Goings on at the 13th Note

Me and Lil went last night to a gig our friend Ben had put on at the 13th note. It featured a Glasgow band called Nackt Insecten, Ben himself doing a free-vocal performance with his friend Pascal and calling themselves Electric U-Boat for the evening, a Belgian guy from Ghent with a little electronic box of tricks and a band whose name I don't know at the end.

I'm not going to review them all, in fact not really going to review any of them, but rather note down a few thoughts that occured to me whilst watching and which I quickly typed shorthand into my mobile phone.

We came in halfway through Nackt Insecten's set. Featuring a guitarist, a knob-twiddler and a drummer they played a jazzy-droney-improv set that I enjoyed a lot. Particularly the drumming, which reminded me of reading about syncopated jazz-style drumming rather than pounding rock-n-roll drumming and kept the wilder parts of the improv/wall-of-sound stuff connected to something other than their own wildness. Of the experimental-improv-drone scene stuff I've seen recently -- and that's quite a lot, always on Ben's recommendations -- I find myself gravitating more to the jazzy end, especially if that jazz influence is filtered through percussion. Nackt Insecten's set reminded me of seeing Chris Corsano at the CCA a couple of years ago, which I really loved, and really opened my eyes to this music.

Ben was on next. His main band, with his girlfriend Hannah and friend Greg, is called Helhesten but this was just him on vocals and Pascal on drums. We'd gone round to Ben and Hannah's the night before for dinner and to meet their two new kittens (called Robinson and Friday, v. cute!) and he was rather nervous, not having done a stripped down vocal improv set before. As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about, it was great, perhaps the best set of the evening.

He had two microphones, wired up slightly differently, and would switch between them, sometimes putting one in his mouth and sometimes using one against the other, creating mini-feedbacks. I wrote in my phone "connects sound and body". I think what I was thinking was how it singled out the human voice and by extension the body and used it as an instrument. Not in a way that R&B singers modulate and whatnot but in a more instinctive way, conjuring up strange repetitions, interesting one-offs, veering between garbled words in (invented?) languages, low groans, high shreaks, long drawn-out moans and clicking, tapping percussive sounds. It made me think about improvisation and decision-making, how apparently unconscious and random sounds are actually split-second choices, not necessarily of the conscious kind but of a sort of body memory or intelligence, as if it knows what it's going to do without the brain having to tell it. Or perhaps it's a question of getting the body into the right context or atmosphere, controlling it from afar so-to-speak, assuming that if one creates the right conditions for it, it will create different and interesting sounds, almost like writing a computer programme.

The Belgian guy -- whose name I will get from Ben -- started his set with an impromptu Ivor Cutler song about bees, which moved into a set played entirely from a small box with lots of knobs, and which reminded me of shifting the radio tuner or a kind of aural equivalent of image-overload. In a good way. Every now and again techno-ish beats would rise out of industrial sounds, only to be distorted and sped up. He was a very skinny guy, and his arms would flail out like a conductors after getting the precise knob-twiddle he wanted. He looked very nerdy, and was a very shy microphone presence, but very nice too. I should get his name.