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Taking over the dilapidated interior of No. 13 North Great George’s St, Bottlenote Music’s BLEED seeks to create an evolving, reverberant sound-space. The performance features five core musicians, with the audience being led from room to room, spending about ten minutes in each. The players’ improvisations cover a vast array of material, from free improvisation to drone work to effects-laden electronic noise. The opening trio of Seán Mac Erlaine and Tobias Delius (each on sax) with Justin Carroll on keys set the tone, as they ride waves of communally developed textures, eventually taking to physically spinning around the room. Wednesday evening’s special guest, violist Ailbhe Nic Oireachteach, occupied a room upstairs, delivering a truly numinous, gripping performance. Next, Shane Latimer’s tremolo-heavy guitar work, using more pedals than you can count, flits from the familiar to the deepest depths of noise.

 
Harking back to works like Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Musik für ein Haus, John Cage’s Music Walk, and Nam June Paik’s unrealised Symphony for 20 Rooms, BLEED’s site specificity is no mere faddish accessory. It highlights the aporias connecting noise, music, and meaning through occupation of space, with an emphasis on flux and change, rather than permanence and certainty. At times evoking the counter-cultural experiments of the Theatre of Eternal Music loft concerts and La Monte Young’s Dream House, the joy of the unknown and reconfiguration of the commonplace (aided by the townhouse’s exposed internal fabric and porous structure) make BLEED a delirious, musically imaginative space to inhabit for its participants.

 

BLEED runs until September 25 as part of Tiger Dublin Fringe.

http://www.fringefest.com/festival/whats-on/bleed