Brian Eno – Apollo: For All Mankind @ Town Hall, 9th October 2010.
The celestial culmination of Birmingham City Council/Birmingham University’s sponsored ‘Sounds of Space Weekend’ was a unique opportunity to hear Brian Eno’s ‘Apollo: For All Mankind’, accompanying Al Reinerts’s two year mission to boldly edit down over two hundred hours of stunning NASA footage filmed on the 1969 Apollo 11 Lunar mission.
Unique in that the transposition, work of South Korean composer Woojun Lee, of Eno’s seminal ambient studio intense dynamic, allowed the audience to appreciate the rich, tonal textures and asymmetrical juxtapositions of the original concept through the instrumental performance of eleven piece ensemble, Ice Breaker, and BJ Cole’s pedal steel guitar. A featured instrument, in his introduction, he conceded, might seem initially incongruous. But with in the context of Eno’s visulisation of ‘zero-gravity Country & Western’ and well, you know Eno, it had a mesmeric tranquility.
Then were three distinct but complementary experiences this evening: the music, the breath-taking clarity, poignance and gentle wit of Reinert’s cinematic collage and the serendipitous delight of watching the fractaled reflections of the screen projection and the stage lighting on the perspex acoustic reflectors suspended beneath the magnificent golden crown plaster moulding above us.
During the interval there were buzzing conversations from elated punters eager to share how many sample references they had spotted taken from the original studio album beginning with Trainspotting and 28 Days Later before moving in to anorak minutiae.
There followed three short movements performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Many of BCMG’s original works (though not these) come from commissioned pieces as part of the ‘Sound Investment’ project where people can incrementally buy ‘shares’ to sponsor a chosen composer’s premier performance. The ‘Serenade for a Satellite’, for some at least, could not have been described as easily accessible. Challenging, yes. Innovative, certainly. Ground-breaking? Well, that depends whether you are digging the foundations for a new temple to the Muses or invoking the Furies to bring about its imminent collapse. BCMG’s brief, amongst others (in paraphrase) is to challenge established concepts of composition and traditional ‘classical’ dynamics. And long may they do so; their international status is a given. (Note, premier night of ‘Stravinski’s Rite of Spring’ literally caused a riot in so called bohemian Paris.) The musicianship and technical prowess was beyond question and pushed the boundaries of accepted formal compositional structures beyond the musical world as we previously knew it. Ergo: mission accomplished.
Review – John Kennedy