A screening of Pilgrimage From Scattered Points, Luke Fowler's impressionistic portrait of composer Cornelius Cardew, made sense of much heard at this tenth anniversary of Scotland's festival of left-field music and sound. Cardew was a master of making unlikely ideas work.
This applied to a set by the heroic Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra as much as it did to The One Ensemble Orchestra's mix of klezmer and choral keening and to the charming instrumental sketches of pianist Bill Wells, who reunited his 2004 cross-discipline quartet with trombonist Annie Whitehead and German electronicists Barbara Morgenstern and Stefan Schneider for their live debut. The addition of Teenage Fanclub guitarist Norman Blake added even warmer textures to an evening begun at the Changing Room Gallery with Scando/East European trio Nalle, and continued by Nils Okland and Hakon Stene's fiddle and percussion.
The upbeat feel continued with Japanese lo-fi trio Nagisa Ni te's UK debut. Melody eventually gave way to Justice Yeldham's solo schtick - blowing into a sheet of amplified glass until it breaks - and the sax/bass/drum power trios of Zu and the Thing produced a groovy cacophony.
The centrepiece was Kaffe Matthews' remarkable trio, along with pipers Jarlath Henderson and Chris Gibb. An adjunct to Matthews' Sonic Bed_Scotland installation in the Tolbooth's attic, pipes were sampled, bent out of shape and bounced right back in a performance as thrillingly 21st century as harpist Zeena Parkins' duo with Ikue Morie was later on. It was a weekend that understood tradition but took it somewhere else entirely.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article