Friday, 8 October 2004
Tonight V and I went to the opening concert for Y2K4, an “international live looping festival.” We missed most of the opening act, but got to hear Sunao Inami, Rick Walker, and Bernhard Wagner’s set. The three had never played together before, but improvised a seamless 45 minute piece, morphing between, and blending, Wagner’s often-lush layers of guitar, Walker’s heavily processed voice and percussion, and Inami’s beautifully subtle and intricate electronic textures. There’s a danger in contexts like this of settling into drones or diverging into cacophony, but this piece oscillated well between the unpleasant extremes—above all else the players were listening to each other, knowing when to lead and when to yield. As I left, I wondered what a world would be like where there was so much beautiful and spontaneous music that no one ever bothered to record anything. It seemed I’d just gotten a hint.
