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New Intimacy III at Ambika P3

Anna Picard

“The vocalist Elaine Mitchener, the poet Dante Micheaux, the saxophonist Jason Yarde, the trumpeter and flautist Byron Wallen, the pianist Robert Mitchell, the drummer Mark Sanders and the bassist Neil Charles delivered their set of Vocal Classics of the Black Avant-Garde with brilliance, discipline and daring; a body of work as substantial, poetic and exciting as Hans Werner Henze’s Voices.”

The smoothing, stroking and rubbing of piano strings add up to punch and panache

★★★★★
Now in its fifth year, the London Contemporary Music Festival has punch and panache. Pornography too, in the form of Annie Sprinkle’s The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop (1992), scored by Pauline Oliveros. Intimacy was the theme, for which read personal and political candour, vocalism as virtuosic as a bel canto mad scene, and the pure joy of Alison Knowles’s Child Art Piece (1964), performed by Otis Prempeh-Findlay.

Child Art Piece was all but silent — a play of tiny limbs and shadows against a white wall. The white noise never ceases in Ambika P3, a former concrete construction hall in Marylebone. Patrons wander in and out of the space — leaning against a wall, squeezing on to a bench, perching on the stairs — yet their concentration is intense. This is how to bend ears: tease at the edge of audibility, then shock with electronics so loud that they rattle your ribs.

In Philip Corner and Phoebe Neville’s set, the strings of a grand piano were smoothed, stroked, rubbed and plucked (BowWow) and blessed and dressed with scarlet petals (Buddha’s Flower Sutra). In Piano Work: A Movement the two Fluxus veterans slowly spun the instrument around. Isolated fragments of sound force the mind to make associations: a minor triad cues a memory of a Schumann song.

At the other dynamic extreme Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother) declaimed pulpit rhetoric on American injustice over layers of pulsing electronica: “We just up and disappear!” How little has changed since Jeanne Lee, Archie Shepp, Joseph Jarman, Les McCann and Eric Dolphy created pieces such as In These Last Days (1979) and Jim Crow (1962).

The vocalist Elaine Mitchener, the poet Dante Micheaux, the saxophonist Jason Yarde, the trumpeter and flautist Byron Wallen, the pianist Robert Mitchell, the drummer Mark Sanders and the bassist Neil Charles delivered their set of Vocal Classics of the Black Avant-Garde with brilliance, discipline and daring; a body of work as substantial, poetic and exciting as Hans Werner Henze’s Voices.