#lauschmann

Jan Lauschmann

You will be familiar with the expression “weird and wonderful” possibly without giving much thought to what it actually means. This is the best description I can come up with for what I have just experienced at Woodend Barn tonight. The event was in two parts, both of them definitely weird – yes - but wonderful too!

The first part, the fruit of a week’s collaboration between visual artists Torsten Lauschmann and Charlie Hammond both Glasgow based visual artists was entitled Matter in the wrong place an exploration of dirt “as material and system”. That is what the programme note said – but what did we actually experience? It was a film and yet not just a film, there was something of son et lumière about it too. I know that art form usually takes place out of doors at a famous location and tells the history of the place. This was inside and gave a completely new slant on the creation often with a spicing of humour, but visually it did have that son et lumière grand scale fantasy about it. The film content was projected onto a huge screen made of crinkled aluminium foil and included silhouettes, dramatic patches of colour and much more too. A vacuum cleaner with a light attachment played a teasing role in the visual sense and added to the soundtrack as well. It was imaginative, disconcerting and great fun too.

The second part of the experience brought together Torsten Lauschmann with musicians from the Red Note Ensemble along with local performers. Inconsistent Whisper used nine performers playing an unlikely combination of instruments and at one point a bit of singing as well. There were two guitars, a harmonium, two recorders, one of these a contrabass, a cello, a saxophone, percussion and to my delight a melodica which somehow brought back a flavour of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera music. Percussionist Tom Hunter set things moving and patches of different coloured lights, blue, green, red and amber triggered the playing of the other instruments, whether singly or in different groups. Improvisations were set off by one player and then taken up sometimes literally or else as a nicely fitting accompaniment by others. Obviously there were powerful elements of chance at work here. What lights would trigger which players and how would they respond to what the others were doing? What was truly amazing was how well the whole musical experience hung together. Perhaps if our world and indeed we ourselves are a product of chance, this performance displayed how things can come amazingly well together to produce something that does not seem to be the result of chance at all. That anyway is what the performance conveyed to me.

There were no seats in the auditorium for the audience although those who wanted one could easily get it. I just sat on the floor and I enjoyed the experience of that too – it reminded me of student days in the now very remote past. On my way home I thought that this is exactly the kind of experience SOUND should be offering to us – something unlike anything I have experienced before.