Concert

Wow.

I've wanted to blog about the Bjork concert at Jacques Cartier pier since it finished on Friday, and have only just made time for it. Being caught up in a random bicycle demonstration, meeting my former students from Italy who are now in university, and meeting my 3rd cousin David and playing with his baby girl, are only three of the wacky things which happened this weekend, and which I'm trying to process. What a weekend!

So the concert. It was the best gig I've ever seen, and I've been to a few. In a nutshell, it was a masterpiece of amplified live music, orchestrated by a team of musicians who use the combination of live harmony and prerecorded electronica better than any others I know of.

The stage was decorated using the theme of flags, which depicted creatures from Nordic mythology (as far as I can tell) which became part of the music only in the final encore piece. It was a colourful, lively set, without being too pretentious, like the visuals in big concerts often are. For instance, I was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert (not that they're at all the same register), and the set was so visually interesting that it distracted from the concert. It was an LED display of a dragon which twisted and turned in synch with the music. So mesmerizing that the musicians could have been playing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' backwards with yukeleles, as the solo for "Under the Bridge" and I wouldn't have known.

But I noticed Bjork's music; the visuals didn't distract at all, except for an oddly-timed, Spidermanesque moment where she cast a web of threads out of each hand, which hung in mid-air for a few seconds. Oh yeah, and the obligatory towers of flame which flared 15 metres high on either side of the stage for the opening tune: "Earth Intruders". But anyway, I was talking about the focus of this concert, the music.

Step one. A choir of Icelandic girls who doubled as a brass band, to drive the harmonies previously played by the philharmonic orchestras Bjork toured with on her second album. They echoed her whispering in 'Pagan Poetry', and built up the harmonic swell on 'Joga'; another ballad a la Bjork which culminates in a sort of childish passionate scream.

Step two, Bjork's voice. Although it's something of a trademark, and her lyrics can be irritating efforts at poetry, on the odd occasions when they fall short of being actually poetic (but hey, who's perfect), nobody does it like her. She builds up a fragile hum only to culminate in an out-of-control scream, declaring love, frustration or humour, or questioning why a partner is cowardly and "can't handle love"... Again, the lyrics can be juvenile at times, but a phrase or a sentence in which she mocks herself for being too scandinavian, too naive or a recluse ("I sit here with a beard and a pipe...") bring home that these lyrics are the immature feelings of a mature woman and artist.

Lastly, the three DJs who do the samples and electronic sounds for the non-acoustic songs. Basically, these three guys (whose names I couldn't find on the internet) are incredible. It's impossible to understand exactly what they do until you go to the concert and stand in an audience with thousands of other people, and amplifiers the size of a small apartment. Although that doesn't sound like much artistry - needing so much technology to perform music - it's actually extraordinarily creative. They create sounds which they adapt to the acoustics of the space they are playing in, as they play. During the concert, there were screens showing the programs they were using to create and control sounds. For instance, one of them had a disc-shaped table on which he put cup-like objects which he moved and twisted around the table. Depending on their relative position to each other, the frequency, balance or pitch of the bass could be altered. Doesn't sound like much until you combine this with a 15 piece brass band, a live drummer and Bjork's screaming vocals, and use it to really drive the spirit of the song.

Picture this music being performed live, literally shaking your organs through your rib cage (that's one of the frequencies they use; it shakes your entire nervous system), playing over the pink, darkening skies of Montreal's quays, with a ferry taking off in the background, and a light breeze which cools off as the music drops...

I guess this means I'm siding with the tattoo-sporting, dreadlock-wearing intelligentsia of Montreal's fashionably unfashionable art student population, croaking to one another about how Bjork is like, so Bach-meets-Kaftwerk, y'know? But through the haze of their pot smoke, emanates some decent taste in music. While other musicians (such as Montreal's philharmonic orchestra) still use amplification to imperfectly reproduce live sounds to a large audience, often losing in quality, directness or timbre, Bjork's band uses electronics to immediately convey exactly the sound they want the audience to experience, and can raise a frenzy of celebratory adrenaline or hush up to a soul-crushing tragic finish, silencing teeny-boppers and fogies alike in mid-stride...

The finale was 'Declare independence', a song from her new album, for which all the choir tore up flags from the stage and danced to Bjork's screams of 'Protect your language' and 'Don't let them do that to you'. Needless to add, the overwhelming majority of Quebequois separatists went wild. Her rare moments of speaking to the audience being in French, there was obviously a message geared towards this audience, about cultures having to fight against nations, which I for one recognize in Nietszche's 'Zarathustra'. But that's another discussion. The point is, the final message was unexpectedly political.

Given that this morning I spent about 20 minutes listening to a sextagenarian Anglophone Montrealer ranting about how Quebequois politics has actively discriminated against English speakers, and was a 'fascist measure', the concert resonates strangely for me. Does it make sense that a shape-shifting musician should be a spokesperson for Quebequois nationalism?