June 7, 2015, 19/F Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung Street, Tin Wan, Hong Kong
A live electronic music event at the Empty Gallery – I was looking forward to see Lee Gamble’s performance the most, as it was a first time for me. Mark Fell and Kouhei Matsunaga were returning to town and to Empty Gallery after their performance on March 15 this year, yet this time playing together as a duo.
Lee Gamble started off with some bubbly noises, and the start was a bit abrupt and shy. It seemed he first had to get a feel for his instruments and set up. He kept moving between three different locations behind the piles of equipment on the table: Some machinery (probably the synth) on the left, screen in middle and some more machinery (probably the mix/effects) on the right. His movements continued throughout the performance, which gave some small hints towards how much live it was. Comparing with the recordings I heard and had in memory, the live performance did sound more rough and unpolished, fitting with the expectations of live.
The musical atmosphere was constantly changing, and the music was very rich and powerful and complex enough to permanently stimulate the audience’s curiosity. This balancing between a not easy to grasp complexity and hypnotic listenability stayed the same on his recordings and well as during the life performance. A constantly changing sonic landscape with so much detail, that the listener is enticed to listen again and again, trying to understand but never fully understanding what is going on. It was a performance in which time just passed without being noticed. There were sections which were more calm and repetitive, but never too simplistic, and these sections were layered with more powerful eruptions of sonic energy. Both elements fused into one whole, and they never resulted to formulaic peak-and-through narrative. It was more like a landscape, which never stops surprising, because it’s never the same.
Lee Gamble’s performance exceeded my expectations, and next I was curious about the outcome of the Mark Fell and Kouhei Matsunaga collaboration. I expected something that will fuse Mark Fell’s deconstructed dance music approach with Matsunaga’s eclectic production, which I have a hard time describing in a short phrase. The performance started with a delay in front of the audience that already reconvened after the break. From the beginning, there was a medium tempo 4/4 bass drum present, and that stayed like that for the whole performance. On top of that, the artists layered different samples, sometimes more minimal, sometimes more melodic trance arpeggios. Kouhei Matsunaga seemed to be mainly in charge of turning the filter knobs. If this was a performance in a club with a dancefloor at 4am, it would be entirely justifiable, but in the given environment (gallery with seated audience on an early Sunday night) it was quite out of place. The music was not bad per se, it was still audible that there are two capable people with a musical taste behind the mixer, yet it was just not enough for me. One guess would be that the artists were simply tired on a Sunday night after a working weekend. Or there was some technical problem which prevented them from using one half of their equipment. I don’t know. But the overall result sounded more as if Mark Fell and Kouhei Matsunaga were seeking for the lowest common denominator of their artistic talents. They are both good and definitely could have done better.
Mark Fell and Kouhei Matsunaga left me with mixed feelings after the performance. I actually left before it even finished, as I couldn’t stand the repetitive predictability while having lost any hopes for a change ahead. Still, it was worth going just for Lee Gamble’s performance – a rare chance to see him in town. In hindsight, I think the size of the lettering on the invitation should have been reversed – Lee Gamble as the headliner, and Mark Fell with Kouhei Matsunaga as the after party DJs. Then all would be fine.