The London Contemporary Music festival (LCMF) thankfully shows no signs of growing old gracefully. The brainchild of artistic co-directors Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen, its 10th iteration celebrates the role of the trickster through grunge, grit and omnicringe, with a steaming dollop of shitpost modernism thrown in. For the uninitiated, to quote post-cringe renaissance man Barrett Avner, transcendental omnicringe is “when something is so bad it tears a hole through the fabric of spectacle to reveal a pure immanent truth”.
If that sounds a bit niche, think again. Despite the December gloom, Hackney Church was packed to the gunwales with a demographic-defying crowd brought together by curiosity and enthusiasm for the unexpected. Free to sit or wander at will, they listened, laughed and occasionally scratched their heads at a world premiere and commission-packed musical parade ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, with an emphasis on the latter.
True to its mission, LCMF surprised and provoked. Adam de la Cour’s Groyne ‘n’ Goosed, a scatological postpunk panto inspired by the subversive Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, included a drunken magician with a phallic third hand and a vegan meat raffle where a hapless volunteer drew the winning numbers by bobbing for – hopefully fake – turds in a bucket of effluent. The anarchic score sizzled, though it needed more rehearsal and better sound design.
Acoustic spread was a frustrating issue for several of the performances on opening night, like noise artist Russell Haswell whose onstage electronics drowned out the spoken text in his absurdist, futurist opera. It was no problem, however, for aya (real name Aya Sinclair), a queer music producer who hails from “off the Pennines” and wisely brought their own kit. Sharp and articulate in hoodie and shredded grey dress, their disorderly set of electronic samples, loops and frictional noise was a highlight.
The trickster was especially well served on the second evening. Jon Rafman’s Counterfeit Poast, a series of vivid Boschian videos featuring manipulated AI, dystopian narratives and imagery dredged up from the bowels of Reddit, were mad, bad and ever so strangely sad. At the other extreme, Scottish free-jazz improvisor Maggie Nicols’s ululating vocals met their perfect match in spontaneous keyboard artist Steve Beresford, whose jangling soundscape fed on found objects tossed under the lid of what became an increasingly congested prepared piano.
Not everything worked. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s hypnogirl 24, based on the curious case of Magdeleine Guipet, who caused a 19th-century sensation performing involuntary dances under hypnosis, was awkwardly stilted. But at its best, for example in a mesmerising, if ear-bleeding set from Japanese avant-noise composer ∈Y∋ (Tetsuo Yamatsuka) and audiovisual artist C.O.L.O (Yasumichi Miura), LCMF staked its claim once again to be the capital’s Mecca for cutting-edge art.
• LCMF concludes at Wigmore Hall on 17 December.
