- Dread, that visceral sensation which can be used both to comment on and revel in the anxieties of our time, continues to be a central concept behind much underground music. It's best understood as an aestheticised experience of fear or, as sci-fi author China Miéville defined it in conversation with the DJ and curator Juha van 't Zelfde, "dark awe," a grim negative to the sublime. Van 't Zelfde has since gone on to curate an exhibition on the topic, Dread: Fear In The Age Of Technological Acceleration, which is currently showing at Museum De Hallen in Haarlem, Holland. The exhibition has hosted performances from Emptyset, Roly Porter and Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley in various venues. Here it colonised Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw aan 't Ij, in collaboration with the concert hall's Listen To This series, to present a cross-stylistic event that dealt with the theme loosely but intriguingly.
For New York percussionist-composer Eli Keszler, the sensation could be felt in the murky clangour of a latticework of piano strings, strung in huge lengths from the base of his drum kit up into the high-ceilinged recesses of the Muziekgebouw foyer, and plucked semi-randomly by an automated mechanism. The result was something like the aural equivalent of a Malevich painting. But while there was a certain stark thrill to those booming, resonant tones, Keszler was clearly more interested in probing the finer points of the architecture he had created. Unfortunately, his fluid drum improvisations revealed it to be rather inflexible. The best moments were when Keszler focussed on his own playing, teasing gorgeous sonorities out of what looked like Tibetan cymbals with a double bass bow, or executing rapid, finely articulated drum rolls across cymbal, snare and rim, as if letting loose tiny avalanches.
Later, Brainfeeder's Ras G would perform in the same room (few people could claim to be as wired into the dread mainframe as he is). His live set struck an effective balance between Black Ark and Sun Ra, but struggled to register against timid sound and a largely indifferent crowd. The simplest explanation is that we were still reeling from the main attraction: Ryoji Ikeda's large-scale audiovisual performance, Superposition. This project was reportedly inspired by "the mathematical notions of quantum mechanics" and, as its title suggests, dealt in the relentless overlay of information. Banks of screens flashed illegible strings of data and arcane 3D graphics, while piercing sine tones and juddering sub-bass formed an abrasive soundtrack. The whole thing was executed with stunning technological finesse, but the basic premise was more than familiar to Ikeda fans. Indeed, the piece was most compelling when Ikeda played to his strengths. At the opening, sonic and visual events, sparsely distributed, built steadily to a retina-scorching peak, like some kind of firmware glitch writ large; at the close, a dizzying montage of abstract geometrical forms whipped across the screen to breathtaking effect.
What's new about Superposition is the involvement of two live performers. Their input revealed Ikeda's weaknesses, particularly in the rather ponderous middle section: first typing out a string of clever-clever dichotomous phrases to be displayed on-screen ("What is mind? Never Matter / What is matter? Never mind") and later interminably scrolling through a series of incomprehensible microfiche slides (hardly the cutting edge of technology) to a Raster-Noton-lite backbeat. Ikeda's best work gives shape to what for most of us are vast, unknowable things—the cosmos, big data, the outer regions of mathematics—delivering them in an overwhelming cascade of sensory data that induces a powerful sense of, yes, dread. But as his work becomes ever more ambitious, it seems he might be bumping up against the limitations of his form.