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Live London #5: Charlemagne Palestine
A scattered crowd littered the balcony above the bodied pews below. A third audience, consisting of soft toys, gathered the dusk in the window left of Charlemagne Palestine and a towering church organ. Foreheads touched wood as if in prayer or somehow closer to the monolithic vibrations issued at the musician’s command. Singular, linear tones forced their way in a perpetual exhalation from the lungs of the organ that graces St Giles-in-the-Fields, London. These where the quiet foundations of the six hour solo performance of Schlingen Blangen. Shards of afternoon autumn light waned through leaded windows, unbroken and constant in their decline. Palestine’s composition waxed with opposing constancy. As the first hour disappeared with hypnotic droning, the second began to grind an internal path, manipulating inner organs. The relentless tones brought challenging reverberations to ones’ respiratory system. The heavily focussed tonal hypnotherapy seemed to generate a consciousness of ones automatic bodily actions. There was a drama to the second hour that the first omitted. The first took shape as a static drone expanding at a glacial pace, as the second seemed to draw ones attention to, for the first time, the performer. As the volume increased the audience seemed to snap out of a trance and began to explore the church, experiencing the perpetual drone from various alcoves and pathways. I spent time walking towards the altar, and amongst the pews that divided the ground floor. The sound was transformed in motion. Originally I heard wavered tones through focusing my breathing and concentrating on my pulse. This time the corporeal in conjunction with spiritual surroundings created a private performance.
As the third hour took hold I found myself slipping in between the hard wooden seat and dusted floor beneath my feet. I sat in a booth, my bottom absorbing the vibrations a fraction before my ears. The darkness had set in and the sound had evolved with the determination of a darkening sky. I could barely see the words on my page as I wrote in sporadic sentences betwixt the sonic onslaught. The sound had swollen into the fourth hour and the organ had stretched into an abundant orchestra of strings and voices. The tonal layering had woven in on itself with a felt-like density, befitting, as it offered comfort to my increasingly sore posterior. The trumpet sound took itself in high calls that issued through supple manipulations of airflow to the pipes. Palestine twiddled responsive knobs and keys, interspersing these actions with moments of swaying in a seemingly inebriated bliss. The possession of the sound and atmosphere of the church compelled many into this uncontrollable trance.
Looking around I began to feel a kinship with the unspoken friends that littered the seats in proximity to myself. Their faces oft looked up and drifted back with eyes shut, yet I began, (after four hours) to feel somewhat amongst companions. As the sound developed into a choral stage, the force of the music had now increased to a loud and consuming volume. The shimmering nature of music so driven and intent over such a long period of time held me captivated and seemingly both at ease and uncomfortable. This challenging nature of listening was part of the performance’s success. The challenge of drone based music can be to merely capture your audiences attention, and often over periods of 20 minutes or so. It was Palestine’s ability to construct his performance as a pure sonic phenomenom, with the art of listening as important as the music being performed. I found the six hours a little too long, but when the performance drew to its conclusion, an emotion similar to one who wants to know what happens to the characters at the end of a good book came to me. I wished to fall asleep and wake with Palestine playing music. I was thrilled with sonic indulgence and the glory of intoxicating swelling drone. This was brave and audacious and poignant to the point of exhaustion.
-- Peter Taylor (28 October, 2008)
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