The UK’s Best Experimental Festival: LCMF Reviewed
the-uks-best-experimental-festival-lcmf-reviewed
January 08, 2016
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# The UK’s Best Experimental Festival: LCMF Reviewed
Since its first edition in 2013, the
[London Contemporary Music Festival][1]{: target="_blank"} has become
perhaps the UK's foremost festival for truly daring music. LCMF fills
memorable venues with blockbuster programs, which makes it feel more
targeted than an EDM monolith and a damn sight more fun than a
bogstandard concert. In recent years, experimental music's pioneers have
rubbed shoulders with the scene's contemporary crop at a disused
car-park in 2013, and then at a former carpet factory in 2014. LCMF's
most memorable past nights have paired Hyperdub's [Fatima Al
Qadiri][2]{: target="_blank"} with knotty compositions by Luigi Nono and
Cornelius Cardew under the banner "Marxist Chillwave" and been dedicated
to the music of film composer Ennio Morricone and staunch modernist
Helmut Lachenmann. These precise but bizarre concoctions are the
festival's hallmark, and this year's seven-night Christmas special
features US provocateur [James Ferraro][3]{: target="_blank"},
[Buchla][4]{: target="_blank"} synth pioneer [Morton Subotnick][5]{:
target="_blank"}, doom demigod and [Sunn O)))][6]{:
target="_blank"} founder [Stephen O'Malley][7]{: target="_blank"} and
even thorny 20th-century poet Ezra Pound. It's all housed in Ambika P3,
a 14,000 square foot hall three floors deep in the University of
Westminster.
LCMF 2015 opens boldly with Collective
Capital, an evening celebrating the cooperative spirit of London's
sprawling experimental scene.
Edward Henderson is a driving force behind the capital's [Bastard
Assignments][8]{: target="_blank"} series, which presents punky,
conceptual performances in living rooms and disused spaces. His festival opener Tape Piece is a characteristically impish acclimatization to Ambika P3, where seven performers
attach sellotape to separate fixtures and slowly unroll them, making
glitchy bursts of noise and a waist-high lattice across the bunker
space. *Tape Piece* forces the audience into unexpected
configurations: as punters move out the way of an incoming tape thread,
they listen in to different parts of the cavernous space. It works a
treat as a one-liner on the physical impact of sound, but the night's
real meat comes courtesy of two world premieres by British composer Neil
Luck and visual artists Anne Bean and Richard Wilson.
Physical interrogation reaches an absurd
zenith with Luck's *Via
Gut*, a theater piece graphically
obsessed with both commercial entertainment and tapeworms. Luck and his
ensemble squib-box alternate between chat-show sleaze and cascades of
maniacal burps. It feels psychotically logical, even as a tapdancing,
squealing guitarist is overwhelmed by an army of tapeworm balloons. The
set-up for visual artists Richard Wilson's and Anne Bean's *NALEMAG*
, an astonishing portrait of the Thames and its shipbuilding
communities, is gigantic. Behind
flickering bulbs, Bean and Wilson dance precisely between blow torches,
oil drums, fog horns. Balloons
scream a cluster as they rise one by one to the ceiling, panes of glass
shatter under flame, firecrackers writhe on Ambika's walls.
Tonight I feel for PAN affiliate and
Codes boss Visionist. Accompanied by visuals of a fleshy avatar merging
with liquid topographies, Louis Carnell's grime arabesques seem a
fitting culmination of the mechanical poise, bass brutality and warped
lullabies of previous sets from John Wall, Shelly Parker and Claudia
Hunte. But on a night where collective energy and spatial play
reign---and deprived of a club context---Carnell and Kevin Bray's A/V
show feels a little flat. A London postcode can't disguise the fact
that, stylistically, Visionist is stranded.
Plunging back underground the night
after, I discover that the crowd has nearly doubled for a night
dedicated to searing, meditative experimental compositions from American West Coast mid-century
luminaries such as John Cage, Terry Riley, [Pauline Oliveros][9]{:
target="_blank"} and Subotnick. For those like me, who have bolstered
old-man-and-his-dog audiences at back-room experimental gigs all year,
there's a genuine thrill to being amongst so many bodies, and it's one
of LCMF's huge achievements that the hundreds packed in on a Saturday
night seem primed to listen hard. It's characteristic of the festival's
savvy programming that the performances feel as personable as they do
seismic thanks in part to the way that they permeate all of Ambika's
corners.
Sandwiched in between urgent student
renditions of John Cage's and Terry Riley's classics *First Construction (In Metal)* and *Keyboard Study No. 2*, Watts
prophets legend Otis O'Solomon pops up on a small blue plinth,
addressing his utopian street poetry directly to the London crowd,
asking, "Love me if you love me, and if you don't---love me anyway."
O'Solomon's direct connection helps imbue the more canonized pieces with
the tangible, human touch so integral to the West Coast legacy,
reminding us that Cage and Riley's music, as much as O'Solomon's proto
hip-hop, is made to be loved.
The reverence fizzing under the evening's
first half properly explodes as Deep Listening guru Pauline Oliveros
modestly takes to the stage. Prior to tonight, my knowledge of Oliveros'
work is slight, and the barbed music she wrenches from her electronic
accordion shatters any preconceptions that her output might be a little
cultish. Oliveros is a magnetic combination of brute force and
sensitivity, and her spasmodic convulsions of MIDI voice, slap bass and
saxophone sounds deserve exactly the breathless adoration they receive.
It's a mark of the moment's ecstasy that I spend most of Subotnick's
closing set simply trying to calm down.
LCMF's marathon evenings can produce musical revelations,
but they're also exhausting, and I'm happy after a night off that
Monday's program features simply one piece: a Chris Watson world
premiere. Since his Cabaret Voltaire days, the founding member has
carved out a formidable reputation as perhaps the world's foremost sound
recordist, honing his craft on the BBC's nature documentaries with David Attenborough and
translating them into a series of mind-boggling solo releases on Touch.
*Okeanos* is, for my money, his strongest work since
2011's *El Tren
Fantasma*.
Much like O'Solomon on West Coast night,
Watson breaks any pretensions of grandeur with a straightforward, modest
introduction: *Okeanos* is an eight-channel
piece exploring "planet ocean," almost all of its sounds are recorded on
hydrophones below the oceans' surfaces and it traces a pole to pole
journey through the songs of bearded seals, orcas and minute
crustaceans. But to describe *Okeanos'* materials gets you
no closer to the sensual epiphany of experiencing the thing. The crackle
of ice on the surface as Adelie penguins first take us under the surface
makes my skin crawl, glitchy mollusc noises tickle my extremities, and
all's washed away by deep currents of suboceanic bass.
Most of all, *Okeanos*
masterfully conjures up a sense of vast space. Watson must have a
treasure trove of samples he could pepper his listeners with but
instead, time crawls. Lilting orca song travels and decays before a mate
answers from a mile away, seal yelps ring on in the void and humpback
whales groan from where the light can't reach. It's this sense of touch
and musicality that makes *Okeanos* so awesome, as if
Watson were so in tune with the environments he's captured that he can
move at their tempo, reconjure their space, sing again their alien
melodies pitch-perfect.
Tuesday's To A New Definition Of Opera II
is an entirely different proposition, and I find that UK premieres of
theater works by modernist icons Ezra Pound and Karlheinz Stockhausen
fall short of being properly mind-expanding. Maybe it's the timing, but
Stockhausen's *Pieta*, where a blue-robed soprano is encircled by a
flugelhorn player and swooping electronics, feels a little too George
Lucas for my liking. LCMF are generally great at digging up forgotten
gems, but on the evidence of the stodgy Le Testament de Villon, Pound is perhaps best remembered for his
poetry.
The opera night belongs not to the
establishment figures but to American video artist Ryan Trecartin and
British outsider composer Tim Parkinson. Trecartin's *CENTER JENNY*, a 50-minute film populated by a swarm of nightmarish fembots, is
nauseating and fascinating in equal measure. Sitting through the
hyper-edited soup of whining chipmunk voices, day-glo swimwear, and
manic karaoke bouts, I realize I'm having a horrible kind of fun.
Trecartin's insistence that we all get an eye and ear full of
sewage---and for a long
time---feels vital on a night
dedicated to age-old forms. Better to feel repelled than
nonplussed.
British composer Tim Parkinson's
music-theater work *Time With
People* is the downtrodden fallout
from Trecartin's gross excess. The pack of zombie
performers---Huddersfield's brilliant Edges ensemble---are glued to
smartphones as they navigate a junk-strewn stage through disembodied
bleeps. They resemble nothing if not a herd of London commuters. But the
thrill of *Time With
People* is how much heart
Parkinson packs into a nihilistic landscape. This opera is made up of
questionnaires, deadpan anecdotes, beaten up fridge parts, soggy
cardboard boxes and rotting lentils. But it is deeply, miraculously
poignant.
LCMF's closing night ambitiously draws
together digital ephemera's finest from both the classical world and the
electronic underground, with composers Jennifer Walshe, Brigitta
Muntendorf and Neele [Hülcker][10] playing
alongside cyber-darlings James Ferraro and PC Music's Felicita. Now that
"post-internet art" has ceased to be a hot topic for endless think
pieces, Requiem For Reality is a chance to assess the work in a less
hype-driven context, a privilege which leaves me feeling ultimately
unnerved.
The night's central performances are the
ones that leave me feeling most confused. Jennifer Walshe's
*The Total Mountain* is a 50-minute multimedia performance where
Walshe turns the tweets of One Direction fans, YouTube detritus and
omnipresent Facebook streams into erratic character pieces both for
herself and on video. It's a precise, far-reaching diagnosis of our
contemporary moment, where distraction and the enticement of celebrity
pervade our physical and virtual lives, and Walshe is a mesmerising
performer.
But I can't shake feeling fundamentally
undernourished at the piece's close, just as, later on, Felicita's
bubbles and squeaks can't bludgeon me into chirpiness. The PC Music
producer's performance consists mostly of him checking his smartphone
while his Mac's rave sequences toy with violet strobes. Maybe I'm
missing something, but it's not my idea of a fun night out. Unlike the
week's most potent programmes, Requiem For Reality lacks visceral
impact, and, for all its kooky sheen, is perversely unaffecting.
Happily, James Ferraro bucks the trend. Strange to think that the man
who made his name with 2011's ringtone odyssey Far Side Virtual should be the one to inject a sense of human
energy at the festival's close, but Ferraro pulls it off. The US
producer drenches Siri memories of latte macchiatos and Toyota licenses
in a thick LA smog, using a guest cellist to invoke a Lynchian
dread.
Ferraro's *coup* is
LCMF at its unpredictable best. The festival distinguishes itself from
behemoths like Berlin's [Atonal][11]{: target="_blank"} by really
pushing the limits of what stylistically can be housed under one roof.
Its nights are underpinned by the risk that things really might fall to
bits, and that sense of daring makes its triumphs feel all the more
real. When LCMF first set up it felt like a purposeful punt at what a
festival could be in a future a little less complacent. That voracious,
fearless programming has become the benchmark for events of this scale
owes as much to this festival as international counterparts like
[CTM][12]{: target="_blank"} and [Unsound][13]{: target="_blank"}. Year
on year, LCMF re-injects myriad scenes with a precious strain of
kamikaze zeal; you can't help but salute it.
[1]: http://lcmf.co.uk/
[2]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/artist/fatima-al-qadiri/
[3]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/artist/james-ferraro/
[4]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/donato-dozzy-speaks-to-synth-pioneer-suzanne-ciani/
[5]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/artist/morton-subotnick/
[6]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/artist/sunn-o/
[7]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/feed/stephen-omalley-talks-sunn-o-depht-lecture/
[8]: http://bastardassignments.com/
[9]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/pauline-oliveros-recommendation/
[10]: http://www.neelehuelcker.de/
[11]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/berlin-atonal-festival-2015-review/
[12]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/michail-stangls-insiders-guide-to-the-ctm-festival/
[13]: http://www.electronicbeats.net/your-attention-is-a-battlefield-unsound-2015-in-review/
---
id: aa9eeeb4-3b84-44df-b212-88de9ad76f17
blueprint: article
title: 'The UK’s Best Experimental Festival: LCMF Reviewed'
date: 2016-01-08T12:46:42+01:00
wp_id: '107052'
slug: the-uks-best-experimental-festival-lcmf-reviewed
teaser_image: legacy/the-uks-best-experimental-festival-lcmf-reviewed/IMG_1849.jpg
contents:
-
type: text
text: '<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Since its first edition in 2013, the <a href="http://lcmf.co.uk/" target="_blank">London Contemporary Music Festival</a> has become perhaps the UK’s foremost festival for truly daring music. LCMF fills memorable venues with blockbuster programs, which makes it feel more targeted than an EDM monolith and a damn sight more fun than a bogstandard concert. In recent years, experimental music’s pioneers have rubbed shoulders with the scene’s contemporary crop at a disused car-park in 2013, and then at a former carpet factory in 2014. LCMF’s most memorable past nights have paired Hyperdub’s <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/artist/fatima-al-qadiri/" target="_blank">Fatima Al Qadiri</a> with knotty compositions by Luigi Nono and Cornelius Cardew under the banner “Marxist Chillwave” and been dedicated to the music of film composer Ennio Morricone and staunch modernist Helmut Lachenmann. These precise but bizarre concoctions are the festival’s hallmark, and this year’s seven-night Christmas special features US provocateur <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/artist/james-ferraro/" target="_blank">James Ferraro</a>, <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/donato-dozzy-speaks-to-synth-pioneer-suzanne-ciani/" target="_blank">Buchla</a> synth pioneer <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/artist/morton-subotnick/" target="_blank">Morton Subotnick</a>, doom demigod and <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/artist/sunn-o/" target="_blank">Sunn O)))</a> founder <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/feed/stephen-omalley-talks-sunn-o-depht-lecture/" target="_blank">Stephen O’Malley</a> and even thorny 20th-century poet Ezra Pound. It’s all housed in Ambika P3, a 14,000 square foot hall three floors deep in the University of Westminster.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">LCMF 2015 opens boldly with Collective Capital, an evening celebrating the cooperative spirit of London’s sprawling experimental scene.</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> Edward Henderson is a driving force behind the capital’s <a href="http://bastardassignments.com/" target="_blank">Bastard Assignments</a> series, which presents punky, conceptual performances in living rooms and disused spaces.</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> His festival opener </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Tape Piece </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">is a characteristically impish accli</span><span style="font-weight: 400">matization to Ambika P3, where seven performers attach sellotape to separate fixtures and slowly unroll them, making glitchy bursts of noise and a waist-high lattice across the bunker space. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Tape Piece</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> forces the audience into unexpected configurations: as punters move out the way of an incoming tape thread, they listen in to different parts of the cavernous space. It works a treat as a one-liner on the physical impact of sound, but the night’s real meat comes courtesy of two world premieres by British composer Neil Luck and visual artists Anne Bean and Richard Wilson. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">Physical interrogation reaches an absurd zenith with Luck’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Via Gut</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, a theater piece graphically obsessed with both commercial entertainment and tapeworms. Luck and his ensemble squib-box alternate between chat-show sleaze and cascades of maniacal burps. It feels psychotically logical, even as a tapdancing, squealing guitarist is overwhelmed by an army of tapeworm balloons. The set-up for visual artists Richard Wilson’s and Anne Bean’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">NALEMAG</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> , an astonishing portrait of the Thames and its shipbuilding communitie</span><span style="font-weight: 400">s, is gigantic. Behind flickering bulbs, Bean and Wilson dance precisely between blow torches, oil drums, fog horns. B</span><span style="font-weight: 400">alloons scream a cluster as they rise one by one to the ceiling, panes of glass shatter under flame, firecrackers writhe on Ambika’s walls. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">Tonight I feel for PAN affiliate and Codes boss Visionist. Accompanied by visuals of a fleshy avatar merging with liquid topographies, Louis Carnell’s grime arabesques seem a fitting culmination of the mechanical poise, bass brutality and warped lullabies of previous sets from John Wall, Shelly Parker and Claudia Hunte. But on a night where collective energy and spatial play reign—and deprived of a club context—Carnell and Kevin Bray’s A/V show feels a little flat. A London postcode can’t disguise the fact that, stylistically, Visionist is stranded. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">Plunging back underground the night after, I discover that the crowd has nearly doubled for a night dedicated to searing, meditative experimental compositions</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> from American West Coast mid-century luminaries such as John Cage, Terry Riley, <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/pauline-oliveros-recommendation/" target="_blank">Pauline Oliveros</a> and Subotnick. For those like me, who have bolstered old-man-and-his-dog audiences at back-room experimental gigs all year, there’s a genuine thrill to being amongst so many bodies, and it’s one of LCMF’s huge achievements that the hundreds packed in on a Saturday night seem primed to listen hard. It’s characteristic of the festival’s savvy programming that the performances feel as personable as they do seismic thanks in part to the way that they permeate all of Ambika’s corners. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">Sandwiched in between urgent student renditions of John Cage’s and Terry Riley’s classics </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">First Construction (In Metal)</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Keyboard Study No. 2</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, Watts prophets legend Otis O’Solomon pops up on a small blue plinth, addressing his utopian street poetry directly to the London crowd, asking, “Love me if you love me, and if you don’t—love me anyway.” O’Solomon’s direct connection helps imbue the more canonized pieces with the tangible, human touch so integral to the West Coast legacy, reminding us that Cage and Riley’s music, as much as O’Solomon’s proto hip-hop, is made to be loved. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">The reverence fizzing under the evening’s first half properly explodes as Deep Listening guru Pauline Oliveros modestly takes to the stage. Prior to tonight, my knowledge of Oliveros’ work is slight, and the barbed music she wrenches from her electronic accordion shatters any preconceptions that her output might be a little cultish. Oliveros is a magnetic combination of brute force and sensitivity, and her spasmodic convulsions of MIDI voice, slap bass and saxophone sounds deserve exactly the breathless adoration they receive. It’s a mark of the moment’s ecstasy that I spend most of Subotnick’s closing set simply trying to calm down. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">LCMF’s marath</span><span style="font-weight: 400">on evenings can produce musical revelations, but they’re also exhausting, and I’m happy after a night off that Monday’s program features simply one piece: a Chris Watson world premiere. Since his Cabaret Voltaire days, the founding member has carved out a formidable reputation as perhaps the world’s foremost sound recordist, honing his craft on the BBC’s n</span><span style="font-weight: 400">ature documentaries with David Attenborough and translating them into a series of mind-boggling solo releases on Touch. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Okeanos</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> is, for my money, his strongest work since 2011’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">El Tren Fantasma</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">Much like O’Solomon on West Coast night, Watson breaks any pretensions of grandeur with a straightforward, modest introduction: </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Okeanos</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> is an eight-channel piece exploring “planet ocean,” almost all of its sounds are recorded on hydrophones below the oceans’ surfaces and it traces a pole to pole journey through the songs of bearded seals, orcas and minute crustaceans. But to describe </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Okeanos’</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> materials gets you no closer to the sensual epiphany of experiencing the thing. The crackle of ice on the surface as Adelie penguins first take us under the surface makes my skin crawl, glitchy mollusc noises tickle my extremities, and all’s washed away by deep currents of suboceanic bass.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">Most of all, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Okeanos</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> masterfully conjures up a sense of vast space. Watson must have a treasure trove of samples he could pepper his listeners with but instead, time crawls. Lilting orca song travels and decays before a mate answers from a mile away, seal yelps ring on in the void and humpback whales groan from where the light can’t reach. It’s this sense of touch and musicality that makes </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Okeanos</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> so awesome, as if Watson were so in tune with the environments he’s captured that he can move at their tempo, reconjure their space, sing again their alien melodies pitch-perfect.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">Tuesday’s To A New Definition Of Opera II is an entirely different proposition, and I find that UK premieres of theater works by modernist icons Ezra Pound and Karlheinz Stockhausen fall short of being properly mind-expanding. Maybe it’s the timing, but Stockhausen’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Pieta</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, where a blue-robed soprano is encircled by a flugelhorn player and swooping electronics, feels a little too George Lucas for my liking. LCMF are generally great at digging up forgotten gems, but on the evidence of the stodgy </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Le Testament de Villon, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">Pound is perhaps best remembered for his poetry.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">The opera night belongs not to the establishment figures but to American video artist Ryan Trecartin and British outsider composer Tim Parkinson. Trecartin’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">CENTER JENNY</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, a 50-minute film populated by a swarm of nightmarish fembots, is nauseating and fascinating in equal measure. Sitting through the hyper-edited soup of whining chipmunk voices, day-glo swimwear, and manic karaoke bouts, I realize I’m having a horrible kind of fun. Trecartin’s insistence that we all get an eye and ear full of sewage—and for a </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">long </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">time—feels vital on a night dedicated to age-old forms. Better to feel repelled than nonplussed.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">British composer Tim Parkinson’s music-theater work </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Time With People</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> is the downtrodden fallout from Trecartin’s gross excess. The pack of zombie performers—Huddersfield’s brilliant Edges ensemble—are glued to smartphones as they navigate a junk-strewn stage through disembodied bleeps. They resemble nothing if not a herd of London commuters. But the thrill of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Time With People</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> is how much heart Parkinson packs into a nihilistic landscape. This opera is made up of questionnaires, deadpan anecdotes, beaten up fridge parts, soggy cardboard boxes and rotting lentils. But it is deeply, miraculously poignant.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">LCMF’s closing night ambitiously draws together digital ephemera’s finest from both the classical world and the electronic underground, with composers Jennifer Walshe, Brigitta Muntendorf and Neele </span><a href="http://www.neelehuelcker.de/"><span style="font-weight: 400">Hülcker</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> playing alongside cyber-darlings James Ferraro and PC Music’s Felicita. Now that “post-internet art” has ceased to be a hot topic for endless think pieces, Requiem For Reality is a chance to assess the work in a less hype-driven context, a privilege which leaves me feeling ultimately unnerved.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">The night’s central performances are the ones that leave me feeling most confused. Jennifer Walshe’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">The Total Mountain</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> is a 50-minute multimedia performance where Walshe turns the tweets of One Direction fans, YouTube detritus and omnipresent Facebook streams into erratic character pieces both for herself and on video. It’s a precise, far-reaching diagnosis of our contemporary moment, where distraction and the enticement of celebrity pervade our physical and virtual lives, and Walshe is a mesmerising performer. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">But I can’t shake feeling fundamentally undernourished at the piece’s close, just as, later on, Felicita’s bubbles and squeaks can’t bludgeon me into chirpiness. The PC Music producer’s performance consists mostly of him checking his smartphone while his Mac’s rave sequences toy with violet strobes. Maybe I’m missing something, but it’s not my idea of a fun night out. Unlike the week’s most potent programmes, Requiem For Reality lacks visceral impact, and, for all its kooky sheen, is perversely unaffecting. Happily, James Ferraro bucks the trend. Strange to think that the man who made his name with 2011’s ringtone odyssey </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Far Side Virtual </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">should be the one to inject a sense of human energy at the festival’s close, but Ferraro pulls it off. The US producer drenches Siri memories of latte macchiatos and Toyota licenses in a thick LA smog, using a guest cellist to invoke a Lynchian dread.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400">Ferraro’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">coup</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> is LCMF at its unpredictable best. The festival distinguishes itself from behemoths like Berlin’s <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/berlin-atonal-festival-2015-review/" target="_blank">Atonal</a> by really pushing the limits of what stylistically can be housed under one roof. Its nights are underpinned by the risk that things really might fall to bits, and that sense of daring makes its triumphs feel all the more real. When LCMF first set up it felt like a purposeful punt at what a festival could be in a future a little less complacent. That voracious, fearless programming has become the benchmark for events of this scale owes as much to this festival as international counterparts like <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/michail-stangls-insiders-guide-to-the-ctm-festival/" target="_blank">CTM</a> and <a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/your-attention-is-a-battlefield-unsound-2015-in-review/" target="_blank">Unsound</a>. Year on year, LCMF re-injects myriad scenes with a precious strain of kamikaze zeal; you can’t help but salute it. </span></p>'
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# The UK’s Best Experimental Festival: LCMF Reviewed Since its first edition in 2013, the [London Contemporary Music Festival][1]{: target="_blank"} has become perhaps the UK's foremost festival for truly daring music. LCMF fills memorable venues with blockbuster programs, which makes it feel mo...
Chunk #2 (Position: 1)
These precise but bizarre concoctions are the festival's hallmark, and this year's seven-night Christmas special features US provocateur [James Ferraro][3]{: target="_blank"}, [Buchla][4]{: target="_blank"} synth pioneer [Morton Subotnick][5]{: target="_blank"}, doom demigod and [Sunn O)))][6]{: ...
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*Tape Piece* forces the audience into unexpected configurations: as punters move out the way of an incoming tape thread, they listen in to different parts of the cavernous space. It works a treat as a one-liner on the physical impact of sound, but the night's real meat comes courtesy of two world...
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Behind flickering bulbs, Bean and Wilson dance precisely between blow torches, oil drums, fog horns. Balloons scream a cluster as they rise one by one to the ceiling, panes of glass shatter under flame, firecrackers writhe on Ambika's walls. Tonight I feel for PAN affiliate and Codes boss Visioni...
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But on a night where collective energy and spatial play reign---and deprived of a club context---Carnell and Kevin Bray's A/V show feels a little flat. A London postcode can't disguise the fact that, stylistically, Visionist is stranded. Plunging back underground the night after, I discover that ...
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For those like me, who have bolstered old-man-and-his-dog audiences at back-room experimental gigs all year, there's a genuine thrill to being amongst so many bodies, and it's one of LCMF's huge achievements that the hundreds packed in on a Saturday night seem primed to listen hard. It's characte...
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Sandwiched in between urgent student renditions of John Cage's and Terry Riley's classics *First Construction (In Metal)* and *Keyboard Study No. 2*, Watts prophets legend Otis O'Solomon pops up on a small blue plinth, addressing his utopian street poetry directly to the London crowd, asking, "Lo...
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Oliveros is a magnetic combination of brute force and sensitivity, and her spasmodic convulsions of MIDI voice, slap bass and saxophone sounds deserve exactly the breathless adoration they receive. It's a mark of the moment's ecstasy that I spend most of Subotnick's closing set simply trying to c...
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Since his Cabaret Voltaire days, the founding member has carved out a formidable reputation as perhaps the world's foremost sound recordist, honing his craft on the BBC's nature documentaries with David Attenborough and translating them into a series of mind-boggling solo releases on Touch. *Okea...
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But to describe *Okeanos'* materials gets you no closer to the sensual epiphany of experiencing the thing. The crackle of ice on the surface as Adelie penguins first take us under the surface makes my skin crawl, glitchy mollusc noises tickle my extremities, and all's washed away by deep currents...
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