no.signal at the Red Rose: A Line-Up of Quiet Extremes

On 11 December 2007, the promoter no.signal presented an evening at the Red Rose Club on Seven Sisters Road in London. The bill was assembled around a deliberate contrast: performances that reduce the guitar to near-silence placed alongside loud drone tones, with percussion and lowercase instrumentation in between. The programme was announced as a first no.signal production at the Red Rose, accompanying premiere showcases.

The stated aim echoed the position taken by the SOTTOVOCE festival earlier that year. Rather than settling on a single register, the night moved between extremes of volume and texture, treating quiet and loud as related rather than opposing concerns.

Ambarchi and O'Malley: A First Duo

The headline pairing was Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley, billed as their first ever duo performance. It came one day after both had appeared as part of SUNN O))) on a bill with Boris and Earth. The announcement promised the unexpected and a surprise addition to the set.

O'Malley, also known as SOMA, is a co-founder and in-house album artist for Southern Lord Records and guitarist in Sunn O))). His work has centred on drone doom and death/doom metal, with the duo and trio Earth as a principal inspiration and guide. His other projects include Ginnungagap, KTL, Lotus Eaters and Gravetemple.

Ambarchi, born in Sydney in 1969, has performed live since 1986. An electronic guitarist and drummer, he has long worked at transcending conventional instrumental approaches. He was a member of the noise band Phlegm with Robbie Avenaim, with whom he later co-organised the What Is Music Festival. His focus is mainly the exploration of the guitar, though he also plays percussion in some live performances. He had recently begun touring with Sunn O))) and had released an EP with Attila Csihar and Sunn O)))'s Greg Anderson under the name Burial Chamber Trio. He also works in popular music contexts as a drummer for the group Sun, with vocalist Chris Townend, formerly of Kiss My Poodles Donkey.

Osso Exótico with Z'EV

The Portuguese ensemble Osso Exótico appeared with the percussionist Z'EV in what was announced as their first live collaboration, launching a new album on Crouton. Since 1989 the group had built a substantial body of avant-garde work; its current members were listed as André Maranha, David Maranha and Patrícia Machás.

Z'EV had spent the better part of thirty years finding ways to draw sound from material and shaping it into a mystic cacophony, using sound as communication. The description of the collaboration pointed to long stretches of rhythmic, bubbling organ matched by large bass drum patterns, culminating in an expansive psychedelic pool of sound. It was framed as music that carries the grit of Tony Conrad into the trance of Terry Riley, radiating the experience of a sweat lodge in an explosion of tribal minimalism. With no sound processing, the result was described as highly natural, grossly enigmatic and deeply energised.

Wastell and Nordwall: New Works

Mark Wastell and Joachim Nordwall were billed for the premiere of new works. Nordwall, a sound artist and musician from Gothenburg, was formerly of Kid Commando, described as an avant punk rock trio. He founded the iDEAL organisation, responsible for releases and an annual festival, and performs solo as The Idealist. His music was characterised as powerful drone that refuses to lull the listener, intense and genre-defying, belonging partly to industrial music and partly to drone and ambient.

Wastell, already known as the head of the Sound323 and Confront labels, focuses his instrumental material on abstract principles of space and texture, encompassing elements of new London silence, pro-instrument minimalism, new complexity and electro-acoustics. Because of the nature of his chosen instrument, he tends to favour chamber-style ensembles and is a member of several regular groups. Much of his relationship with the instrument is concentrated on the tactile, textural and sonic possibilities of both violoncello and bow. Exposure to contemporary composers led to a deeper appreciation of works written for strings by Feldman, Cage, Nono, Lachenmann and Sciarrino; the use of live electronics and musique concrète by Tudor, Parmegiani, Xenakis and others was another important early influence.

Akiyama and Boghossian: Minimal Guitar

Tetuzi Akiyama and Hervé Boghossian were announced for a special one-off, first-time duo showcase of classical minimal guitar improvisations.

Akiyama is often associated with the improvising community in Tokyo that formed around the Off Site venue, but his sound owes as much to the country blues guitarists of the 1930s. He has taken the blues form into a new world of minimalist improvisations, his loose playing sidestepping the usual clichés of the guitar in both free improv and traditional folk. His playing can be heard on Time Between, on the Locust Music compilation Wooden Guitar, and on Relator, released by Taku Sugimoto's Slub label. His projects range from free improvisation with musicians across the globe to hard minimalist electric blues boogies.

Boghossian was born in Marseille and created the avant-rock band ION+ with Jürgen Heckel, also known as Sogar, first as a trio and then as a duo. He began a solo career under the moniker SOL and composed a fifteen-minute electronic soundtrack, i@s, in collaboration with the German video director Thomas Einfeldt. His album Mouvements, based on computer-processed guitar, was released on Raster-Noton in June 2004. He later formed the trio PLATEFORMES with Matthieu Saladin on amplified bass clarinet and Stéphane Rives on soprano saxophone, with Boghossian on guitar feedback. In parallel he worked on the composition series Archi.Texture, its first volume featuring John Tilbury of AMM on piano and Mark Wastell on cello, with Boghossian responsible for composition and computer processing; the album was released on the British label Cathnor, with two further volumes to follow, involving Burkhard Beins, Stéphane Rives and Bertrand Denzler. He was also working on the follow-up to Mouvements.

The evening was completed by a DJ set from Sheikh Ahmed of Failme. Taken together, the programme placed nearly silent acoustic guitar compositions at one end and loud drone tones at the other, with percussion and lowercase instrumentation passing between them.