- Upon entering the Barbican Hall for Hello Terry Riley last month, I was handed a sheet of paper which explained each of the performing artists' compositional methods and how they related to Riley's music, referring to the musicians involved—James Holden, Luke Abbott and Lewis Roberts, AKA Koreless—by their first names. As one of several events at the Barbican marking Riley's 80th birthday, the evening was a reflection of the influential composer's unique persona: extremely musically astute and progressive, but never stuffy. The musical tributes were informed by the academic details of Riley's compositional methods, but in the end, it was more about what his music meant to each of them.
Luke Abbot said of Riley's music that he wants "to just live with it around in the air." His performance used a drone tuned to 555Hz, a note just above C sharp. (Terry Riley often used microtones and unusual tuning systems.) There was also a gong with a hole drilled into it and a resonator attached, which fed back into his setup. The musical bedrock was a sine-like tone that pulsated in volume, with the rate of the pulsations changing over time. There were also climbing and receding arpeggios, fuzzy overdriven sounds and more razor-edged tones that all phased lightly against each other. You didn’t have to pay constant attention so much as sit with it and dip in and out.
The most interesting, and enthusiastically received, performance of the night was Koreless'. Ten string players, all dressed in black, each stood with a round lightbulb in front of them. When a bulb lit up, it was a signal from Koreless to begin playing.
The performance started with short stabs and pizzicatos, before moving through a drone passage and into a reading of prose. It bore similarity to Riley’s "In C": the piece was composed in a way that made it partly determined at the time of performance. It captured the spirit of Riley more than at any other point that evening.
James Holden's "Museum of Fractals" sounded very similar to Riley’s seminal album A Rainbow in Curved Air. As modulated figures and arpeggios played out from Holden's modular synth, tabla player Camilo Tirado added soft punctuations to the notes. It was more emotive and upfront than the other two performances, with the modal nature of the melodies giving off a pleasant, serene feel. Random flourishes and the occasional rapid note cluster led the melodies through constant micro-shifts. The synth patterns were based around fractals, presumably via some mathematical programming method or the synth's architecture. The Barbican is fast becoming one of my favourite venues for electronic music in London: aided by the impeccable sound, nights like these allow artists full creative freedom, encouraging them to explore their music in a more profound way than they’d be able to in a club setting.