Spatial Music Collective

The Joinery, Dublin

Sometimes art explains itself, sometimes it retains its mystery. At other times it needs a little outside help to reach its audience.

Concerts by Dublin's (already) five-year-old Spatial Music Collective often seem to bring such aesthetic issues into sharp focus. Case in point: Collapsing Old Bridgesfor eight-channel tape, composed by Brian Bridges for an installation at the Contemporary Music Centre on "Culture Night" last month.

Its electronically contrived sonic landscape featured a certain essence of choir but as remote as outer space and cold, void of the human warmth generated by an actual choir. And there was a slow, inexorable descent, as of something winding down.

Interesting, engaging. No apparent meaning, but meaning didn’t seem to be needed. However, Bridges spoke later of how the Contemporary Music Centre had wanted the installation to reflect their Fishamble Street location and its associations with Handel and Georgian Dublin.

Accordingly, he had borrowed a sequence from the final chorus of Messiah.

Ah! Now, in addition to engagement there was meaning – the remoteness, a feeling of history, a sense of temporal distance. Me, I'd like to have had the information beforehand; but hadn't it worked as art without it? For her Pensierino, Linda Buckley provided some direction with a reference in her sub-title to Francesco Turrisi, a Dublin-based jazz pianist. Yet this time the piece nearly explained itself – a deep, slowly shifting electronic soundscape acting as backdrop first to thoughtful solo piano and then to an embedded jazz trio.

No such hand-holding for Jonathan Nangle’s “winter tells lies” whose secret remained undisclosed. Moreover, his subtle electronics melded to repeating tonal figures on piano were accompanied by gentle black-and-white video images that deepened the mystery while multiplying the possibilities.

Works by Eric Lyon and Ian McDonnell insisted more strictly on the listener’s own individual responses, while pieces by Enda Bates for hexaphonic guitar (with each string linked to its own speaker) were exploratory and minimalist and did what they said on the tin.