No hay banda: Jesca Hoop at Silencio

So I finally made it to Club Silencio, the much-hyped, David Lynch-branded, private members club in Paris's second arrondissement. The occasion was a concert by Tom Waits-approved Californian singer-songwriter, Jesca Hoop (about whom more later). Styled as equal parts cabaret artistique, boutique hotel, and bad dream, the venue proved, upon my initial wide-eyed exploration, curiously underwhelming; like a night club chill-out room that never ends. Maybe I had simply built up too high an expectation after six or so months of anticipation, but I found myself wondering whether I could actually imagine a scene from one of Lynch's films taking place here. Perhaps, I concluded; but not ineluctably.

It had its low-ceilinged stage flanked by thick red drapes: check. A plunging stairwell decorated with glossy photos of a black-suited man doing strange things underwater: check. Absurdly over-priced cocktails with convoluted descriptions and oblique names: check. A smoking room holding a forest of plastic trees adorned with fairy lights: check. A maze-like layout coupled with a sense of hidden rooms behind concealed doors: check. Cast iron Eiffel-esque quasi-industrial fittings jutting incongruously out of sleek wood-paneled surfaces, walls lined with mirrors arranged at jaunty angles, and black - yes, black - porcelain urinals in the gents' loo: check, check, check. All of which, if not exactly standard fare, felt nonetheless somehow par for the course in a venue supposedly designed by the creator of Twin Peaks, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

Shortly after ten thirty, the red drapes parted to reveal Jesca Hoop and her band, greeted by a seated audience in a polite horseshoe circling away from the stage. The band performed brilliantly. Hoop writes intelligent, thoughtful and articulate songs, full of interesting quirks and infectious hooks. Her voice is powerful and vivid, able to draw from a seemingly bewildering diversity of influences, be it the classic American songbook or the choral music of Bulgaria. Former Fingathing turntablist Dan Baxter (aka Peter Parker) looked every bit the gas station owner turned hip hop convert as he jerked to the rhythms he tapped out of a little drum machine / sampler console. Ex-Pipette, Rebecca Stephens complemented, thickened, and enriched Hoop's voice with her own harmonies and counter melodies in a voice at once bruised and bright.

All was going well, and I feel fairly sure everyone in the audience would've agreed with that assessment. But as things progressed I became less and less sure that everyone on stage would. Principally, Hoop herself was, towards the latter half of the show, beginning to look distinctly uncomfortable. Not so much while singing, but between songs, certain little signs started to tell me - a man who has performed more bad gigs than most - that this was, as far as the principle performer was concerned, a bad gig.

It was an accumulation of little things, each one insignificant on their own: an awkward joke, a sudden urge to stop and have a drink of water, the way she responded to a brief burst of laughter from an audience member, a slight fidgety look about her. Whatever. I was captivated in the way one gets captivated by car accidents while driving past. Except, of course, that musically nothing had gone wrong, and probably to most people there, watching and listening, nothing would have seemed amiss.

And then it happened. Scarcely more than thirty-two bars into her last song, 'Deeper Devastation' from the most recent album, The House That Jack Built, probably the most Julee-Cruise-singing-in-the-Roadhouse song of the night, she stopped. Seemingly for no reason. Apologised, fiddled with the tuning on her guitar a bit, then signaled the band to start up again. Around the same point in the song, same thing happened again. Stopped dead. This time there's a palpable tension. Hoop looks nervous. Starts name-dropping. "I was in the Jay-Z video! What was that song called? I think it was 'In Paris' - is that right?" She turns to her band - she's actually urging her own band members to drop an N-bomb onstage in a foreign country. For a moment, everyone looks distinctly uncomfortable. Finally they get going again, and this time the song reaches its end, but there's more shifty looks between band members as though trying to fathom quite what just happened.

Quite what did happen, I am not sure. This is a woman who has been performing for over ten years, has toured with Eels, Mark Knopfler, and Elbow, shared a stage with Peter Gabriel, released three albums and a string of EPs. The crowd were attentive, respectful, hanging on her every word and applauding rapturously her every song. Yet somehow I suspect Hoop wasn't aware of this. Like the love from the audience wasn't quite reaching the stage. Or it may have been simply that something to do with the architecture, the geometry of the room, in some weird H.P. Lovecraft way, was abnormal, unsettling, "redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours." 

The more I dwelt on this matter, the more I became convinced that, for all my earlier stated reservations, there remained something somehow not relaxing, not chilled out, about this place; something uncanny or perverse, that had somehow managed to creep insidiously onto the stage and subtly disturb and unhinge the act of this seasoned performer. No-one dropped dead, a giant did not appear on stage bathed in a sourceless pool of light, but perhaps a little hint of Lynchian discordance had nonetheless manifested itself here before us at Silencio.

All the Right Kinds of Wrong: Oxbow Live in Parc de la Villette, Paris

By the end of the first song, Eugene is already removing his waistcoat, loosening his tie, and unbuttoning the top of his shirt. And so it begins again, I thought to myself, recalling the very first time I saw Oxbow live, nearly a decade ago: Eugene screaming and growling with animal horror, roughly thrusting his barely concealed cock in the face of the tiny - and frankly terrified - audience at the Amersham Arms. Support act, Richard Sanderson, a morris dancer and London Musicians' Collective director who had opened with a flock of tender folk songs for accordion and laptop, blubbering to me that "the band behind are actually incredibly good musicians." Later, the whole group repaired to my old house by New Cross Gate. Over a morning mug of cornflakes it became clear that Eugene Robinson, author of the book, Fight (whose topic is fairly self-explanatory) was in fact, contrary to expectations, probably the most genteel and articulate house guest I had ever had.

They've just finished the fourth song of their set for the free Villette Sonique festival in Paris, and by now Eugene is down to his jockey shorts. "Suddenly, it's a whole different kind of Sunday afternoon in the park," he growls at the crowd, experimentally teasing his already half-tumescent member. "If you all weren't here, we'd get arrested right now." And then a battery of snare cracks launch us into the next ferocious assault of brutal avant-swamp rock, Dan Adams tearing fuzzy, slurring low-end chords from his fretless Fender bass. But amidst the chaos and the torment there lurk surprising moments of sweetness, recalling the mystical jazz of Duke Ellington's 'Moon Mist', or early 70s Herbie Hancock. In these moments, Eugene rips out a rich, throaty soul singer's voice that make every Brit vocalist from the last decade or so who has ever been called 'soulful' - be it David McAlmont or Adele or whoever - sound like the Mike Flowers Pops.

With a nod to the man the French call DSK, Eugene sidles up to the woman at the side of the stage filming the show, and puts his arm round her waist. "Good thing she's not a hotel maid," he winks to the audience. This gets a big laugh, but it's quickly cut short by a squall of wildly fluctuating feedback from Niko Wenner's guitar amp and the start of another four minutes of paranoia and revulsion. Listing reference points - Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Dr John, Tom Waits, The Birthday Party, The Jesus Lizard, Big Black, etc. - will never come close to the sometimes horrifically visceral experience of watching Oxbow live. Like watching one of the nastier exploitation films from the late 70s era, or a drunken wrestle with a piss-stained homeless psychotic in a back alley at four in the morning: thrilling, if liable to leave you feeling somewhat unclean.

[image courtesy of GoodNoisyCore]

Opera Houses

Driving out of Oslo, from its shiny glass and steel centre towards a country that still doesn't really have anything you could call a motorway and only 60 km of high speed rail (principally, from Oslo to Oslo Airport), one is offered a panoramic view of rapidly encroaching modernisation. From the soon-to-be-replaced E18 highway, overlooking the once-rundown dockland area of Bjørvika, you can see that the only thing separating the enormous 1960s container port from the "€500 million stone behemoth" (Icon) of the new opera house is a wasteland of cranes, half-built bridges, and projects in-development. Google "Bjørvika" today and you'll be offered an awful lot of hotel rooms and not much else.

A great deal of very interesting stuff has been written about container ports as vectors of contemporary capital, heralds of the hypermodern, in the wake of series two of The Wire. The curious thing about driving out of Oslo, however, is that it draws your attention to what might otherwise seem an absurd collocation: container ports and opera houses.

Baron Hatherley suggested to me, via email (well, Facebook actually...), that, "Opera and ornament do seem linked in some manner..." But although Oslo Opera House's architects, Snøhetta, may be most famous for the super-ornamental new Alexandria Library (dismissed by Charles Jencks here), this particular building doesn't really evoke either the swishy expressionism of Zaha Hadid, nor the "doily-tecture" pooh-poohed in Douglas Murphy's post on the Shanghai Expo. Actually, particularly from behind, the Operahuset has a rather South Bank-esque stark blockiness to it. It's an edifice, "a rogue iceberg" as the Icon piece linked above puts it, "crashed into the eastern edge of Oslo's harbour." It resembles in some ways a cracked open freight container - or a series of them, badly stacked, as if by some automated robotic crane gone haywire.

Markedly similar in its jutting frame - if somewhat more decorative in the detail of its surfaces - is Copenhagen Opera House. Completed three years earlier than Oslo's, in 2004, the Operaen occupies a similar space in the city's harbour, separated form the container port only by an expanse of empty polluted land that was, last year, the subject of a Reclaim the Streets-style action. Reffen, described as a "utopian building project," involved the temporary occupation of the land by "constructors" who built ad-hoc dwellings out of found materials. If anything, the link between the opera house and the port is made even more explicit in Copenhagen by the fact that the $500 million required to build it were donated by Maersk, the largest container ship and supply vessel operator in the world.

How to make sense of this juxtaposition of the totally inhuman face of freight transportation with perhaps the quintessential humanist art? Of course, there is an issue of gentrification, which was the focus of the Reffen occupation. And of the attempt to paper over (and launder the proceeds of) "dirty" industry with supposedly elevated culture, which we might relate to the presence of the Cité de la Musique and Parc de la Villette in Paris at the site of the old (pre-containerisation) Port de la Villette, glimpsed in Jean Vigo's poetic realist masterpiece L'Atalante. I would by no means wish to diminish the force of such explanations with the perhaps more figurative exploration that follows.

An hour's walk, south of La Villette, will take you to the Opéra Bastille, a building which, as much as the Oslo Operahuset, seems to invite the public onto its great slopes and surfaces as much as it lurchingly imposes itself on its surroundings. A project initiated in 1968 by Pierre Boulez and inaugurated on the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille, it is significant that the very site of the violent surging forth of the modern world should be marked by an opera house.

Opera may be associated in public consciousness with fusty old-fashioned ideas, and of course it is true that the form became established in the baroque period and the first opera houses were built at this time - even many late-nineteenth century opera houses were built in a neo-baroque style (so the esteemed Mr Hatherley is, of course, right, as usual). But the rococo was really a period of opera's sedimentation and formalisation. As a genre, it emerged out of the Renaissance and arguably flowered into maturity in the revolutionary period from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, broadly between Gluck and Wagner. Revolutionary governments in France and Russia placed enormous stress on the importance of opera (to Lenin, it was second in importance, amongst the arts, only to cinema).

As Gary Tomlinson points out, "No artistic genre... has more often called for purgation," no genre has so frequently called for its own transformation and reformation, no genre has spoken so much and so consistently about its own future. One of the major vectors of this permanent revolution is its relation to the notion of the human - principally in terms of the voice as the medium of operatic truth. From the Florentine Camerata's development of monody to emphasise the solo melodic line of the individual subject, through the successive reforms of Gluck, Cherubini and Spontini in France, placing greater emphasis on the massed singing of the chorus and away from the virtuoso soloist, and on into the twentieth century.

Over the last century, from Berg's Wozzeck to Birtwistle's Minotaur, the operatic voice has become increasingly monstrous and inhuman. In the midst of which we find Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's musique concrète opera, Orphée 53. The only fragment of this last I have been able to find is Henry's Le Voile d'Orphée, which was later used standalone as the music to a Maurice Bejart ballet. In this fragment, the voice emerges only at the end, painfully rupturing the already fraught texture of Alan Splet-esque electronic ululations, barking the Greek Orphic hymn like Marinetti, only transfigured and distorted by concrète tape manipulation techniques. Orpheus, the emblematic figure of the opera, moves from voice as transcendence to voice as trauma.

The roots of the new anti- and/or post-humanism of twentieth century opera are to be found in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, where for the first time, the orchestra itself becomes a privileged vehicle of the truth, in competition with the voice. It may be no coincidence that, today, the most recognisable element of the Ring Cycle is the so-called Wurm-Motiv that accompanies Alberich's transformation into a dragon with slow menacing tritones. From Max Steiner's (1933) music for King Kong to the alien invasion cycles of the 50s and 60s, various subtle transformations of this Wurm-Motiv became the go-to riff for virtually all movie monsters.