MELTDOWN: ALVA NOTO + RYUICHI SAKAMOTO
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre | June 19th
It’s a bit weird normally, to be honest, sitting in a massive concert hall listening to electronic music, especially when the kicks and sub bass get going. Lucky, then, that for Carsten Nicolai AKA Alva Noto and his decade-long collaborator Ryuichi Sakamoto, the last thing these visionaries want to do is make you move.
Yes, it was a sit-down concert of the stillest order, this; played to a couple of thousand mostly-captivated onlookers at London’s Royal Festival Hall. No patter with the audience, nor an interval, nor even a support act, tainted the austere clarity of Sakamoto’s Yamaha grand and its interplay with Nicolai’s occasionally-mind-blowing electronics. It was truly contemplative.
Each smouldering track, across a modest 75 minute set, took a similar shape where Sakamoto was concerned; jazzily abstracted half-improvised chords giving way to plinks, plonks, and meddling with the piano’s strings (Sakamoto at his pretentious best, really, and the gig was part of Yoko Ono’s Meltdown festival, after all, so part of the job description – he used a whisk to hit the strings with at one point). The textural variety was left to Nicolai. Incisive bleeps punctuated roughly-hewn sweeps of distortion with satisfying regularity. Rhythms of every shade were hinted at, and never fully materialised.
But the real highlight was actually Alva Noto’s visuals, bleeding to the whole width of a horizontal screen that stretched the length of the stage. At first, it had ‘Winamp Visualizations’ written all over it, a solitary waveform morphing predictably in sync with the musicians’ sonic gestures.
Yet by the second tune, it was hypnosis. A swarm of mysterious white tadpoles fluxed in tandem like a flock of sparrows against a shimmering background of blue, purple, and orange that looked as though Monet had painted himself a bag of Haribo. There later followed an optical illusion that could easily have tripped out the entire audience.
Evidently, both chaps take themselves rather seriously, occasionally threatening to open some kind of black hole of frowning earnestness. Sakamoto, in particular, looked desperate to play the pained artist, pulling back locks of grey hair before plunging with impassioned vigour onto a single note.
But then again, this was their prerogative, and the art delivered in spades, especially for something that sounds on CD like chill-out music at times. They came on for two encores, which says it all really. This is a kind of electronic music which should warrant more massive concert halls in future.
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Words: Nick Johnstone
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