Spitz Fest #1 - Space Between Words

The first of a few gigs I'm attending this June as official photographer of the Spitalfields Festival was performed last night at Wilton's Music Hall. As the world's oldest surviving grand music hall Wilton's is a near derelict building being kept barely upright by much scaffolding & what looks in some places like paper maché. It's location left me feeling uneasy as I walked from Shadwell DLR station through precarious-looking council estates with my very noticable camera bag slung over my shoulder.

All these apparent negatives pale to the feel of the building as a whole. Although neglected in recent years the unrendered walls & chipped corners harbour an authentic charm and lovely, warm acoustic quality which - I was told by Kate, Events Manager for the festival - is even soft enough to give musicians a little grace when playing or singing an off-tune note. This year's Spitalfields Festival uses some really quirky venues about town...

The performance was nothing if not experimental. Four classically trained singers waited patiently for the fifth performer on stage to read his narrative to the evening - loosely themed with insightful knowledge - before launching themselves into bizarrely rhythmic clicks, pops, tongue-rolls and shushes, mixed with drawn out oohs and aahhs, each short section leaving one singer holding a note while the composer, sat upstairs with a laptop, sampled and looped that single voice through the speaker's next segment.

Impressive storytelling spoke of themes such as Tibetan meditation techniques and, for me, previously un-thought-of thoughts including how if a person has been deaf since birth, they have most probably still learned to read, but those words written have no sound attached to them in their minds. So in one respect it's akin to learning a language comprised only of telephone numbers...

Such seemingly random sounds were occasionally hard on the ear but through the hour-long show moved between accessible and dissonant chords in their own time, breathing a healthy dose of life into the composition. I left perhaps not inspired to compose, but with an opened mind to the possibilities of the human voice when used as a musical instrument. I look forward to where the next gig will take my mind.

Those wishing to read further info in the form of a blog post written by the wordsmith of the show himself, Alistair Appleton, are in luck.