It opened with a vocal tour de force from Jennifer Walshe: snatches of pop hits poured unaccompanied from her lips, lyrics spliced like an anarchic mashup of Top of the Pops 2 footage. And it ended with Oliver Coates brandishing his cello aloft, its tone distorting with each movement – part helicopter, part electric guitar – as layers of synthesised sound roared around him. They dissipated gradually, leaving a single sustained note and ears ringing.
This latest Proms outing beyond South Kensington didn’t just step away from the cavernous Royal Albert Hall into the intimate, artfully lit and stripped-wall surroundings of the BAC. Performed across three small stages surrounding its standing audience, this mixed programme of new music crossed other boundaries: between music and noise, genres and styles, human performers and hi-tech tools.
In Crewdson and Cevanne’s set, Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian’s “sonic bonnet” (a Midi controller worn as a spectacular headdress) triggered looping, distant seagulls, running water and crackles of static, which mingled deliciously with her live harp and sunset-warm, folk-inspired vocals. Also exploring that human-tech divide, Neil Luck used the Musarc choral collective in Any’s Responses as a live laugh-track, their ultra-tight responses triggered by musical instructions spoken deadpan. Elsewhere, his gnomic Deepy Kaye mixed blink-and-you’ll-miss-it video clips of card dealing and coins spinning with his own vocals (spoken, garbled or gargled through water), mystifying live audio description from Mary Ann Hushlak and live electronics with viola (James McIlwrath) and cello (Rebecca Burden).
But it wasn’t all about digital wizardry. Kit Downes’s improvisation on BAC’s 1901 pipe organ – on which restoration work after a fire in 2015 “isn’t quite finished”, as he explained with relish – was a keen-eared celebration of the instrument’s foibles. Under Downes’s hands and feet, its unearthly whistles, patches of microtonal tuning and percussive, pitchless expulsions of air through faulty pipes became beguiling extensions of the standard array of keys and stops. And in a concert that by turn challenged, teased and rejoiced in the sheer breadth of sonic possibilities available to producers of new music today, it was a salient reminder of the continued pleasures and potential of analogue sound.
