Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Sensorium, the multi-disciplinary music festival held at the Project Arts Centre last week and curated by Judith Ring, Angie Atmadjaja and Emily Kalies, was a bit of an endurance test. Well, most of its major concerts were – there were workshops, an improvisation session and a panel discussion that I didn’t get to.
The concerts were held in the Project’s Cube space, and there was an idealistic advance video posted on YouTube, visualising how the space was to be used, with freely placed, beanbag-like seating for the audience.
In the event, that wasn’t what materialised. The opening concert had a central circle of seats, facing out towards the walls, as well as seats along those walls. The last two concerts had seats along the longer walls, with one of the other, side-on walls used for video-projection in audio-visual works.
The first concert was, if you like, a survey of the familiar, offering an all-Irish electroacoustic programme of Judith Ring, Roger Doyle, Ed Bennett Jurgen Simpson and Donnacha Dennehy.
The standout pieces were by Doyle and Dennehy. Sectors four and five from Doyle's The Ninth Set, showed him to be, as it were, the master orchestrator among electroacoustic composers in Ireland, with a fine ear for texture and a gift for finding ways to keep fine detail in focus, even in sound-pictures dominated by massive, crumbling sounds. Dennehy's Metropolis mutabilisshowed his early (1995), almost puppyish enthusiasm for the everyday street sounds of urban life.
The two weekend concerts were altogether less digestible affairs. What was to be made of Theo Burt's Colour Projections?It showed small white circles moving painfully slowly, almost like de-energised arcade game brickles balls, through a large white circle. And, as they intersected, the simple sounds associated with the circles changed. Ho, ho, ho! The cliché about watching paint dry came quickly to mind.
Or Radek Rudnicki's Aquatusz,with live video projections of the dissipation of pigments ritualistically dropped into the water in a small, clear-sided tank, to the accompaniment of desultory trumpet and live electronics? Hey, if I was that bored, I'd get out some paints and do it myself.
The incessant strobe lighting and head-inside-the-factory-machine effects in Tim Wright's Eight Switchessuggested a disregard for the audience's health more than anything else.
The same applied to Enda Bates's new Left, Right, Left, Rightfor hexaphonic guitar (the sound of each string relayable to a separate loudspeaker) and two drummers. The manner, loud and raw, was the thing, not the content.
You've probably got the gist by now, tiny ideas, puffed up and long drawn out, and I haven't even mentioned Jonathan Nangle's sound doodles on an iPad, or the mindless meandering of Matt Postle's Extended A440 Improvisation(using circular breathing so that the sound could continue uninterrupted), which segued straight into his Saliva Piecein which he drained the condensation that had accumulated in his instrument ostentatiously onto the floor.
There were only small reliefs over the final two evenings, the strange balance between kitsch and a kind of church music reduced to purest essence in Linda Buckley's Revelavitfor voice (Michelle O'Rourke) and tape, and the connectedness, clear but not overdone, between the vertiginous abstract visuals and the sound world of Jane Cassidy's The night after I kicked it.
