A few weeks back we featured Late Night Music in the Museum, a pair of gigs presented by Spillers Records at the National Museum Cardiff. Arranged in support of the Fragile? and Chalkie Davies: the NME years exhibitions currently on display, the events provided an eclectic array of Welsh artists a chance to ply their trade within the rather unusual venue, while also enabling visitors to see the museum after hours, an experience tinged with a nameless excitement, the feeling that you’re somehow breaking the rules.
Fragile? hosted ‘Music is Fragile?’, a concert by Cardiff University’s School of Music written in response to the ceramics exhibition. Lisa Nelsen (flute) and Gwenllian Llŷr (harp) played a number of pieces which utilised technology alongside classical music to produce imaginative, evocative sounds, with composers Richard McReynolds, Julia E. Howell, Blair Boyd, Daniel James Ross, Jordan Hirst, Martin Humphries and John Cooney managing to create seven very different pieces. The audience, which ranged from ages seven to seventy, sat (and then stood) entranced – the connoisseurs appreciating the technique and composition, while the lay folk learned just what is possible with a harp, a flute and a gathering of experimental minds.
A quick dash across the hall led to the Chalkie Davies exhibition, the location of the music event presented by Spillers Records. Mike Dennis, wearing a rather apt Dennis The Menace shirt, kicked off proceedings with his rather unique brand of spoken word. As alluded to in the preview post, Dennis is a classically-trained violinist, so the early minutes of his set acted as a pleasant soundtrack for an audience still milling around Chalkie Davies’s photos. But this was not another traditional concert. Dennis was soon utilising loops and effects pedals to build a dense tangle of sound, and as he began to recite his verses a crowd gathered, drawn by lyrics covering everything from bad bosses to the insanity of firearms. Both violin and verses became impressively frantic and by the end of his set the the novelty of a gig in a museum gallery began to hit home.
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If Dennis was the early stages of transition between exhibition and venue, then Junior Bill & the Scallies completed the switch. Peddling their brand of punky, samba-infused ska, the band had the audience packed around them, the photography forgotten, a gang of nodding heads and tapping feet punctuated with sporadic pockets of dancing from the diehards at the front.
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The final act, Gwenno, changed the room again, swapping sweaty energy for something far more detached and ominous. With the aid of electronics that fell somewhere between robotic and celestial, not to mention her Welsh and Cornish lyrics, Gwenno created vivid soundscapes that were somehow desolate, clinical, post-human worlds in which love and pain are nothing but nagging, vestigial impulses buried beneath a cascade of ones and zeroes. Accompanied by Adam Curtis-style visuals projected onto the wall, the set captured the audience in a totally different way to the previous acts. Strangely, things had come full circle, the gallery-cum-club morphing into a conceptual art gallery. (FYI this is neither the time or place but I could write quite a bit more about Gwenno’s music and the ideas behind it. The album is out this July on Heavenly Recordings, so expect one of my long-winded, not-practical-for-the-internet-consumer specials in the near future).
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The diverse, shape-shifting nature of the evening highlighted something very important with regards to museums in general. Without getting too much into politics and the mind-melting confusion of the economy, British museums, along with a whole host of other public services, are under threat from the current climate of austerity. This is something that causes some people to bump their gums angrily (*raises hand*), and others to shrug their shoulders in apathy at the maiming (and eventual loss) of what they see as redundant collections of old stuff. But the truth is that museums can and should be so much more than dusty halls manned by dusty men and women. The Late Night Music evenings showed that museums can be innovative, adaptable and welcoming to all, centres of the community rather than simple tourist novelties. All it takes are some determined people with imagination. Not only does it serve to interest the disinterested (the people who feel museums aren’t for them or else visit once in a blue moon and skip to the dinosaurs) it also gives a productive, progressive outlet for the energy that would otherwise be wasted gum-bumping and foot-stamping by those who already appreciate the value a museum can hold. What better way to ensure the survival of an institute than to make it central to the lives and well-being of the people it serves?
Keep up to date with future events at the National Museum Cardiff on their Website or Twitter page. Let’s hope they continue to do things like this.
P.S. The lovely musical photos are by Andrew Mackie. The amateurish Fragile? one is from us.