Music guaranteed to send you to sleep
Minimalist Dream House Barbican, London EC2
In its youth, back in the late Sixties, minimalism was a hard-edged, hard-driven thing. In its middleage, it has gone all soft, as this event devised by piano-playing sisters Katia and Marielle Labèque showed. The repeating patterns, chasing each other in imitative games, are still there.
But they’ve become gentle and tinkly, suggestive of light filtering through a curtained window, or travelling over a vast landscape – but at a height, with the windows closed. It’s curiously at once intimate and “cosmic”. Tuesday night’s Minimalist Dream
House gig, a follow-up to the Labèque sisters’ 2013 album of the same name, offered an uninterrupted diet of this new “dream minimalism”, from a group of mostly American composers, played by the sisters alongside guitarist-composers Bryce Dessner and David Chalmin.
The low light, the drowsy tangle of piano and guitar artfully magnified and softened by the sound system, the way each piece was linked to the next by a mysterious drone, all contributed to a sense of an immersive experience where distinctions between one piece and the next really didn’t matter too much.
Max Richter’s The Twins was so close to Glass’s mournful piano miniatures it felt like a deliberate homage, and Bryce Dessner’s Haven felt equally beholden to Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint. Most interesting of the bunch was Timo Andres’s Out of Shape, which started with the usual repeating patterns and then ventured out to different harmonic areas, but so slyly and gently one barely noticed.
After the interval there was a muffled cheer as Thom Yorke of Radiohead joined the pianists for a performance of his new piece, Gawpers.
It was mildly intriguing in the way the two pianists sustained made patterns from repeating notes. Then the two guitarists returned for a couple of Yorke’s songs. Don’t Fear the Light had a pleasingly sad way of moving between major and minor, which combined with Yorke’s high voice produced that wistful sadness that was Radiohead’s trademark.
Then, as an encore, Yorke sang the title song he composed for the remake of the horror film Suspirium. There was nothing horrifying about it – just more dreaminess.
The crowd loved it, and of course they gave him a standing ovation. But it was striking just how little energy there was in that gloomy space.
Music is supposed to be enlivening, but this gig felt more like a narcotic.