Black Midi at the Old Fruitmarket
Black Midi have been widely heralded as the new saviours of guitar music, peddling an eccentric blend of maths-rock and jazz harmony. They are also notorious for having a uniquely degenerate and unwashed fanbase. Therefore, when I heard they were coming to the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow, I knew I had to get a balcony ticket as soon as possible. From this vantage point, I was able to witness in full the peculiar effect that Black Midi’s music has on its gormless disciples.
The formula of a Black Midi composition essentially consists of a fairly predictable oscillation between the musically sublime and outbursts of aggressively meaningless, albeit rhythmically well co-ordinated, noise. The movements of the crowd follow a similarly mechanical pattern, with build-ups to these latter sections seeing a circular space clear on the floor. This space is infiltrated by one or two interpretive dancers, before it is collapsed entirely at the onset of frenetic noise, and all sides of the circle rush at one another in a kind of illiterate imitation of a mosh-pit.
I spotted the guitarist and drummer from my band, Cornelius and the Crystalline Obscenities, being tossed to and fro amid this troubled sea of bearded and bespectacled heads down below. I was not surprised to see them there — as I mentioned in my previous post, my guitarist is a hapless fool, and my drummer spends the majority of his waking life drunk to the brink of oblivion. The former was being gently bounced back and forth between adjacent bodies like a pinball in slow motion during a more tender moment of voice and solo piano from the band, with an expression of mournful destitution on his face. He seemed to be looking up to me with an appealing look, as my drummer was raised above the heads of the audience, and carried towards the base of the stage, upon reaching which two large bald bouncers on the other side of the fence forced him brutally to the ground. He lay there dazed and unmoving for a few moments before the crowd swallowed him up, and he disappeared. I did not see him again that evening, and assumed he had been trampled to death.
The lead singer, standing in the spotlight, had dropped his guitar, and was in the midst of an overwrought emotional monologue, delivered more like a soliloquy than a melody, while the piano played a comically romantic chord sequence backing. It might have been beautiful, but of course it was all carried out as part of the general campaign against meaning which is Black Midi’s raison d’etre. I reflected that my drummer’s death at the hands of a hypnotised crowd in an ecstasy of post-irony, amid the nihilistic poetry and general stench, was deeply symptomatic of something wrong in our culture.
And indeed, Black Midi are an intriguingly symptomatic band. This is what draws people to listen to them — they are exemplary articulators of the cultural decline. As I watched this bizarre display unfold, and contemplated the death of my associate, I felt for a moment that they were touching on something truly transcendental. However, the tender interlude came to an end, and the band returned to attack the atmosphere they had delicately constructed with randomly dissonant chord stabs.
This put me in mind of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of sand mandala construction and dismantling. In this ritual, elaborate art works are assembled out of sand, and then slowly taken apart, reduced to granules which are placed into a bottle, and then released into the river. It is intended to display in practical terms the Buddhist philosophy of embodied impermanence and emptiness, encapsulating the cheerful nihilism which was their bulwark against the challenges of life atop the cold, arid plateau which they called home. Likewise, the eloquently constructed textures of Black Midi compositions are carefully erected and then destroyed in tantrums of frustrated noise-rock. It is an approach to music which could only have emerged from BRIT School ennui, a thoroughly Londonian death drive and schizophrenic contempt characteristic of the spiritual barrens of the imperial centre.
Overall, the standard of musicianship was very high, and the sound passable, although the keyboard disappeared in the mix completely during most of the louder sequences. The experience was also diminished for me retroactively when I discovered that my drummer had survived the trampling. This robbed my recollection of some of its spiritual character.
4/5
