ART OF NOISE
LONDON HAMMERSMITH ODEON
THEIR TIME, like the strained smile
on celibacy's face, is desperately short. Like the tame, trained. caged
bear all their disregard is now marshmallow; their mouths don't have the
proper shape for prophecies. No longer “dropping storm-troops behind enemy lines in Time”.
Misnomer are presently a Theatre without plot. 'theme, narrative or
characterisation. an Orchestra sanely conducted by some stuffed-shirt
malcontent., unconcerted curators quite happy to repackage the
avant-garde for easy consumption and smother all experience into a
symmetric-al, homogenous whole.
What experience?…it's all
pre-prog-rammed, pre-recorded. pre-packaged. pre-dissolved and as
removed from hyp-er-real life as any dictator: watch four guitarists
throttle Peter Gunn'. three backing vocalists beat Andrew Sisters wings,
or numberless sessioneers fill space and struggle against the backing
tape's stranglehold. Grimace while they take after-song bows. Fidget in
lieu of yet another drawn-out. well-arranged opus – ‘movements' like
those of disease, work, poverty and religion; something to suffer, an
excuse for failure, a justification for nothing.
And why should they be blown away like chaff in the wind? Once Upon A… 'Beatbox ' was a revelation: Sly Stone sampled ("Bop-du-dup-du-buum").
ske-wered, and tarred with High-Art dilent-tantism (small wonder Urban
USA fell at the first bell)… tonight it's a Yessong, refracting
Misnomer’s relationship with technology - like wandering salespeople
testling out new vacuum cleaners, they lead us into the intricacies of
two-grand Fairlights but the end result is less Duane Eddy, Television
or Musicology than alphabet blocks, loss of meaning.
The disconcerting thing is: these
are the established controllers of new-pop strategies; the cutting edge;
the dream image as fetish. Ann Dudley and J J Jeczailk, when not recast
as dabbling jazzers or smart classicists (?). help make the objects of
popular culture competitive by producing, programming and adding a dash
of faked-art. It is their principal function - though hardly their
avowed purpose - to stem off new unrests by endlessly imitating, though
never learning from, yesterday's mistakes - where their efforts, like
those tonight, “lack finish complexity, stasis, individuality, coherence, depth and endurance”.
Make no concession to this triumph of skill over all; gauchery over ineptitude – it’s kiss-off time.
