bass clarinet; Lena Brechbül, sound) We are advised to put earplugs on due to the high volume of the performance which is presented like a collective circular rite and I must confess that at this point, it is 1:30 pm, I decide that for me the festival is over. I really apologize with the musicians but my ears are full of sounds and my head quite empty so I hope to see them sometimes, somewhere else. Good night and good luck.
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