Midweek Intermission – GoGo Penguin live at The Hall, Aviva Studios, Manchester, 18th September – Apophenia: World Premiere

Midweek Intermission is a feature where we look at a live performance from an artist or band not from the Nordic countries, just to mix things up a bit.

Those that saw GoGo Penguin’s live performance of their score to the film ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ (‘Life out of balance’) a few years ago would have known what to expect from this ridiculously talented trio at the Aviva Studios last night. And plenty of them were numbered, I’m sure, amongst the crowd, the most erudite-looking I’ve ever seen for a gig, including representatives probably both from contemporary music schools and from the Fast Show’s ‘Jazz Club’ back in the 1990s.

This time out the musical performance was a carefully crafted blend of their musical catalogue and an at times mesmerising and almost non-stop 75-minute audio visual experience conjured up by the ‘cognitive design studio’ TENENTNET and labeled ‘Aphonenia’. It was the World Premiere tonight.

For the benefit of the uninitiated (and, hands up, I was one) ‘Apophenia’ is “the unmotivated tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.”

It manifests itself in numerous ways. Statistically, it is the false identification of patterns in data. I’ll leave that one to the stattos. More meaningfully, it can describe a human propensity unreasonably to seek definite patterns in random information, such as can occur in gambling. Now we’re talking. Not so much a life out of balance as one out of control.

The way it is presented in the film, on a giant cinema screen that dwarfed the barely lit musicians below it, is a mind-blowing maelstrom of shifting, weaving, throbbing images which, if you aren’t careful, can remove you from the safety of the somewhat chic St John’s district of Manchester into the madhouse.

Those relentless images include the sensation of being in a planetarium and then instantly within a body (are the stars and atoms interchangeable like the galaxy in a globe on the cat’s collar in Men in Black?)

The images move so fast at times it’s hard to keep up. Sensual overload. Was that Trump at Hole 5 on his golf course? The Grand Canyon morphs into an Icelandic landscape complete with deadly volcanic eruptions.

Huge waves swirl around as if a tsunami has hit; the waving hair of a dog is transformed into enormous fields of wheat; historical and futuristic images are intertwined in a ‘2001’ – like sequence. The Big Brother eye forms out of a mountainside, and stares unnervingly at you. Birds swirl in their vast evening formations like they do on the video of Choir of Young Believers’ ‘Hollow Talk’.

Then giant geese sweep majestically across that mountain scene before disappearing in a cloud of feathers and Zebra-like two-headed leopards prowl the savannah.

These dramatic moments are matched by quieter, more contemplative ones and in one sequence I was reminded of the Thanatorium the (enforced) assisted suicide programme in the film Soylent Green, a topic that is about to raise its ugly head here in the UK.

And then in the final sections we are returned to our own habitat of skyscraper cities, modernistic architecture fusing into itself, contrasted with iconic art deco works like London’s Trellis Tower, and ultimately to Manchester, the band’s home city where its ceaseless rush towards ground breaking, towering modernity is contrasted with a lingering and then repeated shot of the Northern Quarter’s Vinyl Exchange; probably the most impactful and meaningful one of the entire film.

Musically, GoGo Penguin intrigues me. Technically, they cannot be faulted. Just once I thought drummer Jon Scott (a new addition since I last saw them) had missed a single snare drum beat but on reflection it was probably just my imagination; my mind zapped by the events on the screen. With much emphasis on the ride cymbal and his three snare drums his sometimes complex work is always crisp and neat.

Double Bassist (for the most part) Ian Blacka mainly plays a rhythmical role but occasionally shoots off into almost a lead guitar one, his instrument producing the sort of sound you were least expecting.

Keyboard man Chris Illingworth has the attribute that he is so proficient at his art that you sometimes barely notice he is even there. His performance is an effortless mastery of his piano.

There is some intrusion from electronic backing tapes but it is low key. The question it prompts is how they are able to keep it all together – live and recorded music and a complex film show, with absolute precision.

Many of their pieces follow a similar format, a slow build up into a watered down climax by way of an obscure metre and only once I can remember them rocking out and then only for a short period.

I do wish they would occasionally slip into common time, get a recognisable beat going and let rip. And I suspect many others in the audience feel the same. Constant innovation is fascinating to watch but everyone needs to bang their head every so often.

But at the end of the day they will continue to do what they do best. They have cinematic tendencies and they show through whatever they do.

The word multimedia is thrown around with loose abandon these days. Rig a flickering black and white TV set up on stage to go with your show and you are ‘multimedia’. While it remains a fairly simple concept of mainly acoustic instrumentation and a video show this performance in my opinion epitomises what multimedia means today and it was enhanced further by its location in the Aviva Studios, an ultra modernistic building but with the darkness and clean straight lines in its performance spaces that are emblematic of its host city’s smoky industrial past.

‘Everything is going to be OK’ – title track from GoGo Penguin’s most recent album.

The ‘Apophenia’ tour now continues with seven performances across Europe until the end of November, including one in London. See the website for details.

Find them on:

Website: https://gogopenguin.co.uk/