photo by Bob van Danzig 
photo by Bob van Danzig 
photo by Bob van Danzig 
photo by Bob Danzig | In C and Air (1986) |
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Bow Gamelan Ensemble ICA, London IN C and Air included working with the sound poet Bob Cobbing who wrote several poem-songs for the commission. We used a complex arrangements of pulleys to animate the entire stage as a percussive instrument, a re-enforced glass tank of water to facilitate sounds ‘bent’ by being played in water as well as waterfalls created by buckets on pulleys, an entire hinged stage full of instruments that suddenly fell down around us and a light sensitive screen on which we could flash and ‘catch’ momentary shadows of instruments thrown and played in mid air. There’s a flying car that thinks it’s Ornette Coleman’s drummer... veering from beauty to horror, the spectacle is utterly, and at one point literally, stunning. Time Out Brilliant! The dingy ICA theatre has been transformed with the pickings from a hundred East London skips - the wreckage comes alive… That car starts to float across the stage, headlights and doors flashing and slamming, starts to dance. Brilliant. You can’t believe your eyes. And then the stage turns out to be all trapdoors which open and gape luridly, then slam in deafening symphony. How do they DO that? There’s underwater percussion, music from welding, prepared and invented instruments, automatic music, a symphony of fire alarms…Tonight was a wealth of stunts and japes aural and visual,… Bliss… Brilliant Melody Maker If you’ve never experienced the extremes of fear and fascination in the same five seconds, you’ve never had the pleasure of a ringside seat for the Bow Gamelan Ensemble. Put simply it is the most stunning cross media project of the decade - sonic choreography meets visual drama. Shattering glass, a free fall of rhythms, klaxon horns, the drone of what sounds like a bagpipe but looks like an octopus revolving from the ceiling, the rattle and roll of tin plates in tumble dryers: the instruments are oddments of industrial and domestic waste, some are nicked from skips, some fished out of the bottom of Bow Creek, recycled with an eye for sculpture and an ear for sound. John Cage, the Dadaists, ‘80’s noise groups like Test Department, they are all kindred souls of a kind: as for straight forward comparisons, there are few if any at all. Their ICA season is specially commissioned…. Me, I can’t wait. City Limits I’ve never seen the ICA stage so crowded….truly the art of noise/noise of art. Sounds Magazine Back to the Bow Gamelan Ensemble main page |