Powerplant is a project fusing percussive music with electronic music and video art. Percussionist Joby Burgess takes David Schembri through the ins and outs of the project.
Percussion is, at its very basic, hitting things to make a sound. For professional percussionists, that is just the start of what can be done using percussion, as Joby Burgess shows in his project, Powerplant, which fuses his playing with live electronic processing or looping.
“The music is specially written for the project and fuses elements of electronica, pop and contemporary classical composition. Most recently, we worked with Will Gregory of Goldfrapp on a new work for bass marimba and tape loops,” Burgess says.
The ensemble is rounded up by composer Matthew Fairclough, who handles the sound design for the live shows, and visual artist Kathy Hinde who creates original video projections for the group.
What you are hitting counts for a lot in percussive music and, in Powerplant’s first album, Import/Export, Burgess uses a range of found objects and materials to make music on.
“A percussionist lives or dies by his or her sounds. For Import/Export, together with composer Gabriel Prokofiev, I spent much time discovering a palette of sounds for each object – enough to sustain seven or eight minutes of music,” the percussionists recounts.
“Once, we had a range of sounds and performance techniques that very naturally gave way to scraps of melodies, riffs and rhythmic material. In the voyage (movement) Fanta, which uses just a pair of West African soda bottles, we started with the struck cowbell and scraped guiro sounds, before exploring the melodic range of the instrument. In the opening, this is done by slowly tipping the liquid in the sealed bottle while tapping it. Later the bottle is opened and blown like a flute.”
Once the ideas start forming, the percussionist will workshop them with the composer so they can hear them come to life. Here is the stage where the electronic components come into play with live looping and delay effects being used. These are crucial devices, given that Burgess essentially plays solo in his performances.
“I love the dialogue in the performer-composer relationship and I feel it often makes for a more successful end product. The collaborative element is then taken forward when video and sound design are introduced. They are introduced at different times, depending on the piece or composer involved, and both have a generally organic development process of their own,” the percussionist says.
To give an example, in Im Dorfe by British composer Max de Wardener, Kathy Hinde began working at a very early stage filming specific gestures at the piano, which gave way to the piano part that accompanies the live drums.
Freedom to roam is certainly one of the things Burgess can safely claim to have as a percussionist. “I play and own many hundreds of instruments and that certainly does mean that I work across a very broad range of musical genres and with a very wide range of musicians,” he says.
“Over the past few years I have worked with everyone from Peter Gabriel and Murray Gold (Dr Who), where I have had to supply big grooves, to Eric Whitacre and John Taverner, who require more delicate magical touches to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and John Lunn (Downton Abbey) who require fast, virtuoso marimba.”
Using loops or ostinato to generate material or build form is an essential tool for many composers – dead or alive, classical or pop
Among his hundreds of instruments, Burgess is also a prolific user of the xylosynth, a hybrid instrument which is part xylophone and part synthesizer. When struck with mallets, the wooden keys are used to trigger samples or software synthesizers off Burgess’s laptop.
His latest album, 24 Lies Per Second, brushes with technology in its theme. Three tracks on it take inspiration from the work of Austrian film director Michael Haneke, who said: “Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.”
This album, Burgess says, is a “darker, more experimental album and makes constant use of or reference to sampling, tape loops and the human voice”.
In his performance at the Manoel Theatre, Burgess will be performing as part of the Modern Music Days, a new, international concert series committed to promote 20th-century repertoire and contemporary music.
The first concert will also feature an eclectic and multimedia performance by Powerplant, from the UK.
On the programme is music by Max de Wardener and Gabriel Prokofiev, along with two works by US minimalist composer Steve Reich, Burgess’s own arrangement of Electric Counterpoint and a live tape loop piece from the late 1960s, where the performers use voices taken from the audience.
When asked whether he has ever encountered any form of snobbery in the music world for using electronic implements so much, the percussionist shrugs off any of this and points at the use of technology as a continuation of what composers and performers have been doing for ages.
“For many hundreds of years composers and performers have been like magpies, constantly borrowing and reworking tiny motifs and ideas, which is in essence what sampling boils down to. You take a small part of something that already exists and begin to work with it to create something new and original,” he says.
“What used to be done by ear or with pen and paper, is these days done with technology. I guess the snobbery comes, when the sample is used very heavily, as to lack any real originality. Using loops or ostinato to generate material or build form is an essential tool for many composers – dead or alive, classical or pop.”
The event takes place on Saturday at 8 pm at the Manoel Theatre, Valletta as part of the Modern Music Days series of concerts. Modern Music Days is part of the Valletta 2018 Cultural Programme.
www.teatrumanoel.com.mt
www.modernmusicdays.eu