Instal Brave New Music Festival ///
February 16, 2008 ///
Glasgow, Scotland ///
WORDS: Jeremy Purser ///

Instal is the self-proclaimed leading experimental music festival of the UK. It’s a weekend long event including nearly 50 musicians, as well as visual artists and conceptual poets.

I witnessed day three of four. Performances began with Wandelweiser, the international group of composers whose musical ideologies are based around silence. Dutch-born flautist, Antoine Beuger, and German violinist, Burkhard Schlothauer, founded the group in 1992. Radu Malfatti, Austrian trombonist and member of the collective, performed a piece by fellow Wandelweiser member and Swiss pianist, Manfred Werner.

Werner’s composition demonstrated a level of profound minimalism that would make Terry Riley look like an ostentatious baboon; Werner’s piece was only notated by periods and ones. Malfatti pulled his trombone up to his lips and put it back to his side without making any sound (or so it seemed). I was almost certain he was playing John Cage’s 4’33’’, the piece that is simply four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. However, I began to notice other things: the sounds of rustling newspapers, people coughing and sipping tea, etc. The venue, Arches, is underneath Glasgow Central rail station. At one point in the performance I was convinced that Malfatti was controlling the sounds of trains overhead with his trombone. Then I realized there was a CD player in the back of the room that was playing eerie metallic tones reminiscent of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was also known for his alternative methods of music notation. Malfatti was still pulling his trombone up to his lips intermittently; I started to hear a barely audible baritone breath come through the horn. I was then struck by how inclusive the piece was, in that it included its environmental sounds and called upon the audience to become a participant by making negligible sounds and to practice a more sensitive awareness than one is usually required at a “gig” or a “show.”

The next group, Translation, primarily made up of performance artists, began the evening course of events. The evening concluded with a sound performance by Jarrod Fowler. He called the attention of the room and introduced himself, but before he even finished mumbling the last syllable of his name an eruption filled the room. I say "eruption" because it sounded like an actual volcano spewing magma and ash, not the grossly self-indulgent solo from Van Halen I. Fowler is from Roxbury, Massachusetts, a town near Boston and where he composes half hour pieces such as the one performed at Instal. Fowler’s piece can be simply described as loud and dense. To explain the performance in a more complicated way – it sounded like a mash-up of the Slayer catalog, airplanes, dial-up internet, and a food processor played at five times normal speed. However, as the piece progressed it began to take shape, which was either caused by very interesting and purposeful dynamic or the loss of ranges in frequency in my ears. The transformation went from a violent bombardment of harsh sounds to a violent bombardment of less harsh sounds with some added pretty sounds – from a hyperspeed metalcore mash-up to manic depressive IDM.

The major event of the night was Energy Births Form, a collaboration of free jazz musicians and improvisers. The roster included double bassist Alan Silva (who played with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and his own group, Silva’s Celestial Communication Orchestra), saxophonist Donald Dietrich (member of Borbetomagus), noise artists Incapacitants (whose members comprise two-fifths of Hijokaidan), saxophonist David Keenan (half of Glasgow’s free jazz duo Tiger Meat), guitarist Kazuo Imai (Incapacitants collaborator), drummer Sabu Toyozumi (Masayuki Takayanagi, Kaoru Abe, Keiji Haino, and Peter Broetzmann collaborator), drummer Ben Hall (plays in Graveyards, an offshoot of Wolf Eyes), and stringed koto player Michiyo Yagi. There wasn’t much variation in Energy Births Births Form, or more appropriately, there was no relenting. Everyone played hard, and they played hard for nearly three hours.

Challenging would be would be an understatement to describe what went on during EBB. Imai played his Les Paul with a bow; however more akin to Mike Tyson than Jimmy Page. Microphones were placed inside the bells of saxophones, bow strings were broken while sawing at the double bass, and Yoko Ono screeches were discharged from a thin Japanese woman wearing a Hellraiser t-shirt. Incapacitants was working with more guitar pedals than Omar Rodriquez-Lopez could ever dream of touching. I laughed to myself noticing the irony in having two drummers, and yet no discernible time signature. I’m tempted to say what I saw was overly self-indulgent, but I’ve already used that word in this article; and one could easily see the loss of self in each musician. They weren’t working towards any sort of arrangement or taking solos, but rather melding into a sonic blast of which no one could take sole ownership.

Instal was more about ideas and their consequential sounds than music in any form of immediacy. The festival called for radical thinkers in auto-destructive art, poets writing diatribes to Kenny G, and tubas playing while being filled with sand. Some people call it noise, but folks are nice and they provided the ear plugs.