KVT – Sound Stuff under the Big Top
KVT experiments about experimental sound
For a few years now the Sound Stuff festival has been a real highlight in the Hanoi music calendar and I still have shivers running up and down my spine when I remember the last sit down concert in the grounds of the History Museum, a couple of years ago, when Vu Nhat tan, Tri Minh and Robert Henke, a German experimental composer, went all electronic with environmental noise. Great stuff!
This year when I walked into the grounds of the History Museum on Friday night, under the big canvas canopy, I thought I must have been at a wedding…all those rows of seats down the front draped in snowy white with big crimson bows. Then I realized that they were for the VIPs …so after finding a place with the other plebeians of the unadorned class I looked forward with mounting anticipation to Tri Minh’s combo of traditional, classical and electronic taking over on stage under the huge bank of lights visually stereo scoped on the two big screens on either side.
And we weren’t disappointed. Tri Minh has a great sense of the dramatic and commenced with himself on grand piano counterpointing a colleague on a traditional ty ba (or dan bau- please excuse my unfamiliarity with Vietnamese names). This overture celebrated Tri Minh’s recent experimental compositions fusing music and instruments from East/West/past/present and was followed up with Danish singer, Michael Moller, joining a big band of traditional Vietnamese string, flute and percussion players, western classical horns and piano plus inevitable electronic inventions.
Tri Minh’s very listenable CD ‘Hanoi Love Stories’ is labeled on the internet as ambient/lounge music…which I think sells it short…and Moller led the group into a fusey ambient bit called “If I Run From the City” which caught the attention of all the young European expat males and their glam Vietnamese girlfriends sitting near us and they stayed rapt the next couple of pieces that hovered around Deep Foresty, laid back stuff gradually warming up into easy listening, move your body and groove bits until we got the perfect fusion and great noise I was waiting to hear with glorious trombone blarts in “Much Too Loud” ….the type of stuff I’d have been delirious to stay with all night.
I personally think that Tri Minh’s new experimental path is meandering wonderfully through uncharted territory with really exciting possibilities.
