Holy shit, it's come to this:
Quote:
Lou Reed’s Metal Machine at the Festival Hall
Even a prickly old contrarian such as Lou Reed would surely agree that, in 2010, he didn’t expect to find himself revisiting his most infamous recording to an effusive response from live audiences. Released in 1975, Reed’s Metal Machine Music — four sides of feedback squall — seemed at best an act of creative self-sabotage, at worst a titanic act of passive aggression. Not that Reed would agree with either view. Recent interviews depict a man who believes that he laid the avant-garde egg from which a generation of sonic adventurers such as My Bloody Valentine and Mogwai hatched.
As Reed, now 68, is swift to point out, a note-for-note recital of Metal Machine would be a tall order. However, some years ago, that didn’t stop the German composer Ulrich Krieger from scoring the whole thing for orchestra. Krieger was one of the two musicians accompanying Reed for this concert, part of the South Bank’s Ether festival, switching between zealous saxophone honking and occasional thumps on a huge gong. The other, the self-styled “electronic alchemist” Sarth Calhoun, spent most of the 80-minute performance crescented by equipment including two Apple Macs and the continuum fingerboard he stroked vigorously.
The noise, however, had begun long before either of the rest of the trio ventured on stage. A guitar placed against a floor amp provided a rhythm of sorts — a throbbing oscillation that provided the only sonic constant. However, this wasn’t quite the sustained display of nihilism that many anticipated. After a ten-minute passage that intensified into what resembled a chorus of souls in limbo unleashing a single hellish major chord, there followed a detour into something bordering on melody. Hunched over a desk of electronic equipment, guitar on lap, Reed seemed to forget his raison d’être here, and sketched out a reflective mini-tune that fanned out into a crescendo of requiem-like grandeur. Given that the nature of the show was made clear in advance, you couldn’t help but wonder if the trickle of people walking out before the end were doing so in protest at the relative prettiness of what they were hearing.
Those who stayed, however, were “rewarded” by a climax that finally squared up to Metal Machine Music’s fearsome reputation: Reed and Krieger face-to-face, trading ectoplasmic solos before Reed called the whole thing to a close with a series of deafening gong thumps. “Metal Machine Trio lives!” he declared, before revelling in a different kind of feedback — that of fans rushing forward to shake hands with him.
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