photo by Ed Sirrs 
photo by Ed Sirrs 
photo by Ed Sirrs | A Damned Near Run Thing (1988) |
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Bow Gamelan Ensemble South Bank Centre, London The location of this event on the South Bank gave us extensive possibilities for echoes right across the river reverberating in front and behind us and seemingly colliding in our space. We exploited all this potential by bolting 20ft steel megaphones to various instruments such as the resonating cavity of giant m’biras so that the river itself seemed to rumble back at us with Waterloo and Westminster Bridges acting as supplementary amplification. 12ft long thunder sheets added complexity to the resound and specially commissioned Le Maitre pyrotechnic whistles produced different pitches by their chemical stroboscopic interactions. I was agog at the spectacle of impersonality here, a spectacle in which the girders and their adjacent surfaces were the stars, in which the Bow people submitted themselves as specks on their own landscape. Melody Maker …the extraordinary range of, at once, haunting, comic, evocative, aggressive, delightful and strange sounds and visual effects which Bow Gamelan produce… There seems no limit to the potential of this group. Performance Magazine I left exhilarated. The Face Helium filled balloons soar with piercing sibilance towards the darkening canopy of the sky. As night falls, caped performers stalk up and down tensely, like besieged city dwellers, the fires below the eerily whistling boilers casting a flickering glow… Ever imagined what rusty lengths of piping sound like when played with gas jets? What about amassed choral of hoovers? Or a percussion orchestra ranging from bell trees made out of hubcaps, to metal plates thrown around in an industrial dryer, even a car with its doors and boot slamming in polyrhythmical fury? The Bow Gamelan Ensemble turn all of these and more into an awe-inspiring cross-media extravaganza. The worlds of Improv, sound sculpture and performance art combine at the South Bank. Rhythm Magazine
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